Set to start shipping in two weeks

Mar 22, 2010 13:33 GMT  ·  By

The 18-inch EON18 mobile PC was released by Origin back in November and was the company's first gaming notebook. Now, the PC maker seems to think the laptop did well enough for itself that it deserves a sibling and, thus, has put together the second EON mobile PC, namely the EON15. This new device is smaller than its predecessor, with a screen size of 15.6 inches, but has insides that enable it to “play the most graphically intensive games and run your daily applications flawlessly.”

The EON15 is powered by a choice of Intel Core i7 central processing units. One is the Core i7-720QM, which has a clock speed of 1.6 GHz, and the other is the 1.73 GHz Core i7-820QM. The chosen processor is paired with up to 8GB of RAM and a hard disk drive of up to 500GB.

Also, the HDD can be replaced by a solid state drive of up to 256GB. Furthermore, the configuration includes a DVD writer or a Blu-ray burner. As for connectivity and I/O, the laptop boasts a multi-gesture touchpad, Gigabit Ethernet, WiFi, Bluetooth 2.1, a seven-in-one card reader, an ExpressCard 54 slot and DVI and HDMI outputs.

Now comes the part that is most important for gaming of any kind, namely graphics. The 15.6-inch screen with a resolution of up to 1,920 x 1,080 will be kept busy by a discrete graphics card from NVIDIA, which can be either the GeForce GTX 280M or the GTX 285M. Here is the only disadvantage of the product, as the use of NVIDIA graphics implies the fact that the notebook won't support DirectX 11.

Origin's fresh gaming notebook weighs a total of 3.31 kilograms and, while already available for pre-order, will start selling in two weeks and come pre-installed with either Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit or Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit. The starting price currently listed is of $1,899.