This year, EVGA’s following it up with the SC-15, a slightly
smaller gaming laptop that learned some lessons from its larger sibling.
In fact, the 15-inch SC-15 largely
resembles the 17-inch SC-17 at first glance, sporting the same sleek industrial
design, the same flat power brick, and the same easy-open lid that can be
lifted with a single finger. The biggest differences are under the hood.
While the SC-17 packs a 4K display powered by an
Nvidia GeForce GTX 980M, the SC-15 packs a mobile GTX 1060 chip—which should
actually deliver gaming performance roughly in the same ballpark as the GTX
980M. The display’s been swapped out for a gorgeous 1080p G-Sync panel running
at a smooth 120Hz. EVGA product manager Jacob Freeman says customers were
asking for a 1080p display to help improve battery life, and the reduction in
sheer pixels allowed EVGA to double the refresh rate of the screen. That sort
of speed matters when it comes to gaming.
The GTX 1060 can handle virtual reality workloads,
too, making it an interesting option for a portable VR station. EVGA had an
SC-15 set up with an HTC Vive connected and a VR rollercoaster game playing for
people to try.
The SC-15’s internals are rounded out by an Intel
“Kaby Lake” Core i7-7700HQ processor, 16GB of DDR4 RAM, and a 256GB SSD paired with a 1TB hard drive. You can overclock the
GTX 1060 GPU in EVGA’s laptop, but not the CPU, because Intel restricts
overclocking to only the tippity-top Core i7-7820HK processor.
