EON17-SLX

When financial limits are tossed to the wind, you'll find laptops that offer higher-than-high-end components, opting for absurdly powerful processors instead of the slimmer, battery-friendly CPUs used elsewhere. You'll get not one, but two discrete graphics cards, and you'll see bells and whistles like nobody's business. You'll also pay through the nose. 

Rather than starting from scratch, Origin has built the Eon17-SLX in a generic black Clevo chassis. It's not particularly unique, especially since the same off-the-shelf body and lid will be used virtually unchanged in similar systems from other brands. The black metal and plastic construction weighs 9.2 pounds—already too heavy to carry around frequently—but it's weighed down further by a giant 3.8-pound power brick, bringing the total weight to 13 pounds.

Instead of a chiclet-style keyboard, like that seen on the Maingear Nomad 17, the EON17-SLX has a traditional layout with adjacent keys. The Windows key, which takes on extra importance with Windows 8, has been shifted to the right of the spacebar, which keeps it out of the way during games, but inconvenient for shortcuts. The backlighting, however, is anything but traditional, letting you adjust the brightness and color in three different zones of the keyboard, giving you seven different colors to choose from behind three different lighting zones. The mouse has been changed to a clickpad, complete with gesture support for Windows 8 along with the usual scrolling and zooming. A fingerprint reader just below the keyboard lets you log on and off securely and easily.