 Normally, I would look at a product as complex as a laptop from a new player and draw either of these conclusions. One, that they've simply rebadged someone else's probably mediocre B-level design, unless they paid huge money for an exclusive, or two, that they did a horrible job on it due to their inexperience. EVGA has the potential, though, to be different. While they have done and continue to pretty much apply colorful boxes and stickers to third-party designs like, oh, I don't know, this one, they also have a deeply experienced motherboard, electrical, and software design team, giving them way more applicable engineering street cred than someone like Razer, who surprised, I think, everyone over the last four years by bursting onto the scene and demonstrating that there is still room for a newcomer to shake things up in this category. But is EVGA walking down that same path to success, or is it all just theoretically I guess it makes more sense than it at first glance appeared to? There's only one way to find out. Intel's Skull Canyon NUC features a sixth-generation Core i7 quad-core processor and Thunderbolt 3. Learn more at the link in the video description. Opening up the SC17, we get pretty much the entire guts laid out before us, with none of the configurable or upgradable components trickily hiding under the keyboard or anything like that. My config has a 256GB SM951 NVMe SSD accompanied by a 1TB hard drive, notably a 9mm thick one, haven't seen one of those in a while. It's got an Intel 8260 NGW wireless card and a 74.5Wh battery, which is well positioned for reducing sweaty palm syndrome directly under the touchpad, which is fortunate because the top of the laptop does get quite toasty up towards the screen. Moving on to the rest, unlike this Sega unit that we reviewed a while back that featured a desktop GTX 980 video card, a desktop Core i7 6700K, four sodium slots for memory expansion, and all the cooling to go with it, EVGA has gone for a purely mobile device-based design, around a 45W Core i7 6820HK BGA CPU, so that means it's soldered directly to the motherboard, with a mere two sodium slots, though thanks to DDR4's improved density, they've packed 32GB of 2666MHz RAM into them, and even gone as far as to bake the GTX 980M mobile GPU directly onto the main board, rather than opting for an MXM add-in card. This seems to have directly contributed to the SC17's slimmer-than-most 17-inch gaming notebook's design, the size of which should be pretty easy to gauge, looking at the relative size of the two A-type USB 3.0 and single C-type USB 3.1, and headphone jacks on the right, as well as the Intel Gigabit LAN HDMI 1.4, normal mini display port, and G-Sync ready mini display port on the left. Alright then, while it is slimmer than many other 17-inch class gaming behemoths, it's still bigger and very dense feeling compared to an Aorus X7. Why? Well, first and foremost, because EVGA has chosen tank-like construction over portability, and while they seem to have brute-forced it a little, I mean that bottom cover has to be the thickest that I have ever seen, they definitely achieved their goal. The machined aluminum chassis has less flex with its bottom cover removed than most laptops this size that I've encountered that are fully assembled, and I have never seen a 17-inch laptop with a screen with this little flex, like holy actual ****. And this approach carries over to cooling as well, with four heat pipes carrying heat away from the CPU and GPU toward a total of four heat-sync fin arrays that are fed by a pair of large blower-style fans. They intake air from the bottom of the unit right next to this beefy rubber heel that pulls double-duty, adding a subtle angle to the keyboard, and cleverly ensuring that there is enough clearance on the bottom of the device for ample airflow, and it works pretty well. I would like for EVGA to tune their fan-ramping logic, which can make these sharp adjustments as often as every five to ten seconds while gaming, but at 70 degrees under load and Ida64 on the CPU, and about the same on the GPU while running Unigine Heaven, even while overclocked by 76 megahertz, I can't really complain, though it should be noted that the CPU got quite a bit hotter at about 90 degrees Celsius with the canned 3.8 gigahertz all-core overclock. And while this use three screws in place of every nail approach, in spite of EVGA's efforts to engineer a flatter power brick that slides into your bag more easily, does not improve the totability of the SC17, what it does do is sidestep the trap that many newcomers and even many multinationals fall into, where they, either to save weight or material cost, manage to build devices out of aluminum and corning glass, and still have them feel kinda... cheap. So I think there's a lot of merit to this approach, especially for a 17-inch gaming device, where, realistically, were you going to be carting it around to class every day anyway? Not for the keyboard, unfortunately. While I think they did a good job of the touchpad, it's got a slightly heavy click, but zero noticeable latency, and flawless two-handed operation are the highlights here, the keyboard tuning needs some work, I'm HO. The five-level backlight is good, the layout is fine, other than using prime hotkey space on the up and down arrows for switching over clocks instead of page up and down, and it's not like there's keycap wobble or anything like that, but the top of each stroke is stiff, while the bottoming out is spongy, and the space bar in particular is so mushy, that I actually found myself misfiring fairly frequently. Let's talk screen now. EVGA, puzzlingly, equipped the SC17 with a 4K 60Hz IPS panel, from Sharp that manages great color, fantastic contrast, with a non-distracting amount of motion blur. Actually, very little backlight bleed as well. Sounds great, Linus. Why is that puzzling? Because the 980M, even with EVGA's shockingly smooth pre-configured overclock for the CPU and GPU in their PrecisionX software, and, this is mind-bending, their full-fat enthusiast-grade BIOS-level overclocking features, with like mouse support, clear CMOS button, and all that, you know, just like a desktop, just is not really capable of driving AAA titles at 4K with high details. Not today, and definitely not two to three years from now. And since there are no G-Sync 4K panels that I'm aware of, their decision left them with no support for what is, in my opinion, the only technology that Nvidia provides, aside from just putting a faster GPU in there, a desktop-grade one, that could compensate for a GPU resolution mismatch like this, with smoother animations at lower and highly variable frame rates. They did say that they're working on it at CES, but that doesn't help buyers today. Which I guess leads us very gracefully into today's conclusion, and the answer to the question that I posed about six minutes ago. It depends on how you evaluate success. If I were to pick on what was bad, I could say that at the price, I don't think their spec competes well with the fatter, heavier, and uglier, but significantly faster gaming laptops that are out there from competitors. But if I were to look at what they got right, there is a lot to like here. They built a chassis and a unique product identity around quality and overclockability that I believe they can carry forward for a couple of years at least, without anyone properly competing with it. The machine was rock solid in my testing with zero odd behavior, and they even avoided most of the oopsies that first-time laptop makers fall into. The 1080p webcams, soft image quality, and poor low-light performance are a bit of a drag, but the speakers and the built-in microphone are both surprisingly good. I'm just here for the food, alright? Jeez. Which means that while I won't be running out to drop nearly 3G's after taxes and shipping on an SC17, I will have a very close eye on future EVGA mobile products. Well done, guys. Massdrop is working with Hi-Fi Man to bring back their HE300 headphones with a special MD or Massdrop edition. So in their former life, under solely the Hi-Fi Man name, these entry-level headphones were a whopping $300. The new one is actually very similar to the older HE300s, but with an updated and more lightweight structure, a more neutral sound signature, and an all-black appearance compared to the silver and black of older generations. The most important thing, though, the biggest change, is the price. They've reduced it to a very low 99 US dollars. So you can check that out at draw.psslashltt-hm-350, or you can just click the link in the video description. And if you're a little confused because you've never heard of Massdrop before, well, I'll explain it. Massdrop takes sellers and buyers, lots of buyers, and puts them together. The more people buy, the lower the price goes. They've got deals in all kinds of stuff, knives, camping supplies, keyboards, headphones, for example. And you can check it all out, again, at that link in the video description. So thanks for watching, guys. If this video sucked, you know what to do. 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