My favorite English word, and one of the first I ever learned, is “games.” Some of my happiest childhood memories are of chasing down .exe game files on DOS-powered Pravetz computers in my native Bulgaria during the ‘90s. The specifics will differ with each person, but I imagine most Verge readers my age and younger have grown up with video games as an essential and inextricable part of their life. And as those lives become more mobile, we naturally want to take those games with us, which is where portable consoles, smartphones, tablets, and gaming laptops all come into play. Today I want to talk about the latter of those, the laptop, and how it fares in its quest to make PC gaming mobile.

EVGA, a hardware company best known for a successful line of Nvidia graphics cards — and my favorite alien mouse — this year launched its first foray into designing and building whole computers with its mighty 17-inch SC17 laptop. Needless to say, it’s a gaming powerhouse, touting a 4K screen, a 2.7GHz Core i7-6820HK processor, 32GB of RAM, and a GTX 980M graphics card. I’ve put it through its paces with demanding games like The Witcher 3 and Battlefield 4 and it’s barely broken a sweat, and what’s more, EVGA has just introduced a version of this laptop with a GeForce GTX 1070 inside it (not a mobile version, the actual desktop card). So can you game on this thing? Hell yes. But then for $2,499, it had better be able to run Crysis like Usain Bolt handles sprints.

EVGA SC17: FULL SPECS AND FEATURES
The interesting questions about the SC17 relate to its practicality, not its performance. This laptop weighs a full 10lbs (4.5kg), the equivalent of five Asus ZenBook 3s or ten 9.7-inch iPad Pros, and I’ve felt the full heft of it every time I’ve tried to transport it. Now, that’s not for nothing, as the SC17 is encased in a seriously tough aluminum unibody shell that gives it protection, rigidity, and long-term durability. I just can’t call this a portable computer in any meaningful sense. It qualifies as transportable, but then so do all-in-one PCs, which have a number of ergonomic advantages and don’t come with the same miniaturization premium as a laptop.

To test both my stamina and the SC17’s mobility, I took it on a trip back to Bulgaria at the start of this month. The first issue I encountered was that none of my techie backpacks could accommodate this PC, so I had to use a small suitcase instead (Ed. note: LOL). EVGA is addressing this pain point head-on by now providing a free backpack with purchases of the laptop. And another helpful touch from the company is the design of its 240W power adapter, which is wide and long, but also short — so it packs flat rather than fat. All the same, I find these to be only slight mitigations to the pervasive issue of this computer’s size and weight. Even moving it between rooms is a complex activity that requires planning and clearing out a big enough landing spot.