Origin EVO16-S review

Origin’s newest, thinnest gaming laptop, the EVO16-S, fits right in with other big names in the same price range. It’s a little more expensive than laptops like the Acer Predator Helios 300 and the Lenovo Legion 5 Pro, but it doesn’t perform much better than those machines. But the differences are small, and if you don’t need a higher resolution and refresh rate.

The EVO16-S is a good choice for a 1080p laptop with an AMD Radeon RX 6650M XT. Even though the 6650M XT and Ryzen 7 6800H keep the EVO16-S fed in terms of gaming performance, the 1080p 144Hz screen doesn’t have a huge appetite. If this laptop had a 1440p screen or said it had a refresh rate of 165Hz or 240Hz, the graphs below would show something different.

The EVO16-S doesn’t have any great or unnecessary features. It’s a gaming laptop for people who aren’t sure what they want. My review unit EVO16-S costs about $1,920. Mine has 32GB of RAM instead of the standard 16GB and a 1TB SSD. It’s a lot of money for a laptop with an AMD processor that has the same features as Intel’s Core i7 12700H and Nvidia’s RTX 3060.

If you cut the amount of RAM and SSD in half, the price drops to about $1,500. For me, that’s the only price at which this laptop makes sense as an alternative, assuming you don’t have to have a better screen right away.

Origin EVO16-S review: Design

The EVO16-S is a mid-sized gaming laptop that measures 14.9 by 9.9 by 0.78 inches and weighs a modest 4.5 pounds. Origin sent my review unit in a big wooden box to keep it safe, which seems like a lot, but that’s what you get when you buy from a small company like Origin.

Origin sent me a custom lid for the review laptop and a separate lid to show off the UV printing the company does. The second lid is my favorite of the two we have because it has a picture of the RPG Dauntless on it. The prints are very good in terms of color and clarity.

Keyboard and touch board

When we lifted the lid, we saw a black deck with a simple design, which surprised me because the lid is so bright, we like this type of keyboard. The font is futuristic, and every letter and number is made of sharp, straight lines.

The WASD keys have a diagonal line that goes from the top right to the bottom left, and the corners of the space bar have these brackets that remind me of what cybernetic soldiers see when they put on their visors in science fiction movies. You can buy this laptop from its official website.

Origin EVO16-S review: Display

The Origin EVO16-S’s 16.1-inch, 1920 x 1080 FHD (1920 x 1080) display is bright and has a 144Hz refresh rate, but the color depth is shockingly bad. This made many scenes in video games and movies look dull. When we compared the trailer for Puss in Boots: The Last Wish to other trailers, we noticed many problems, especially the lack of color.

We couldn’t help but notice how dark and muted the color was on the giant’s moss-covered back in the scene where Puss has a bell hanging over him. On my other screens, it was a lush, bright green, but the Origin EVO16-S changed it to a dark green. Even though the brightness wasn’t as bad as it could have been, we remember thinking, “This could be brighter,” when we looked at the beautiful scenery in this amazing movie.

Origin EVO16-S review: Audio

The bottom-firing sound system on the Origin EVO16-S is at best average. It’s loud enough and vocals are clear, but instruments are often lost in the noise. Also, this speaker system doesn’t seem to be able to give percussion a full sound. Even at full volume, the music in Hi-Fi RUSH was still hard to hear. This was true of almost everything else in the game as well. During a cutscene, I could barely hear the characters talking, and sounds like robots hitting each other, explosions, and gunfire were hollow.

Everything seemed to blend together, and at times it was hard to tell what was going on. I could still keep up with the beat and get a general idea of how the game went, but it wasn’t a great sound experience. We first tried out the sound system by playing “1,000,000” by Nine Inch Nails.

Origin EVO16-S review: Graphic and gaming

The EVO16-S doesn’t have high-end specs, but it does a lot with what it has. In many of the games I tested, like Hitman 3, F1 2020, Overwatch 2, and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, the RX 6650M XT came very close to 144 fps . If you turned down a few of the graphics settings, you could play a wide range of games. With AMD’s FreeSync Premium, fps changes are also smoothed out.

When it comes to ray tracing, the RX 6650M XT can’t quite match the power of a good Nvidia RTX 3060. In my Metro Exodus RTX test, it couldn’t even come close to 60 fps, averaging 48 fps. It doesn’t look great next to cheaper laptops with better screens, and I can’t think of anyone who would want a laptop at this price to be good at ray tracing. People who own an EVO16-S are choosing to live with ray tracing off and FSR on. If you want more, you’ll have to pay for it.

Origin EVO16-S review: Performance

Origin’s goal of keeping the machine cool and running longer on battery is mostly successful, even if it hurts gaming performance. It lasts about two hours with my usual workload (about 10 Chrome tabs, Spotify, Affinity Photo, and Slack all running), and the fans are mostly quiet, though they sped up a few times for no apparent reason.

Origin says that you can get up to seven hours of battery life if you set your laptop to a power setting that doesn’t use as much power. It was hard to test these claims because when I switched to the most efficient setting, “Quiet,” the mouse pointer jerked and the screen could no longer refresh quickly. So if you want a machine with a long battery life, you shouldn’t look at this one. Instead, check out our guide to the best laptops, which has machines that are better all around.

Origin EVO16-S review: Battery life

The EVO16-S has a battery life that is not very impressive. The assertion made by Origin that its battery will last for six hours is extremely optimistic. The EVO16-S lasted 97 minutes when I looped a movie with the display brightness set to 50 percent, the keyboard lighting turned off, Bluetooth turned off, and location services turned off. This is equivalent to 1 hour and 37 minutes. If you intend to use the EVO16-S while you are at work or school, you will need to carry the power adaptor with you at all times.

Origin EVO16-S review: Price

Memory and storage are also strong points of the EVO16-S. Our review unit has 16GB of dual-channel DDR4-2666 RAM from Corsair. The most RAM that can be used is 32GB, which is what Origin offers. This laptop has two storage drives. Ours is a 500GB M.2-format Samsung SSD on which Windows 10 Home is installed without any bloatware.

It also has a large 2TB mechanical hard drive for storage. All of this is covered by a one-year warranty, but I’d like to see three years of coverage at the base price of this laptop, let alone the price of our fully-loaded tester. For this review, I priced a Razer Blade 15 Advanced with similar specs at $2,999 and an MSI GS65 Stealth at about the same price.

Origin EVO16-S review: Conclusion

The EVO16-S is a well-equipped and adaptable gaming laptop since it features twin USB 3.2 Type-A and USB 3.2 Type-C ports, acceptable speaker quality, and a light weight of around 5 pounds. Despite this, it is difficult for me to advocate the $1,900 construction that I have. At that price, it starts slipping behind other less expensive but more powerful laptops.