Origin PC debuts ultrathin laptops with 30-series GPUs

My name is Jeff Bakalar. I'm joining you from the great state of New Jersey. So, gaming doesn't always have the biggest footprint here at CES but we do have some of the industry's top names. Always bringing along something very special to show off. This year is no different. Our friends at origin PC are here joining us and to talk about. New high performance laptops coming right off the heels of that Nvidia press conference. I'm joined today by my good friend Kevin was lose key, the CEO of Origin PC. Kevin, it's good to see you my friend. Thank you for joining us. Hey Jeff. It's great to see you. Great to be on the stream. Hello, everybody. It's not our usual you know, CNET live stage. That's a yes.>> But I'm digging this I really like this virtual thing, and we can connect with each other and get up close and personal. And yeah Would you like me to go right into these laptops? Yeah I feel the timing of this could not be any better. Nvidia just wrapped up their press conference, which perfectly parlays into the the new laptop announcements. You guys have for us today. Take it away. Tell us about it. Yeah, man, I'm so excited. The timing could not be better. We literally just launched these laptops on our website. So we have two brand new laptops, minutes ago just launched Nvidia minutes ago just announced these products to the world. And here it is. This is our Evo 15 s. This is our new super thin and light Updated version of a 15 inch laptop, and this is our 17 inch Evo 17 S. So this is a super thin and light 17 inch laptop. And that's just a quick view of them but now we're gonna go into the nitty gritty and the details and. The highlight of all of this of these new laptop launches is that we now have NVIDIA GeForce GTX 30 series and these thin and light laptops. So we have up to the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 3080 with 16 gigabytes and insane 16 gigabytes of G DDR six Ram. So we have the 3080 version and also a 3070 version. So before we go into all the other great things about these laptops, man, I think we wanna pause there I mean this. As you all know, our tx 30 series is second gen ray tracing cores, third Gen tensor cores. It's just the most amazing GPU technology. It's out there today and it's now available on laptops. Yeah, I mean, I gotta ask you, Kevin, I know you're not the one building and putting these things together, but like, dude, I feel like we need to take a second and appreciate how insane it It is just from a just from a practicality point of view of how much real estate you're only afforded inside of a laptop and cramming in an RT X30AD with the 16 gigs or I mean it. It kind of doesn't make any sense. Can you can you speak a little bit to the sort of, you know, engineering marvel that Getting laptops as thin as the ones you just showed off contain that much horsepower. Yeah, I mean, one of the words that comes to mind is just magic. It's literally magic how you're getting this level of performance and if in a light notebook, we're talking about less than four and a half pounds and weight and less than an inch thick. And it has the graphics power to drive the latest games with ray tracing ultra. We have option optional 4k OLED screen so you can run this in 4k with a beautiful stunning screen. Or we also have 1080 DPI screen up to 300 hertz. So if you're super competitive gamer, you can really push the limits and go for high frame rates. And then if you're a gamer like me that plays a lot of single player games and wants things as beautiful as possible, you could crank it up to 4k. And I often tell people that our laptops are more powerful than most people's desktops. And people think that okay, you work there, you're just giving me the marketing hype. But I mean, I will challenge a lot of people out there and say this laptop is more powerful than most people's desktops right now on their desk. Yeah, I mean, you know for me, I just think back even a couple years to when you know if you wanted those high end graphics cards in a laptop. You were basically making, you know the sacrifice of having this you know, four inch thick laptop with a with, you know, this sort of huge footprint that was heavy and you know it was basically a portable desktop is how I would describe a lot of that stuff. But the fact that now we're talking so thin and even, like you said, four pounds so light. I mean, what is this due do you think to sort of change the direction of, of sort of PC gaming because, like I said, especially as it relates to laptops, this is not a thing where you're sort of anchored down by a big honking laptop. How does that sort of change the game? One of the biggest things I think it changes is that you gamers used to have to choose between. I want to go desktop and have the best overall performance, the best looking and the best frames per second and 4k, et cetera. Or I want to go laptop and kind of sacrifice one of those things, right. That used to be the scenario. The scenario today is that you can actually choose either one and you're not sacrificing anything. So as we mentioned, these are just as powerful as a desktop. So when people ask me, what should I buy a desktop or a laptop? It's actually hard for me to answer that question, cuz I used to say. Well, if you want the best best power go with a desktop. If you want some portability, go with a laptop and you're gonna sacrifice something. But now I kinda say, well I don't know if you don't want your perfectly if you literally cannot lose, you're perfectly fine with either one. Especially with a thunderbolt three port on this laptop and DisplayPort out and things like that. A lot of people use these laptops and they'll hook them up to a thunderbolt dock and be docked at home and get a full power right there. Or what I've seen people do is a hook it up to their living room TV. So you can have a large TV hooked up to this laptop, running a game with a controller and you know you would have no idea that's a laptop powering it when you when you're actually playing the game. Yeah, I've actually had a lot of conversations about that especially last year with everyone being home so much for people who wanted that solution of bringing their gaming laptop, their gaming experience from room, to room, from TV to TV, There obviously are solutions in place, where you can stream stuff from one room to the other. But when you introduce that portability, bringing that around with you, within your home, and not having to stream something over the network, it just makes that much more sense. So. Just a really kind of impressive option for people to seek out and take advantage of with the prevalence of these kinds of machines you know taking place. Yeah, so a little bit more in the specs that's under the hood that a lot of people are gonna ask about so it has an Intel Core i seven processor, eight core processor, Up to 32 gigs of RAM, up to 4 terabytes of hard drive space, of course it has the latest Wi-Fi. And we're gonna keep going back to the NVIDIA RTX 30 Series cuz that is the highlight and the most amazing part of it. But one of the most amazing parts of NVIDIA's new N20 Series is DLSS. So on video DLSS is an amazing AI technology that gets better over time. So this improves your performance and your games your frames per second. Over time, it gets even better and better as AI learns. And I can't say enough about DLSS this is to me one of the main highlights, and it's a must have when I play any game now that offers DLSS it's on, it's automatically on. I'm getting more performance, more frames per second. And it's kind of a lot of people call this also magic, some press outlets are called a magic. PC Gamer was quoted as saying that you can get 85% higher frames per second [INAUDIBLE] DLSS on. So I know that you've worked with DLSS but I just wanna say we have to highlight that because these laptops offer DLSS from a video and the performance is mind boggling. Yeah, I feel like DLSS has been such a game changer for accessibility and really for a lot of people to get a taste of that super high end fidelity when maybe they're not When they're not able to buy the latest and greatest graphics card that just comes out that sort of technology has been able to like leapfrog people, maybe a generation or two with, with some really impressive AI and sort of architecture. What. Besides, you know all that stuff, are you able to kind of, you know, squeeze out of what you're getting with now that there's, you know, 30 series cards in laptops. You know what are the other sort of added benefits to having that under the hood. I mean, I don't wanna to go too much into performance and speeds and feeds and all that stuff. And that's all that information is going to be out there soon, you could check that out. But I can give you some hands on experience. So I've had some hands on with these laptops. And of course, I had to fire up cyberpunk, that's the game I'm playing right now and are fired up on our 1080p panel With ray tracing on ultra with DLSS on and it was just stunning. It looks amazing, it plays super smooth and still it's hard for me to wrap my head around it. I live and breathe this industry for 20 years, I'm around it all the time and I'm still kind of totally amazed. That I'm playing the latest game with all the bells and whistles turned on looks beautiful. On a 15 inch light laptop. It's just, I can't say enough about it. I feel like promoting it a little too much. But really, it's gonna blow your mind when you see this thing in person. Well, look, I think that's fair because I think a lot of people didn't really understand just how Impressive this architecture this generational leap, netted performance, right? Like I think that is a topic that's still sort of under discussed. Maybe on a surface level, I think when you get into the nitty gritty and you talk to the bench markers and people who really put these. Products through the ringer that generational jump is so mind blowing and in video obviously very quick to say and highlight the fact that this is the largest generational leap they've really ever done. I think it makes sense to kinda be blown away. And look like you said you've been doing this for a while, I've been covering games for well over a decade. The kind of performance that we are getting and again from the laptop versions from you know now the laptop versions for what we're seeing out of the the GPUs and desktops. It truly is mind blowing, just the jumps in the short amount of time that we're experiencing. Kevin what I want to pivot real quick and talk a little bit about Kinda 2020 and what kinda year that was for origin PC. And what you sorta saw firsthand as something that impacted your business what did you see from what 2020 really meant to people who play video games. I mean, just like everyone else out there, we had to make changes. We had to pivot quickly. You know, first and foremost of mine was safety and the health of everyone, you know, family, coworkers, et cetera. So obviously we have people working from home. So we had to quickly switch to a different tools to work from home. Luckily we're a technology company so we're able to do that quite well. And you know, I found the team to be super efficient. We haven't really missed a beat. We've been able to launch new products, keep our service levels high. We offer 24 seven Lifetime support. So we actually have in house you know, Tech's that work out of Miami, mostly out of Miami and all throughout the US. And luckily for us, this was already happening. We had a lot of our Tech's working from home. So we were actually at one point looking to bring more people into the office and then COVID happened. And we said, You know what, we're just gonna keep hiring people and have them work from home. And it's worked out really well. We're still offering that 24/7 support. Obviously, manufacturing does come into the office. So we've taken great lengths to make sure that everything here is clean 6 feet apart, right one of my masks Super safe some of the business of course, was impacted in a negative way and some things did slow down. But overall, the demand is super high. A lot more people are staying home. They're not taking vacations, they're upgrading things around their house. They're getting additional gaming PCs. I myself, I'm in that boat. I'm in the business but I'm also a consumer and a gamer. So I use the opportunity to say, we're taking a lot less family vacations this year and we're gonna upgrade things around the house. So we upgraded our game room and added some additional PCs and we're doing some gaming with the family and actually play animal crossing with my mom. So It's been this really, really weird year of a lot of negativity, a lot of things, my heart goes out to all people affected. But at the same time, all these new different opportunities where we're connecting in different virtual ways, just like this live stream right here, it's totally virtual and it works. We're still able to keep things going. For me, that's being kind of the most surprising thing. Is there one thing as it relates to PC gaming in your specific field that you've been the most sort of surprised by? Is there something that you can kind of put your finger on and that's maybe giving you a little bit of hope? Well, I just The gaming community coming together and start connecting and you never know what game is gonna take off. And what technology is gonna take, like among us is a perfect example. Who would have thought that among us would have been the number one game or one of the number one games of the year? And how much of that is tied to COVID? We don't know. But obviously a lot of people are at home playing games and they want that social interaction and that's a perfect game. Where it's not your typical shooter, it's a different type of game where you're having a lot of back and forth and kind of figuring out who's the good guy who's the bad guy? So those type of games really taken off and I think there's gonna be more games in that room. Obviously discord, record numbers, YouTube record numbers, twitch record numbers. So, it's just amazing to see, how things pivoted, and how, gamers, are still wanting to, play games together and still socially interact with each other. Definitely. Kevin, I appreciate you coming in. Can you just let us know real quick ,are these laptops that you guys debuting today, they're available for order. Right now right? And you're pretty much ready to go. Absolutely So originpc .com these laptops are available now. There is a lead time because we're gonna custom build it to order. All of our laptops, desktops come with HDUV printing, so you can actually print anything you want on a panel the laptop, or we can laser etch it or we can paint it. So yeah, you can go to our website now customize your product to your heart's content, and then we'll deliver it and two or three weeks Excellent. Kevin, always a pleasure. Thank you so much for being here. Really appreciate it. Guys. Don't forget to interact with us on our social channels, subscribe to our YouTube channel that always goes a long way. Of course, you can reach out to me personally on Twitter. I'm at Jeff bakalar