General Analysis

For a 17" notebook, the Eurocom Sky X9E3 is massive. It comes in at nearly 2 inches / 4.7 cm thick and weighs 12.1 lbs / 5.5 kg without the power brick. The unit really is a desktop replacement. While die-hard gamers could carry it with them, I have a feeling they would soon grow tired of the weight.

When I cracked the unit open to look inside, the interior metal frame left me impressed. Most notebooks today are just plastic fantastic. Seeing a proper metal support frame in place along with some massive heatsinks left me quite happy with the design. The unit's build quality is very good, with it feeling sturdy and offering no flex on the base and the display having only a tiny bit of flex. That said, the hinges were still strong and stiff and should hold up well over time.

Gaining access to most of the replaceable, critical components was honestly quite easy. Remove a few screws and pull the bottom off and you have access to two RAM slots, the battery, and two 2.5 inch HDD bays. Removing the keyboard required a bit of patience, but once done, I had access to three M.2 slots and two more RAM slots. Upgradeable GPUs via MXM 3.0 with a limit of 190 watts are also quite nice. Generally speaking, the unit has enough upgrade options to make any enthusiast happy for a few years at least.

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Little to no bloatware to be found on the Eurocom Sky X9E3, which is always a good thing. I hate nothing more than having a new system and needing to reset / reinstall the OS because I can't be asked to remove 30+ crappy programs that do nothing but waste space. Thankfully, Eurocom realizes this, and it is not a problem. More vendors should learn from their example here. After all, is it really worth it to potentially ship systems with viruses by accident for a few extra bucks on the bottom line? Moving on, the few applications that are installed primarily handle features such as overclocking, macros, RGB LEDs, etc.


The keyboard does feature back lighting, and it is nicely done if I do say so myself. It is not overly bright, and during daylight conditions, it's a subtle glow that is generally not noticeable. However, once you turn off the lights, it's just right for typing. The glow illuminates the keys without being blinding or distracting. The back of the display also has LEDs which can be set via the same software. RGB LEDs are here to stay, or so it seems.


As for other software, they also include software macros you can record at your leisure and tools to overclock the system. While others may have more luck, overclocking is not something I would recommend. Under extreme loads, namely AIDA64, the Intel i7-7700k does in fact thermal throttle, dropping down to 4.1 GHz from the base clock of 4.2 GHz. As it cannot handle stock clocks under system stress tests, I definitely don't see overclocking the CPU as being all that viable. Again, your mileage may vary in this regard depending upon the configuration. A key point to keep in mind is that this unit also has an unlocked system BIOS to go with its overclocking features.

As for the GPUs, they can get a bit toasty, hitting 90°C, which means overclocking won't give you a huge boost in performance because the boost clock will drop once temps hit the temperature threshold. Still, there is a bit more performance to gain if you keep temps in check. Overall, the system can peak at 500 watts according to the LCD display on the 780 watt FSP power brick under heavy gaming loads. That is a lot of juice for a notebook to suck down. As a compact and power hungry system, the temperatures I encountered are to be expected. Generally speaking, temps did not inhibit performance. I have to say as far as laptops go, it even gave my daily system a run for its money.

Noise levels are not a strong suite for this unit as it is rather loud, reaching 53 dBA at 30 cm / 1 ft away. While the speakers and subwoofer are of good quality and sound is as a whole far better than average, this unit's noise level under load means you will want a good set of headphones if you plan to do any serious gaming. This is because even with the speakers turned up, you just cannot fully drown out the noise of the system fans. Even at low loads, the system is very audible. Silence freaks will want to steer clear.