Premium gaming notebooks often try to be as skinny as possible, but Digital Storm's Avon ($1,999 in the base model we tested) bucks that trend.
This 17.3-inch gaming laptop leverages a 1.6-inch-thick chassis to house a full-power Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 graphics chip, approaching or tying pricier RTX 2080 Max-Q laptops in our testing.
Speed indeed is the Avon's calling card, as its mostly plastic chassis won't wow shoppers.
The sleeker MSI GS75 Stealth matches its performance for several hundred dollars more, but if function first, form second is your goal, the Avon is a good contender for your money.
Thick Chassis, Thin Bezels
Besides a full-tilt 8GB GeForce RTX 2070 (instead of one of Nvidia's slightly dialed-down Max-Q GPUs), what do you get for your $1,999? The parts list starts with Intel's beefy Core i7-9750H processor and includes a 144Hz 1080p display, 16GB of dual-channel DDR4 memory, and a 512GB PCI Express solid-state drive.
My test unit doesn't include a secondary storage drive, which I found strange, given the laptop's size, until I looked under the bottom access panel—there's just a pair of M.2 Type-2280 (80mm) slots for SSD-only storage, with no 2.5-inch bay where you could add an inexpensive hard drive.
The Avon's price is a reasonable value for the included hardware.
The Alienware m17 was going for about $100 more with a similar loadout as I typed this; it included a secondary 1TB hard drive but was saddled with a Max-Q version of the RTX 2070.
The 17-inch Lenovo Legion Y740, coming in right around the same price as the Avon, also uses Max-Q graphics cards exclusively.
Don't forget about the warranty; the Digital Storm has three years of standard coverage, while the Alienware and Lenovo systems have just one year.
Similar Products
The Avon bears an uncanny resemblance to the Overpowered Gaming Laptop 17+ since it shares the same basic chassis...
It's not a carbon copy, however; the Avon has more powerful internal components and minor design differences, including the keyboard.
The system owes its modern look to its thin-bezel display.
If you're coming from a 15.6-inch laptop with traditional bezels, the 15.5-by-10.3-inch Avon is around the same size.
In fact, it's about as trim as a 17.3-inch notebook can get, at least until you hold your ruler vertically.
The 1.6-inch thickness of this beast is more than double that of the MSI GS75 Stealth.
Again, the extra height gives the Avon the thermal headroom it needs to handle a full-power GeForce RTX 2070 GPU.
At least it's not heavier than it needs to be; I weighed my review unit at 5.6 pounds.
Sturdiness is something the Avon has in abundance.
My poking and prodding revealed little flex and no squeaks or creaks in protest.
The plastic construction is strictly utilitarian, though; nearly all of the competition makes extensive use of metal at this price, whereas the Avon reserves it for just the lid backing and a strip above the keyboard.
The other visual surfaces are coated in soft-touch silicone that, while practical, lacks a premium look.
For visual flair, the Digital Storm logo on the lid is passively backlit by the screen, and an RGB light strip along the front of the chassis can be configured in the preinstalled Gaming Center software.
The latter also allows you to configure the keyboard's per-key backlighting...
Each key can be set to any of the 16.8 million colors in the RGB spectrum.
You can choose from preset patterns, or fashion up to five of your own profiles.
You'll find the power button and status lights at the top right of the keyboard.
There's also a button to switch between Game and Office power modes.
The system ships with Game mode enabled, which allows the cooling fans to run as needed, while Office mode suppresses the fans to keep the noise level down at the expense of performance.
The Avon's port selection spans three sides.
The left edge holds a Kensington-style security lock slot, an Ethernet jack, a legacy USB 2.0 port, and separate microphone and headphone jacks.
On the right edge, there's a full-size SD card reader and a pair of USB 3.1 Gen 1 Type-A ports.
Finally, the back of the laptop holds a pair of mini DisplayPort video outputs, an HDMI video output, a USB 3.1 Gen 1 Type-C port, and the jack for the 230-watt power brick, which is relatively compact (6 by 1.25 by 3 inches) and weighs about 1.5 pounds.
It's not a deal-breaker that the Avon is missing a Thunderbolt 3 port, but it would be nice to see one at this price point.
The machine lacks built-in biometric security features like a fingerprint reader.
Gaming laptops tend to be lax in this regard, but I'm still docking points; someone should step up the game.
The 720p webcam is also below average for a notebook in this price range.
I wouldn't want to use it for a casual video chat, let alone a live stream.
Click, Clack, Repeat
One keypress is all you'll need to realize the Digital Storm's isn't your typical membrane keyboard.
The direct feedback communicates to your fingers exactly when a key is fully pressed or released, with no mushy or rubbery in-between.
The keys give off muted clicks and clacks when pressed.
The typing experience is only vaguely like that of a desktop mechanical keyboard, so you'll need to temper your expectations.
For one, the key travel distance is much shorter, although it's long by notebook-keyboard standards.
The per-key RGB backlighting looks great, especially since the secondary symbols are backlit.
Layout-wise, I appreciate the full-size keys on the top row, although I dislike the fact that the arrow keys are crammed into the main keyboard area instead of being separated into their own cluster.
(The right Shift key and the number-pad "0" key are truncated to make room.) At least the number-pad keys are otherwise full-size, an assumption that can't always be made on notebooks with numeric keypads.
The Avon doesn't have dedicated macro buttons or media-control keys, and the included software doesn't allow you to reassign keys.
As a righty, the expansive, buttonless touchpad seems unnaturally far left to me because I have to reach across my centerline to make a left-click.
I made a lot of mistaken right-clicks as a result.
The pad's tactile clicking takes slightly more effort than I expected, though the clicks are quiet enough for my ears.
An Almost-Perfect Gaming Display
The Avon's 1,920-by-1,080-pixel panel is an ideal match for its GeForce RTX 2070 graphics card.
You'll see in the benchmarks section that it can approach triple-digit frame rates in the latest games, a statistic that makes its 144Hz refresh rate and advertised 3ms response time more important, especially to competitive esports players.
It's regrettable, though, that the screen lacks Nvidia G-Sync technology to further smooth out gameplay.
The upside of leaving it out is longer battery life (G-Sync prevents a laptop from switching to its on-CPU graphics solution when maximum 3D performance isn't needed), but as a gamer, I'll take G-Sync over battery life.
Everything else about the display is a winner, including its excellent brightness, high contrast, and vivid color.
The anti-glare surface helps keep reflections from ambient light at bay.
You'll want to supplement the entertainment value of the screen with a pair of headphones, as the Avon's built-in speakers (which project from under the palm rest) have flat sound that doesn't get loud enough.
Intel 9th Gen Leads the Way
The Avon is one of the first gaming laptops PC Labs has tested with one of Intel's 9th Generation Core processors, specifically the Core i7-9750H.
This six-core, 12-thread chip is a marginal upgrade over the Core i7-8750H it replaces, with boosted clocks (a 2.6GHz instead of 2.2GHz base clock, and a 4.5GHz boost clock, up from 4.1GHz) and a bigger cache (12MB versus 9MB).
Unless you spend serious cash for a portable with a desktop CPU like the Alienware Area-51m, the Core i7-9750H is one of the fastest processors you can get in a notebook.
Let's get to the benchmarking.
I pitted the Digital Storm Avon against the following systems for our performance comparisons...
These 17.3-inch models all feature high-end hardware.
Besides the Avon, the MSI GE75 Raider is the only other unit to employ a full-power (non-Max-Q) graphics chip.
The pricey Core i9 processor in the Alienware m17 may give it an advantage in CPU-limited scenarios, while it will be interesting to see how the Core i7-8750H chips in the others stack up to the Core i7-9750H in the Avon.
Productivity, Storage, and Media Tests
PCMark 10 and 8 are holistic performance suites developed by the PC benchmark specialists at UL (formerly Futuremark).
The PCMark 10 test we run simulates different real-world productivity and content-creation workflows.
We use it to assess overall system performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheet work, web browsing, and videoconferencing.
The test generates a proprietary numeric score; higher numbers are better.
PCMark 8, meanwhile, has a Storage subtest that we use to assess the speed of the laptop's boot drive.
This score is also a proprietary numeric score; again, higher numbers are better.
PCMark 10 is the only test I ran where the Avon didn't perform as well as I expected, even though it scores well above the 4,000 points we consider excellent.
The PCMark 8 storage numbers are within a stone's throw, so the gaps in the PCMark 10 scores must have come from somewhere else.
Next is Maxon's CPU-crunching Cinebench R15 test, which is fully threaded to make use of all available processor cores and threads.
Cinebench stresses the CPU rather than the GPU to render a complex image.
The result is a proprietary score indicating a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads.
We also run a custom Adobe Photoshop image-editing benchmark.
Using an early 2018 release of the Creative Cloud version of Photoshop, we apply a series of 10 complex filters and effects to a standard JPEG test image.
We time each operation and, at the end, add up the total execution time.
As with Handbrake, lower times are better here.
The Photoshop test stresses CPU, storage subsystem, and RAM, but it can also take advantage of most GPUs to speed up the process of applying filters, so systems with powerful graphics chips or cards may see a boost.
The Avon's Core i7-9750H processor earn it top honors in Cinebench, though by a margin of less than 5 percent next to the Core i7-8750H-based Asus.
Its slightly boosted clocks can't do much more than that.
The Digital Storm continues its winning streak in our Photoshop test, where it ties for first with the Core i9-powered Alienware.
Graphics Tests
3DMark measures relative graphics muscle by rendering sequences of highly detailed, gaming-style 3D graphics that emphasize particles and lighting.
We run two different 3DMark subtests, Sky Diver and Fire Strike, which are suited to different types of systems.
Both are DirectX 11 benchmarks, but Sky Diver is more suited to laptops and midrange PCs, while Fire Strike is more demanding and made for high-end PCs to strut their stuff.
The results are proprietary scores.
Next up is another synthetic graphics test, this time from Unigine Corp.
Like 3DMark, the Superposition test renders and pans through a detailed 3D scene and measures how the system copes.
In this case, it's rendered in the company's eponymous Unigine engine, offering a different 3D workload scenario than 3DMark, for a second opinion on the machine's graphical prowess.
We present two Superposition results, run at the 720p Low and 1080p High presets.
The Avon's 3DMark Fire Strike score is downright impressive; its high-octane GeForce RTX 2070 card let it essentially tie the RTX 2080 Max-Q silicon in the Alienware, Asus, and Lenovo systems.
It's at a slight disadvantage in the more challenging Superposition test at the 1080p High setting, where the Alienware and Asus pull ahead.
But before we draw conclusions, let's do some real-world gaming.
Real-World Gaming Tests
The synthetic tests above are helpful for measuring general 3D aptitude, but it's hard to beat full retail video games for judging gaming performance.
Far Cry 5 and Rise of the Tomb Raider are both modern, high-fidelity titles with built-in benchmarks that illustrate how a system handles real-world gameplay at various settings.
We run them on both the moderate and maximum graphics quality presets (Normal and Ultra for Far Cry 5, Medium and Very High for Rise of the Tomb Raider) at native resolution to judge performance for a given system.
The results are also provided in frames per second.
Far Cry 5 is DirectX 11-based, while Rise of the Tomb Raider can be flipped to DX12, which we do for the benchmark.
The results are clear: The Digital Storm and its full-power RTX 2070 have no trouble keeping up with the RTX 2080 Max-Q Alienware, Asus, and Lenovo laptops.
Although the MSI GE75 Raider uses the full-bore RTX 2080, it didn't perform consistently better than the RTX 2080 Max-Q notebooks.
The Avon earns bonus points for being the least expensive system here, too.
Video Playback Battery Rundown Test
After fully recharging the laptop, we set up the machine in power-save mode (as opposed to balanced or high-performance mode) where available and make a few other battery-conserving tweaks in preparation for our unplugged video rundown test.
(We also turn Wi-Fi off, putting the laptop in airplane mode.) In this test, we loop a video—a locally stored 720p file of the Blender Foundation short film Tears of Steel—with screen brightness set at 50 percent and volume at 100 percent until the system conks out.
The six-plus-hour runtime of the Avon is a pleasant surprise.
Battery life may seem like a distant priority for a big gaming laptop that's destined to spend most of its life plugged in, but it's nice to feel like you're not tethered to the wall.
Thermal Performance
The Avon's two cooling fans were usually off or running inaudibly while I was doing everyday tasks like web surfing, while a gaming workload brought them up to full speed in short order.
The sound at full tilt is audible across a living room, though possible to ignore; it lacks characteristics such as excess motor noise or whine that would make it too noticeable.
It also helps that the fan RPM is consistent, not varying up and down.
I tested the Digital...
