When HP revampled its line of Omen gaming machines last year, its laptops offered good looks but just middle-of-the road graphics. But with the latest Omen 17, HP has focused on performance, packing Nvidia's new desktop-level graphics chip into a sleek, 1.2-inch thick chassis and tagging it was a reasonable starting price of $1,599.
Available sometime in September, the Omen 17 is a surprisingly affordable way to get VR-ready. And for those who want to push the specs to the max, the Omen has you covered. You can select up to an Nvidia 1070 GPU, a 4K display with G-sync and an Intel Core i7 CPU.
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When I got chance to check out the Omen 17 at HP’s launch event in New York, I was really impressed by the laptop’s clean lines and overall restrained design. It was enough to make me look past the system’s red-and-black color scheme. something that almost every gaming PC maker tends to over use.
I really appreciate how HP positioned the Omen 17’s ports so that everything you need to hook up a a VR headset is on the same side. HP also claims that the Omen 17 can last up to 7.5 hours on a charge, although we’re going to have to wait until we got one in for review to confirm that.
The one thing I wish I could have tested out a bit more is that system’s Bang and Olufsen tuned speakers, but since HP was hosting a Heroes of the Storm LAN event about 20 feet away, that wasn’t going to happen.
When I think about the Omen, the thing I keep coming back to is its price. While we still don’t know exactly what the Omen 17’s $1,599 starting config entails, if HP can produce a VR-ready system for that kind of cost, it’ll once again have a machine that can live up to the Omen name.
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