With a prime position near PAX Australia’s entrance, HP/Xbox Australia’s booth is certainly busy this year. but perhaps the most eye-catching part of the layout is the focus on HP’s unconventional desktop computer, the HP Omen X. Shaped like a giant cube on its side (which I suppose makes it like a diamond), the Omen X promises a few things – from a powerful gaming system, to a revival of the Voodoo brand with its logo, to boasting at being able to show you how your computer ‘feels’.
The cubic design of the Omen X is largely intended to help with cooling (and not just to look cool). Raising the computer rather than letting it lie flat exposes the six sides of the cube for vents and cooling, as well as angling the motherboard for ease of access. It also thermally isolates the main board, the processor and graphics from the four hot-swappable drive bays. The model on display features two GTX 1080 graphics cards, which certainly shows off the power the case can contain. There’s also room for liquid cooling to each of those graphics cards, as well as two spare radiator slots in the case.
The front of the case is where it gets a little weird, as HP claim the case has ’emotional lighting’ to show how your computer ‘feels’. This sounds a lot like marketing gumpf-speak for ‘LED lights’, but it turns out there’s a little more to it. The cube’s front contains four quadrants, each outlined by LED lights, and these quadrants’ colors can be linked to useful computer monitoring levels. For instance, one quadrant’s colors can represent the temperature of your CPU, another the temperature of your GPU, another the load on your CPU and the last the load on your GPU. Whether this is easier than an OS tool is debatable, but it’s hard to deny the lighting looks extremely cool on the Omen X. And speaking about useful features, one of the front quadrants of the case actually comes off, to reveal a small inbuilt toolkit with an Allan key and various tools to help with installation and modding. The Omen X’s price ranges from $4499 to $7000, and are on sale at JB Hi-Fi and Harvey Norman.
In addition to the Omen X, HP are also showing off their Omen 17 and 15 laptops, which again are targeted directly at gamers. The Omen 17 features a full HD display which is non-touch, which HP say will reduce reflective and produce better colour saturation and viewing angles. This is matched up to a GTX 960, although a GTX 1070 version has just been launched which supports 4K displays if you need to go higher than 1080p on your laptop. The laptops also contain lithium polymer batteries, which will charge by 50% in 30 minutes with HP’s ‘fast-charge’ technology.
There are also the standard Omen desktops on display, which resemble more traditional towers, although with a tasteful strip of LED lighting down the centre. While simpler in terms of design, these also feature a helpful ‘landing pad’ on their top surface, to keep hard drives or phones while they plug in to the desktop’s USB ports.
If you aren’t at PAX this weekend, you can check out all of these products, along with their full specifications at HP’s official website.
