HP Omen Desktops, Laptops, and Backpack VR Rig Unveiled

HP has unveiled a handful of new gaming rigs for its Omen line of PCs and laptops. All of these machines are aimed at gamers and look pretty cool along with cramming in updated hardware. The first is the Omen X compact desktop, a small form factor offering that looks sort of like the Alienware Alpha rig.

The Omen X an be configured with unlocked Core i7 chips inside of Kaby Lake flavor and includes an overclocked GeForce GTX 1080 GPU under the hood. One of the coolest things about this machine is that there is a backpack accessory available for it that allows you to wear the beast for VR gaming sessions using something like the HTC Vive with no wires tethering you down.

It also has support for hot swap batteries so you can keep the wireless VR gaming going as long as your battery supply holds out. That backpack accessory comes with four batteries included for $600, you don’t even need to take off the backpack to swap the batteries. This PC will ship in July starting at $2,500.

If you are more the desktop type of gamer, the Omen by HP Desktop might be more your speed. This machine can be had with Kaby Lake Core i5 or i7 processors and can be ordered with up to dual GeForce GTX 1080 Ti GPUs in SLI mode., you can get into some serious gaming with that configuration. You can also get this desktop with a pair of RX 580 GPUs in Crossfire and a AMD Ryzen processor under the hood. Liquid cooling is optional and you can get normal HDDs, or SSD/HDD combos for storage. The Omen desktop starts at $900 and is available now.

For the mobile gamers out there, the Omen 15 and Omen 17 laptops are the ticket. Omen 15 can be configured with Kaby Lake CPUs, and up to GeForce 1060 or RX 550 graphics. The larger Omen 17 can use either a GTX 1070 o a RX 580 GPU. The keyboards on both machines are backlit and an optional 4K display is available. The Omen 15 starts at $1,000 and will launch June 28 alongside the Omen 17 starting at $1,100.

The last item is the Omen by HP Accelerator, a Thunderbolt 3 enclosure that can be a stand alone enclosure or bought along with an AMD or NVIDIA graphics card. It can also be used as external storage support up to a 1TB HDD. The Omen Accelerator ships in August for $299 reports HotWardware, presumably sans storage and graphics card.