HP has some new PCs for you to ogle, including a reinvented Pavilion X2 tablet-laptop hybrid, a new Envy laptop, and the Envy Phoenix gaming desktop. It’s a big makeover for the company’s line-up, laptops especially, and if you’re looking for a new machine to take to school or uni then your interest should be piqued.
Pavilion: New X2, X360 And All-In-Ones
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The Pavilion name represents HP’s mainstream PC line-up; these are the machines that you’d be buying for your kid’s school work or for a uni student on a budget. First in the line-up is a new and improved Pavilion X2, built around a 10-inch display (with 11 hours of battery life) in a tablet form factor that’s magnetically attached to the keyboard base. The tablet has a plethora of ports for such a small device, with full-size USB 3.0, USB Type-C (for charging and data transfer), microHDMI and a microSD card slot. Its side-mounted stereo speakers carry the Bang & Olufsen logo, as part of a new partnership with the Danish audio brand.
You’ll find an Intel Atom inside, Windows 8.1 (upgradeable to 10, obviously, in a week or two), 2GB of RAM and a 32GB SSD. The new HP Pavilion X2 kicks off at around a $549 starting price. If a detachable isn’t your speed, then there’s also a new 11-inch Pavilion X360‘ — same basic hardware, but ditching the removable tablet and keyboard base for a 360-degree rotating hinge — for $150 or so more than the X2 at a $699 starting price. You can also buy a $999 version with a low-voltage Core M inside.
New regular ol’ 15-inch HP Pavilion notebooks — in a huge range of configurations, but starting from an absolute bargain basement price of $499 — will be trickling out onto store shelves, and into HP’s online store soon. Home or small business users might be happier with a proper desktop PC, like the new Pavilion AIO, which comes in both 23 and 27-inch screen sizes, again with B&O speakers — this time in a quad-speaker array — and a bunch of different Intel and AMD-based system configurations, with the 23-inch model starting at $1299 and the 27-inch model starting at $1899. And, finally, there’s new Pavilion desktop PC towers.
Envy: New Desktops, Notebook, And The Envy Phoenix
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There’s a new Envy 15.6-inch notebook, completely redesigned from last year’s model, now including a hinge design that elevates the keyboard slightly from your work surface for more comfortable typing. As with the all-in-ones, you can choose from a massive range of Intel and AMD processors, as well as HD, Full HD and Quad HD+ displays, a bunch of different RAM and storage options, as well as standalone AMD or Nvidia graphics. You’ll get up to 10 hours from the most efficient configuration possible, and the entire thing weighs only 2.37kg. B&O audio, as with other models, comes standard for the $1899-plus laptop.
By far the most interesting for we high-end users and gaming fanatics, though, is the Envy Phoenix, a proper gaming PC in a full-width mini tower case — with Intel i7 K-SKU multiplier-unlocked processors for fans of overclocking, integrated watercooling, proper discrete graphics option all the way up to a Nvidia GeForce GTX 980, and fancy lights on the front that change according to how much strain you’re putting on the CPU. This is the one we really want to play with — it’ll be out in October, with pricing yet to be locked down. [HP]