If you’ve got a whole bunch of money and you want a gaming PC, HP wants to know you. Its unconventional Omen X cube PC case is on show at PAX Australia in Melbourne this weekend, and you can see all the high-end kit inside and the bells and whistles that it boasts.
We’ve covered the Omen X in the past, and while it’s unlikely to appeal to the enthusiasts that already build their own machines, it’s made for people that don’t want to. That’s the entire point of pre-built gaming PCs, to be honest, but you do pay extra for that hands-off approach.
If you’ve got a wallet fat enough, you can spec HP’s Omen X up with a bunch of different graphics options up to two full-fat GTX 1080p in SLI, which should go nicely with its (optionally liquid-cooled) K-SKU overclockable Intel Core i7 CPU. Four hot-swappable 3.5-inch drive bays support fast SSDs and capacious HDDs, and the Omen X also comes with a motherboard-mounted M.2 SSD.
The standout feature of the Omen X, we think, isn’t one that you can see. There’s actually a little tool kit hidden away behind one of the front panels of the chassis — the one that you might recognise because of its Voodoo PC logo. If you can’t remember Voodoo from the early days of PC gaming, they made graphics cards like the Banshee that, for their day, were stupidly powerful — and stupidly expensive.
The Omen X can be configured from a base cost of $4499 to upwards of $7,000, and if that’s somehow not too rich for your blood it’ll go on sale in a variety of pre-built options in JB Hi-Fi and Harvey Norman. HP will let you spec one up to your liking on its Aussie website, with the base spec still including that Core i7 and 16GB of DDR4 alongside a 2TB mechanical drive.
You can buy the chassis itself, too, originally conceived by Maingear — 32kg and 52 litres of four-thermal-chamber space inside, including that beefy 1300 Watt power supply — for $999. Which, again, is a lot. But it’s a cool case, and HP gets points for being one of the only massive top-tier PC brands that will actually sell you a bare case on its own.
The HP Omen booth backs onto Microsoft’s Xbox one at PAX, too — and since you can play Gears of War 4 multi on PC and Xbox with cross-platform support, there’s a 4v4 section that’ll put paid to the old PC versus console argument …We think we know who’ll win convincingly. [HP Omen]