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HP is reentering the high-end gaming space with a big glowing cube that, like all great gaming products, looks like it could have come out of a sci-fi movie. It's called the Omen X Desktop, and it's supposed to be powerful enough to handle 4K and VR gaming. It also takes advantage of its shape in some interesting ways, using the cube-design to separate components into different chambers to assist cooling and to offer easy-to-swap hard drive compartments.
The Omen X Desktop's baseline model will come with an i7 Skylake processor, 8GB of RAM, a 2TB hard drive and 256GB SSD, liquid cooling, and AMD's Radeon RX 480 graphics card, which itself has 4GB of RAM. It also has a ludicrous 10 USB ports (eight 3.0, two USB-C). Buyers will be able to spec it much higher if they want to, with the machine's graphics option maxing out at either dual NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 cards or dual AMD Radeon R9 Fury X cards. Pricing will start at $1,799 on HP's website beginning tomorrow.
In a slight change of pace, HP will also be selling the Omen X Desktop's chassis on its own for those who want to build a gaming PC from scratch. The case will sell for $599.99 and, on top of its wild design, has a few other solid reasons that gamers may want to pick it out, including the separate chambers for its GPU, power unit, and hard drives, and its four swappable hard drive trays. My colleague Dan Seifert also points out that it looks like a Borg cube. I'm not familiar with Star Trek though, so I'm somewhat partial to Lenovo's Cylon design.
HP started getting back into the PC gaming business earlier this year with the launch of the Omen Laptop and Omen Desktop. At the time, HP also said it was planning a higher-end line of products called Omen X, which is what we're seeing launch today.
Alongside the Omen X Desktop, HP is also announcing a series of Omen gaming accessories made in partnership with SteelSeries. Those include a mouse, mousepad, keyboard, and headset. HP is also announced plans for a gaming monitor with a curved display, though it didn't provide details beyond that.