HP wants to bring gaming to a wider range of gamers with its new Omen gaming arsenal

HP India announced the launch of HP OMEN gaming laptops and a desktop yesterday at a launch event in New Delhi. The company launched the OMEN 17 laptop and OMEN 15 notebook geared towards gamers in addition to the OMEN desktop who want more power and are not looking at portability. Ketan Patel, Senior Director for Personal Systems hosted the event and interacted with us after the keynote presentation.  The most affordable device in this range is the Omen 15 notebook featuring a 15.6-inch full HD display, Intel Core i5-7300HQ (2.5GHz, turbo boost up to 3.5GHz) processor, 8GB of DDR4 RAM. It comes with an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 graphics and a 1TB HDD with a price tag of Rs 79,990.  The HP Omen 17 laptop is the company’s first VR ready gaming notebook featuring a 17.3-inch full HD display, Intel Core i7-7700HQ (2.8GHz, turbo up to 3.8GHz) processor, Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 graphics (6GB GDDR5), 16GB of DDR4 RAM, 1TB 7200RPM HDD, 128GB SSD storage, and Bang & Olufsen audio. Prices start at Rs 1,39,990.  HP Omen 870 desktop can be configured with an Intel Core i7-7700K (4.2GHz, 8MB cache) processor, Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 graphics card, 16GB DDR4 RAM, 128GB SSD, and a 2TB 7200RPM HDD. It comes with a three-year manufacturing warranty with prices starting at Rs 1,39,990.  HP also announced Omen accessories including a keyboard, headset, mouse and mousepad developed in partnership with SteelSeries. The Omen Headset comes with retractable mic and a 3.5mm mobile adapter priced at Rs 7,499. The Omen keyboard is priced at Rs 9,999. The Omen mouse comes with intelligent RGB illumination and is priced at Rs 5,499. The Omen Mousepad featuring a non-slip rubber base is priced at Rs 2,199.  We spent some time gaming through Call of Duty, NFS Most Wanted and Counter Strike across different systems. Even though these games will not help us gauge the raw performance of the systems, they do give us an idea about the overall quality of peripherals and how capable the entire package is. It would be unfair to be decisive about the performance and how these systems fare without a proper review but the overall the build quality of all three systems available during the event for testing was top notch.  Ketan Gupta pointed out that the company is focusing on providing gaming laptops to a wide range of people, starting from amateur gamers to the ones who take gaming seriously and need quality machines. He went into detail pointing out that the gaming industry is massive in India and growing 13 percent annually in a lucrative market. HP will compete with competition in performance and design along with a strategy to help build the gaming community. The company will leverage the OMEN brand to help nurture the community by means of sponsorship and events.  One key factor that the company highlighted is the ability for gamers to tinker with the hardware being offered in terms of adding additional RAM or overclocking the OMEN 870 desktop. HP has added the liquid cooling in the desktop to enable hobbyists and serious gamers to bump up the performance of their systems without any performance deterioration. HP also pointed out that they have a good relationship with AMD and will work on bring the recently announced AMD Ryzen to India as soon as it is possible. They did not have any official timeline as Ryzen was just announced yesterday.