Harvey Norman brings HWZ members up close and personal with the latest HP Omen gaming systems
Building a gaming PC is confusing stuff. To help with that, Harvey Norman, HP, and HardwareZone collaborated on a special event for our readers to equip themselves with the knowledge needed to make sense of the saturated gaming market, and allow them to experience HP's latest Omen gaming systems first-hand.
It's now possible to get an entirely Omen-branded system with Omen mice and headsets designed in collaboration with SteelSeries. The laptop pictured here is the HP Omen 15.
It’s a glorious time to be a PC gamer. But it’s also a tumultuous one, given the frenzied release of new hardware over the past year.
NVIDIA’s excellent Pascal cards were followed by AMD’s second-generation Polaris GPUs for the mainstream market, and AMD hasn’t even debuted Radeon RX Vega for the hardcore gamers yet.
On the CPU front, AMD’s Ryzen CPUs impressed with their price-to-performance ratios, and we’re just beginning to get acquainted with Intel’s new enthusiast-grade Core X processors.
How’s one to choose when it comes to building, or even buying, a gaming PC?
To help with that, Harvey Norman, HP, and HardwareZone collaborated on a special event for HWZ members that would equip them with the knowledge needed to make sense of the saturated gaming market, and allow them to experience HP’s latest Omen gaming systems first-hand.
HWZ members gathering for the start of the event.
HP Omen systems and gear lined the exhibition area at Millenia Walk, and HWZ members even got a peek at the HP Omen X gaming desktops, which will only be available to buy in the coming months. The futuristic, cube-shaped systems garnered quite a bit of attention, but that’s probably no surprise given that they don’t look much like a traditional desktop. Here's what they look like inside.
The Omen X desktops are coming soon!
More modest looking Omen desktops were on show as well, and these draw on the performance heritage of the Omen X systems to enable powerful configurations like dual NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti cards in SLI.
The Omen desktops will take up to dual NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080s in SLI. Not to mention, they look good too.
Finally, HP’s newest Omen laptops were on display as well, showing off a new and more aggressive design.
A row of HP Omen 15s running Street Fighter V.
Most of the systems were running Street Fighter V, and our members had fun trying out the game on them.
Well, somebody's having fun.
The sprawling 35-inch HP Omen X 35 curved monitor.
The emcee for the night was Afiz “Sodafiz” M. Noor, a prominent caster and streamer in the local Overwatch committee and also a member of Singapore’s Overwatch World Cup 2017 committee.
Sodafiz was the emcee for the event.
He introduced our Associate Editor Kenny Yeo, who started things off with a step-by-step guide on putting together your own gaming rig, covering everything from the monitor, mouse, keyboard, and headphones to choosing the individual components in the system.
If anyone in the audience was having a tough time deciding between Intel or AMD Ryzen, or was simply looking for a good headphone recommendation, they probably walked away a little less confused.
Our Associate Editor Kenny Yeo walked the audience through configuring their gaming rig.
HWZ members listening to our Associate Editor's recommendations on putting together your own gaming PC.
Next up was Miss Makino, a former Counter-Strike pro who played under the Grudgebringers, or GBR, one of the titans of the local Counter-Strike scene in the early aughts. Her experience in the competitive scene is extensive, including even a trip to Paris to compete in the ESWC finals, where her team achieved 10th place.
Miss Makino talks about her experience with HP's Omen gaming systems.
HP’s Omen gaming systems were the star of the show here, and she brought her experience as a professional player to bear in sharing her positive impressions of the Omen hardware.
If you missed out on the event, you can still head down to the HP Omen showcase at the attrium of Millenia Walk this weekend to check them out. You can also find out more about the new Omen gaming systems and accessories (including prices) in our earlier article here. HP’s got other interesting stuff planned in the pipeline as well, including the Omen X Compact Desktop that doubles as a backpack PC, and the Omen Accelerator external graphics dock.
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