HP introduces a new line of entry-level gaming Laptop & PCs

HP has been ramping up its Omen line over the past couple years to serve the high-end gaming community, and now it’s taking a swing at more casual gamers with its new Pavilion Gaming line. At launch, the line includes two desktops, a laptop, and a display, and HP says that it’s all meant for people who are interested in gaming, but aren’t necessarily buying their PC solely to play games.

The Pavilion Gaming Laptop comes in one size, a 15.6-inch model, but will be offered in a number of configurations, going as low as $799. They’ll all have 8th-generation Core i5 or i7 processors (either U- or H-series), 8GB of RAM, and some combination of a 1TB HDD and solid state storage. They’ll be offered with either a Radeon RX 560X, a GeForce GTX 1050 Ti, or at the higher end, a GTX 1060 Max-Q. It can also be configured with 16GB of Optane memory.

Image: HP

The laptop still has a distinct “gaming” vibe to it, with an angular design and keyboard lettering with a futuristic style. Naturally, it can glow, too — there’s an option for white, green, or purple keyboard backlights, with matching accent colors on the laptop itself. it can be configured with a 1080p 60Hz display, a 1080p 144Hz display, or a 4K 60Hz display. Overall, you’re still looking at some relatively solid specs, even if you’re missing out on the highest levels of performance.

Then there’s the two Pavilion Gaming desktops, the 690 and 790. The 690 is a smaller unit, meant for people with space constraints, and is less flexible because of that. It only fits half-length graphics cards and offers fewer storage device and memory slots. The smaller model starts at $549 and the larger one starts at $749, and both can be specced way up. The 790, for instance, supports up to 64GB of RAM.

Image: HP

And finally, there’s the Pavilion Gaming 32 HDR display, which is a 32-inch sorta-HDR display. I say “sorta” because it’s going off a different definition of HDR than the one 4K TVs use. It still has the wider color gamut of 4K HDR TVs, but it doesn’t get as bright and offers less contrast because of that. The display has a 2560 x 1440 resolution, a 75Hz refresh rate, and support for AMD’s FreeSync. It’ll sell for $449.

The Pavilion Gaming line is all supposed to launch in May and June. In addition to the gaming products, HP is also updating its standard Pavilion laptops and desktops with new colors and, in some cases, 8th-generation processors.