Omen Accelerator
Engage primary thruster
Price $ 998 www.hp.com.au
External video cards have been teased for several years, but technical limitations have stalled their mainstream adoption. More and more users express the desire to take a lightweight notebook with its all day battery life and carry it to work or around the campus and then bring it home, plug it into an external dock and have the grunt to play your favourite PC games. Thanks to Thunderbolt 3 and the bandwidth it provides, we are finally at the stage where external GPU enclosures are making sense. Enter the HP Omen Graphics Accelerator.
The HP Omen Accelerator features a physically big and bold design that really stands out on your desk. There are three versions available. There’s the entry level unit with no GPU or storage included, then there’s a version with a GTX 1060 3GB and a 1Tb hard drive, while the highest end model adds a GTX 1070. We have the mid spec model on hand. It’s all powered by a 500w 80Plus Bronze ATX PSU which is pretty basic for a machine such as this. The 1Tb HDD can be used to store anything including games that would otherwise not fit onto a typically small laptop SSD. There’s an extensive range of ports including gigabit LAN, four USB 3.0 Type-A ports and a USB 3.1 Type-C port. All in all the Accelerator brings pretty good additional functionality. Importantly, your laptop will be charged while it is plugged into the Accelerator.
The unit is user upgradeable much like a regular desktop. Do you need a larger HDD or SSD? Check. Do you fancy a next generation GPU? No problem. Setup is as simple as connecting your laptop via a single Thunderbolt 3 cable and running through the automatic setup. Add the GPU driver and you’re good to go.
And now the big question; how does it perform? We ran a set of gaming benchmarks and found that the GTX 1060 3GB equipped Omen Accelerator is capable of genuine 1080p gaming, though it does come with compromises vs a desktop system. We tested with a HP EliteBook x360 with an i7-7600U dual core CPU. This is a fast laptop CPU, but obviously it cannot compete with a faster desktop CPU, so there will naturally be some performance penalty. This, in combination with software ecosystem immaturity, bandwidth limitations, and overhead means that performance is compromised. Don’t be too concerned about that though. The level of performance on offer absolutely destroys integrated graphics and, when viewed this way, we can’t really complain. The GTX 1060 equipped
the level of performance absolutely destroys integrated graphics
Omen Accelerator will deliver 1080p gameplay with any modern title which at the end of the day is the goal of the unit. You’ll get better performance from a dedicated gaming laptop, but they come with their own compromises.
External GPUs are still a nascent technology. HP have done a good job with the Omen Accelerator though if you’re a serious gamer, there’s no substitute for a desktop. The gap is narrowing quickly though. CHRIS SZEWCZYK