Samsung Notebook Odyssey Takes On Overwatch Gamers At PAX East 2017 (Hands-On)
The PAX East 2017 convention in the great city of Boston, Massachusetts is currently under way. A few of HotHardware's troops are at the expo, including site founder and editor-in-chief Dave Altavilla, who had a chance to visit Samsung's booth and get a hands-on look at the company's Notebook Odyssey, a pretty sweet laptop designed specifically for playing PC games. This is the same laptop that made our "Best of CES 2017" list.
Samsung offers the Notebook Odyssey in both 15.6-inch and 17.3-inch form factors. The one it's showing off at PAX East 2017 is the 15.6-inch model, which like its bigger brother comes standard with a Core i7 quad-core processor based on Intel's Kaby Lake architecture. This is paired with up to 32GB of DDR4 memory, an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 GPU, and up to 256GB PCIe SSD + 1TB HDD storage.
The 15.6-inch model comes in "Knight Black" and "Storm White" color options. Interestingly Samsung uses the color options to differentiate the amount of GDDR5 memory inside the laptop, with the black version having 2GB and the white model featuring 4GB of GDDR5 memory. Both were shown at PAX East 2017 comfortably playing Overwatch, the popular team-based multiplayer shooter from Blizzard Entertainment.
Storage also differs between the two. The black model has 128GB SSD paired with a 1TB HDD, while the white model bumps the SSD up to 256GB. These are easy to upgrade on both versions. By removing three screws and popping off the bottom cover, users have access to the laptop's guts where they can access the RAM and NVMe storage. Both come with 16GB of RAM.
One of the truly unique things about the Notebook Odyssey is its HexaFlow vent on the underside (Samsung calls the design "Dragon Scale"). It consists of a complete metal backplate with ventilation taking up around half of the space on the bottom of the laptop. To keep the laptop's innards cool, the HexaFlow system sucks cool air in through the bottom and shoots hot air out of the back. This also keeps the bottom of the laptop cool so gamers don't cook their legs.
For those interested, the Notebook Odyssey in Knight Black is available now direct from Samsung for $1,200. The Storm White variant will be available soon, and sometime later this year Samsung will release its 17.3-inch models. Those will come with 32GB of RAM (upgradeable to 64GB), be capable of 4K output, and promoted as being VR ready. They'll also ship with two NVMe slots, allowing for users to configure storage in a RAID array.
For those interested, the Notebook Odyssey in Knight Black is available now direct from Samsung for $1,200. The Storm White variant will be available soon, and sometime later this year Samsung will release its 17.3-inch models. Those will come with 32GB of RAM (upgradeable to 64GB), be capable of 4K output, and promoted as being VR ready. They'll also ship with two NVMe slots, allowing for users to configure storage in a RAID array.
