Samsung ventures into PC gaming with the Notebook Odysseys

Samsung makes perfectly nice PCs and all, but to date it hasn’t ever really courted the growing gamer market. Well, that changes today: the company officially revealed its new Notebook Odyssey, its first ever dedicated gaming laptop. Well, laptops — there’s a 15.6-inch model and a real whopper with a 17.3-inch display.

We spent most of our time with the 15.6-inch version as its the model closest to shipping, and it looks… well, exactly like what you’d expect a gaming laptop to look like. In other words, expect lots of black with red trim, complete with a red backlit keyboard. You’ll find all the usual ports running around the machine, including a single USB 3.0, 2 USB 2.0, HDMI and Ethernet, though I’m a little surprised Samsung didn’t go a little crazier with ports. It’s a pretty beefy machine, after all. That said, it’s a surprisingly portable beast at 5.5 pounds — I closed up a demo model and walked around the show room for a while without feeling the typical gaming rig fatigue.

Like the more pedestrian Notebook 9, the Odyssey also runs with Intel’s 7th generation Core i7 processors, but here you can squeeze in up to 32GB of DDR4 RAM and a multiple storage options — one machine can take SSDs up to 256GB and hard drives up to 1TB at the same time. Don’t worry about squeezing pretty visuals out of the thing, either: it ships with one of NVIDIA’s full-power GTX1050 GPUs. Samsung kindly let us play some Overwatch on a demo machine (that new Oasis map, natch), and the whole thing was pleasantly buttery. I’m not sold on the look but there’s definitely plenty of power in sealed away in this frame.

If your games need even more room to breathe, Samsung will eventually have you covered. That 17.3-inch model is still in the works, and it’ll come with a multi-color backlit keyboard and a bright, 300 nit display, just because. The thing is, Samsung hasn’t officially locked down the final specs and pricing yet. Oh well — nothing wrong with a company keeping some cards close to its metaphorical chest. We do, however, know that it’ll support up to 64GB of DDR4 RAM and SSDs up to 512GB (the 1TB limitation on hard drives still applies).

Time in Samsung’s demo room was limited, but Samsung first steps into PC gaming seem to be strong ones. If you’re feeling good about Samsung’s approach, you’ll be able to get the smaller Odyssey for $1199 and up this February — we’re not sure when the bigger beast will be available yet.

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