Walmart's homegrown gaming PCs are surprisingly good
Like, GeForce GTX 1080 Ti good.
Walmart is getting into the gaming PC business. The retailer has announced an exclusive line of three laptops and three desktop towers under the name Overpowered — and the specs are actually pretty good. The machines, available only from Walmart, have been designed in partnership with Esports Arena.
Firstly, the laptops. Walmart's entry-level machine is the "OP Gaming Laptop 15" which comes with a 15.6-inch display with a 144Hz refresh rate, a Core i5-8300H processor, 8GB of RAM and a GeForce GTX 1050 GPU. Storage-wise, it offers up a 128GB SSD with a 1TB HDD. Not bad for $999.
Next up is a "Plus" version, which bumps the specs up to a Core i7-8750H processor with 16GB of RAM, a GeForce GTX 1060 6GB GPU and a 256GB SSD paired with a 1TB HDD. This one's on sale for $1,399. Then there's a 17-inch version with the same CPU and GPU, but with an eye-watering 32GB of RAM and 2TB HDD alongside the 256 SSD, hence its heftier price tag of $1,699. All of the laptops come with a mechanical keyboard with RGB lighting, two USB 3.0 ports, a USB-C port, and a USB 2.0 port.
Walmart's not gone into great detail about its desktop offerings, but we know the three models — DTW1, DTW2 and DTW3 — each come with a Core i7-8700 processor, and, respectively, a GeForce GTX 1070 GPU, a GeForce GTX 1080 and a GeForce GTX 1080 Ti. More specs and pricing details on the desktop models will be announced in due course, although some reports suggest the mid-range model will retail around $1,899. A good price for high-spec kit you wouldn't expect to find at Walmart.
Update 10/30/18 12:15PM ET: This post has been updated to indicate that Esports Arena helped design the computers, not built them.