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HP’s new dual-screen gaming laptop lets you watch Twitch and play simultaneously

HP’s new dual-screen gaming laptop lets you watch Twitch and play simultaneously

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A 6-inch display above your keyboard

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HP is launching a dual-screen gaming laptop today, with an additional screen above the keyboard. The secondary 6-inch 1080p display is designed to be used with a real-time screen mirroring feature that can cut and magnify parts of the main display (like maps) and let you zoom into them while gaming. You can also use the display to chat to friends on Discord, stream tutorial videos from YouTube, or simply keep an eye on CPU and GPU performance.

We’ve seen plenty of wild dual-screen laptops before, but this secondary display could be useful to some. It’s like a giant version of Apple’s Touch Bar, but as it acts as a secondary screen so you can pretty much run any app on it. PC gamers often use dual-screen rigs to be able to watch Twitch streams while they’re gaming, or to follow tutorials from YouTube, so you’ll be able to drag your favorite browser onto the miniature 1080p display and watch away.

The main display on HP’s new Omen X 2S laptop is a 15-inch 1080p panel, with a 144Hz refresh rate or the option to upgrade to a 240Hz model or even a 4K HDR version. As you’d expect in a modern gaming laptop, HP is including Intel’s 9th Gen Intel Core i9 8-core processor, alongside up to 32GB of RAM and Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 2080 Max-Q GPU. HP has developed a special cooling system for the Omen X 2S that involves a liquid metal compound that’s applied to the CPU and should help with heat dissipation and performance. HP claims performance can be boosted by up to 28 percent because of this new thermal solution, but we’ll have to wait for benchmarks and reviews to really test that theory.

The Omen X 2S is 22mm thin with a full metal chassis, but HP isn’t revealing weight or battery life just yet. The Omen X 2S will be available in June starting at $2,099.99.