Samsung has officially re-entered the gaming market at CES 2017 with the introduction two Odyssey-branded portable gaming notebooks.
The Samsung Notebook Odyssey will be offered in your choice of 15.6-inch (280 nits) or 17.3-inch (300 nits) screen sizes, both of which feature an anti-glare panel with a full HD resolution of 1,920 x 1,080, and up to Intel Core i7 Kaby Lake processors.
The smaller of the two machines packs an Nvidia GTX 1050 GPU and can accommodate up to 32GB of DDR4 RAM. As for storage, the 15.6-incher is configurable with up to a 256GB PCIe SSD and a 1TB hard drive while the larger 17.3-inch model has room for up to 64GB of RAM and up to 512GB of PCIe solid state storage (which appears to be 2x 256GB drives) and a 1TB HDD.
Samsung hasn't yet decided what GPU it'll use in the larger model.
The smaller Odyssey tips the scales at 5.58 pounds (2.53 kilograms) while its bigger brother weighs a bit more at 8.36 pounds (3.79 kilograms). As is the case with most recent gaming laptops, there is no shortage of customizable LED lighting.
To keep temperatures down, Samsung has employed a cooling system called HexaFlow in which the bottom panel of each notebook largely consists of perforated cooling vents. Three screws hold the removable HexaFlow vent in place; removing them grants access to the system's innards where you can add or replace storage drives and system memory.
Availability and pricing hasn't been released although several reports mention an unofficial "early 2017" launch starting at $1,199.