HP’s refreshed Sprout Pro puts serious Kaby Lake power under the hood

HP has revealed its new take on the Sprout Pro all-in-one, the PC which boasts an integrated downward-facing projector that effectively creates a second display on the desk surface below, and offers 2D/3D scanning capabilities.

The Sprout Pro G2 has seen upgrades on the processor, memory and GPU front. It still has a 23.8-inch Full HD touchscreen display, along with a 21.3-inch projected touch display which offers 20-point touch (two pairs of hands can work together in the space, in other words) via HP’s Touch Mat.

Said Touch Mat is 2.2mm thick and can be used with HP’s Active Pen, which also comes included with this all-in-one, and apparently the stylus/mat combo gives an experience which feels just like pen-on-paper writing.

The original Sprout Pro came with a Skylake CPU, and with this next-generation model, HP has upped the ante to one of Intel’s Kaby Lake processors – a quad-core Core i7-7700T to be precise, which runs at 2.9GHz and has 8MB of cache.

Buyers can specify up to 16GB of DDR4-2400 system memory (double the 8GB which was possible with the original model), and on the storage front, the machine comes with a 1TB SSHD (a hybrid hard drive that has 8GB of flash cache to speed up commonly used applications) – or alternatively there’s the choice of a 512GB SATA SSD (exact storage options will vary from region to region).

Discrete or integrated GPU

You can plump for integrated graphics (Intel HD Graphics 630 courtesy of that Core i7 processor), or a discrete solution, although not a Pascal-based one – the GPU on offer is Nvidia’s GeForce GT 960M (with 2GB of video RAM). Again, this is an upgrade from the original Sprout Pro which carried an option on the GeForce GT 945M.

Connectivity includes four USB 3.0 ports, an HDMI 2.0 output, Ethernet port, headphone/mic combo jack, and an SD card slot. On the wireless front, there’s 802.11ac dual-band (2x2) Wi-Fi along with Bluetooth 4.0.

As ever, the machine comes with Windows 10 Pro, a wireless keyboard and mouse set, plus all manner of additional software such as HP’s 3D Scan Pro v5 (which is capable of capturing 3D models, as you might expect). You also get a three-year warranty.

The price and release date of the Sprout Pro G2 are still to be confirmed.

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January 04, 2017 at 12:00AM
Darren Allan