Samsung Reveals The ArtPC Pulse, A Cylindrical Desktop PC That Comes With 360-Degree Speakers

Samsung just unveiled the ArtPC Pulse, a cylindrical desktop PC that comes with built-in 360-degree omni-directional speakers. The new PC has drawn comparisons with the design of the Apple’s Mac Pro and is intended for the high-end consumer market with its decent specs.

Samsung revealed the ArtPC Pulse quietly on Amazon earlier today. The desktop PC comes with a full metal body design with a circular ambient lighting close to the top section. The omni-directional speaker on the ArtPC Pulse was provided by Harman Kardon, a company mostly known for manufacturing audio equipment for homes and cars.

The speakers are located on the machine’s top layer. It does appear that Samsung is trying to sell its ArtPC Pulse as an entertainment-centric PC, according to ArsTechnica. The design of the speakers is very reminiscent of the ones found on the Amazon Echo and Google Home.

On the back, the ArtPC Pulse comes with four USB Type-A ports, one USB Type-C port, a 3.5mm headphone jack, an HDMI port, an SD card reader, an Ethernet port and a power connector indicating an internal power supply.

The new Samsung desktop PC comes in two Intel quad-core variants, one with a Skylake Core i5-6400 processor, 8GB of DDR4 RAM and 256GB of SSD storage and another with a Skylake i7-6700 processor, 16GB of DDR4 RAM and 256GB of HDD storage + 1TB of HDD storage. Both models come with a dedicated AMD Radeon RX 460 GPU with 2GB memory.

The ArtPC Pulse really isn’t intended to be used as a workstation seeing that it only comes with a quad-core setup. Although Samsung's new desktop PC looks like a variation of Apple’s Mac Pros, it doesn’t come with six, eight or twelve-core CPU models. Overall, the Samsung ArtPC Pulse is a pretty decent machine, but users shouldn’t expect anything special performance-wise.

The Amazon listing states that it has removable expansion modules and that there’s also an optional 1TB hard drive module that will be sold separately. What’s unclear here is how the modular system will work, as pointed out by PCWorld.

The Samsung ArtPC Pulse is available to preorder now and is expected to start shipping on Oct. 28. The Core i5 model sells for $1,199, while the Core i7 model sells for $1,599.