HP’s Omen 15 gaming laptop is back with an all-new minimalist look. This iteration also introduces AMD Ryzen processors to the lineup, with our review unit pairing a colossally powerful Ryzen 7 4800H with a 6GB Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Ti for smooth 1080p gaming frame rates. This HP has everything we expect from a mid-level gamer and then some, including a 144Hz screen, a first-rate keyboard, and close to 10 hours of battery life in our testing. Though the $1,299 it commands is a tad pricey for a GeForce GTX 1660 Ti-based laptop—the Acer Predator Helios 300, an Editors’ Choice pick, can be found with a GeForce RTX 2060 for more than $100 less—it’s far less dosh than any eight-core Intel-based gaming rig, and gives gamers who want seamless power for livestreaming, content creation, or doing it all at once a great option without breaking the bank. It earns its own Editors’ Choice Award for its unusual mix of fierce CPU, classy design, and battery endurance among midpriced gaming machines.
Hey, You Don’t Dress Like a Gamer!
This new Omen 15 marks a significant change of design direction for HP’s gaming laptops. The trapezoidal looks of previous models (see the Omen X 2S) have been replaced with conventionally squared-off edges. It’s also devoid of color accents, with branding reduced to subtle Omen lettering and a small reflective square on the lid. It’s like the Omen line suddenly went to business school.
Despite its more austere look, the Omen 15 isn’t boring. Up close, its sturdy aluminum keyboard surround and palm rest give it a premium vibe, while the rest of the chassis is good-quality plastic.
Inward-sloped edges help it look thinner than its 0.89-inch thickness suggests. The rest of the chassis is trim enough, at 14.1 by 9.4 inches. Though HP lists the Omen 15 at 5.42 pounds, it registered a more acceptable 4.6 pounds on my scale, about the norm for gaming notebooks in this class.
Smooth Screen, Solid Input Devices
The Omen 15’s 144Hz anti-glare screen is plenty bright and colorful—HP rates it for 300 nits and 72 percent coverage of the NTSC gamut. It also offers wide viewing angles so the picture never washes out. The panel lacks support for frame-rate-smoothing technologies such as G-Sync or FreeSync, but these are rarely seen outside of much more expensive gaming notebooks.
The Omen 15 also does well in connectivity by offering four USB ports (three Type-A and one Type-C, all version 3.2 Gen 1 supporting 5Gbps signaling rates), HDMI 2.0a and mini DisplayPort video outputs, an Ethernet jack, a full-size SD card reader, and an audio combo (headphone/microphone) jack. Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5 come courtesy of its Intel AX200 wireless card.
One deficiency that the Omen 15 shares with most gaming notebooks in this price range is a lack of built-in biometric features, such as a fingerprint reader or face-recognition webcam. The ho-hum image quality from its 720p webcam is also status quo.
A Thoughtfully Laid-Out Keyboard
As laptop screen bezels have shrunk—the Omen 15’s screen is about as wide as the laptop itself—so has the available width for keyboards. Rather than cram in a number pad, HP included a desktop-like cluster of navigation keys and—gasp!—full-size arrow keys in a most productive use of the space.
I also like the taller-than-normal top row keys. Energetic key action and a flex-free deck round out the first-class typing experience.
Gamers out for flashy looks might bemoan this Omen’s white-only keyboard backlighting, as some gaming notebooks in this price range offer customizable RGB colors. However, given the lack of customization here, I’d argue that white is preferable to the red that has been overused on gaming notebooks.
Before we leave this area, note the tiny perforations above the keyboard. They could pass as speaker grilles, but they’re just decoration; the speakers actually face horizontally from either side of the palm rest. The Bang and Olufsen-tuned sound is surprisingly full and enjoyable.
Moving below, the buttonless touchpad’s proper offset, in line with the keyboard, keeps your palms on either side of it while typing.
Correctly sized for the laptop’s 15.6-inch screen, its smooth surface and quiet physical clicks make it more than usable.
Testing the Omen 15: Eight-Core Power for Less
The $1,299 Omen model 15-en0029nr that I’m reviewing is, as I noted, on the pricey side if you’re purely after graphics-driven performance. Notebooks with its GeForce GTX 1660 Ti can be had for much closer to the $1,000 mark, or even slightly less, judging from some bargain models on Newegg and Amazon.
That said, the value of this model is strongly tied to its eight-core, 16-thread AMD Ryzen 7 4800H processor (rated for a 2.9GHz base clock, and up to a 4.2GHz boost). Getting the same core and thread count in an Intel-based gaming notebook means spending around $2,000 or more for one featuring the Core i7-10875H, such as the Aorus 15G.
Notebooks in that league also bump up the graphics card and usually include a fancier screen, which underlines the problem: You can’t get an eight-core Intel chip without spending for the best, or near-best, of everything. The Omen 15 offers eight-core performance and respectable 1080p gaming prowess for much less.
This Omen unit also includes 16GB of dual-channel DDR4-3200 memory, a 512GB solid-state drive with Windows 10 Home, and a one-year warranty. Dell’s G5 15 SE commands roughly the same price ($1,309) with a 6GB Radeon RX 5600M (the AMD equivalent of the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti), though the configuration I saw on Dell’s site doubled the solid-state storage to 1TB.
Speaking of storage, the Omen 15’s support for just one internal drive is a downside considering the size of today’s games; you might find yourself shuffling games on and off or resorting to external storage.
Now, onto the benchmarks, where I compared the Omen 15 to the gaming notebooks whose basic specifications are listed below.
The $999 MSI Bravo 15 is the least expensive of the lot, making do with an entry-level 4GB Radeon RX 5500M. The two Intel-powered machines are the Acer Predator Helios 300 (2020), outfitted in its most powerful 8GB GeForce RTX 2070 Max-Q guise, and the more modestly equipped Lenovo Legion 5i. Both use a six-core, 12-thread Core i7-10750H, the common-denominator chip for Intel gaming notebooks in this class. Let’s get benching.
Storage, Media, and CPU Tests
First up is UL’s PCMark 10, our system performance assessment that simulates real-world productivity and content-creation workflows. The Omen 15 and the rest of the AMD trio had no trouble sailing past the 4,000 points that we look for in that test. Meanwhile, our PCMark 8 storage benchmark showed an even playing field. That was expected since these notebooks all use solid-state boot storage.
Next up is a pair of CPU-crunching tests: Cinebench R15 stresses all available processor cores and threads while rendering a complex image, while in our Handbrake test, we transcode a 12-minute 4K video down to 1080p.
The AMD machines predictably dominated here, the Omen 15 leading by a hair in Cinebench. The Handbrake results are especially telling for content-creators; sometimes, there is no substitute for extra cores.
In other scenarios, the processor’s frequency can be more important. The Intel chips in the Acer and Lenovo top out at a scorching 5GHz, which gave them the edge in our photo-editing test. We use an early 2018 release of Adobe Photoshop Creative Cloud to apply 10 complex filters and effects to a standard JPEG image, timing each operation and adding up the totals. This test is not as CPU-focused as Cinebench or Handbrake, bringing the performance of the storage subsystem, memory, and GPU into play.
Graphics Tests
Our first two benchmarks in this section measure the gaming performance potential of a PC. In UL’s 3DMark, we run the Sky Diver (lightweight, capable of running on integrated graphics) and Fire Strike (more demanding, for high-end gaming PCs) tests, both DirectX 11-based. Unigine Corp.’s Superposition is the other; it uses a different rendering engine to produce a complex 3D scene.
The Omen 15 scored as it should have in Fire Strike, a smidge off the GeForce RTX 2060-powered Lenovo and well ahead of the budget MSI. The Dell scored much better with its Radeon RX 5600M, but the GPU-focused Superposition 1080p test suggests that it offers equivalent brute performance.
Let’s try some real games. We use the built-in 1080p benchmarks in Far Cry 5 (at its Normal and Ultra presets) and Rise of the Tomb Raider (at its Medium and Very High presets). Far Cry 5 uses DirectX 11, while we flip Rise of the Tomb Raider to DirectX 12.
The Omen 15’s numbers were on the mark for its GeForce GTX 1660 Ti, which is to say that it offers plenty of performance for graphically demanding gaming at 1080p resolution. It should have no trouble powering esports titles well into triple-digit frame rates.
Battery Rundown Test
For our last benchmark, we measure a laptop’s unplugged runtime while playing a locally stored video with screen brightness at 50 percent and audio volume at 100 percent. We use the notebook’s energy-saving rather than balanced or other power profile, turn off Wi-Fi, and even disable keyboard backlighting to squeeze as much life as possible out of the system.
Nearly 10 hours of battery life from a gaming notebook, especially one packing an eight-core CPU, is remarkable. This kind of unplugged life gives the Omen 15 an undeniable measure of practicality. Its ability to automatically switch off its dedicated Nvidia graphics card in favor of the CPU’s integrated Radeon graphics is a leading reason it can last so long.
Keeping Its Cool—and Keeping Quiet
Many gaming notebooks struggle to keep their heat under control, but not the Omen 15. Its outside surfaces remained respectably cool throughout my gaming sessions. Our FLIR One Pro thermal imager shows that its hottest area, the keyboard center, reached just 107 degrees F.
Its internal component temperatures fared well, too; the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti topped out at 77 degrees C, and the Ryzen 7 4800H in the low 80 degree C range, according to my GPU-Z logs.
Most of the Omen 15’s fan exhaust is properly directed out the back of the chassis. Its two cooling fans are barely audible at lower speeds and shut off, i.e., stay completely silent, if the processor and graphics card are cool enough. The Omen Command Center app provides a comfort mode to keep the fan noise to a minimum at the expense of performance.
Fan noise while gaming is, of course, more pronounced, though it’s low-toned enough that it won’t become a topic of conversation.
An Overachieving AMD Gaming Machine
There’s little to dislike about the Omen 15. It could use a second storage drive, and it is more expensive than your average GeForce GTX 1660 Ti notebook. But this notebook meets or exceeds expectations for a mid-2020 mid-level gamer everywhere else.
Above all, the Omen 15 shows how a gaming notebook can be practical. A productive keyboard, ample connectivity, and nearly 10 hours of battery life mean it can serve as a general-purpose PC. An eight-core AMD processor that makes short work of gaming, creative work, and multitasking seals the deal.
Gamers after the most bang for the buck won’t go wrong with the Acer Predator Helios 300. But if you’re already spending that much for what is—let’s face it—a luxury item, the Omen 15 is a distinguished step up.
