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HP Omen 15

Editor's rating (1-5): Where to Buy

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What's Hot: Boutique looks and build quality, extremely thin and light, good performance in games
and for other demanding tasks, lovely 1080p display.

What's Not: All ports are on the rear-- tidy but inconvenient.

Reviewed December 19, 2014 by Lisa Gade, Editor in Chief (twitter: @lisagade)

Editor's note June 2015: HP has updated the Omen 15 with NVIDIA GTX 960M graphics.

The best gaming laptop is the one you have with you, or so they say. The HP Omen 15 is easy enough to carry on the road, and in fact it's as slim and light as some 15" Ultrabooks. Yet it packs some serious power with a quad core i7 CPU and switchable NVIDIA GTX 860M graphics with 2 gigs of VRAM. It has ample RAM, a fast SSD and 2 x 2 WiFi 802.11ac for low latency multiplayer action. It's also a unique and stunningly attractive machine that goes up against the Lenovo Y50, Razer Blade, MSI Ghost GS60 and less capable but still high end 15" slim and light machines like the Dell XPS 15 (lower end graphics) and 15" Retina MacBook Pro (older and lower end graphics).

Design and Ergonomics

The Omen 15 weighs just 4.68 lbs. and is 0.78" (19.8mm) at its thickest point (the 15" MacBook Pro is 0.71"). HP bought Voodoo nearly 10 years ago, and this is the first time since the first and second gen Envy models that we've seen them resurrect what's left of that gaming laptop and desktop company. It's got the cool looks and impossibly slim design you might've expected from Voodoo back in the day, and unlike the older Envy gaming models, the design doesn't ape the MacBook Pro. Rather this is a trapezoid of a laptop (even the fancy box is a trapezoid) that uses wedges and angles to make its unique statement. It looks both stealth-gamer and dignified at the same time. The black aluminum casing has stipples and textures, with hidden air intakes under the bottom mesh-clad area. There are no flashy lid logos or ground effect LEDs, and it's something you could take to the office without anyone giggling. The keyboard of course has all the LED love you could ask for, but you can change colors for the office to look staid. Of course, a gaming laptop that does double-duty as a powerful portable and starts at $1,500 should look classy, but we've seen plenty that don't look and feel as good as the Omen.

The laptop looks and feels like it came from a boutique PC maker, and there are no creaks, squeaks or mismatched seams. If you're a perfectionist, you'll like this machine. Neat freaks will like that all the ports are on the back, keeping "unsightly" cords out of sight and your way. Practically speaking though, it's annoying and I grumble each time I have to peer around the rear of the machine or lift it up to see and access the ports. On a positive note, the Omen 15 has an ample selection: 4 USB 3.0, HDMI, mini DisplayPort, 3.5mm combo audio and an SD card slot. The card slot isn't on the back: it lives on one of the sloped sides. Ethernet comes courtesy of the included USB to Ethernet adapter.

The laptop's stereo Beats branded speakers sit on the keyboard deck below grilles on the left and right sides. We like the positioning compared to notebooks with down-firing speakers that are easily muffled, but we weren't wildly impressed with volume or fullness. They're decent Ultrabook speakers and not a multimedia extravaganza like the Lenovo ThinkPad Yoga 14 (yes, a business Ultrabook like the ThinkPad can really rock some great sound). The speakers are quieter and less full than the MSI Ghost Pro--when I exercised on an exercise bike I used each laptop to stream Under the Dome on Amazon Instant Video, and I had to set volume on the HP Omen 15 to 96% vs. 74% on the MSI GS60 Ghost Pro.

Heat and Noise

The hinge is firm yet not difficult to operate and the stippled black aluminum lid is unusual and attractive. The bottom of the laptop has a mesh pattern, and a significant section toward the rear masks large air intake zones. HP uses two fans connected by a heat pipe that has heat sinks for 4 chips in addition to the CPU and GPU that are on opposite ends of the laptop toward the rear. HP states that they put a great deal of engineering time into designing a cooling system that keeps heat off the keyboard area while venting it out the rear and away from the user. Extremely thin laptops with aluminum casings tend to be very hot when dedicated graphics chips and quad core full mobile CPUs live inside. Hence the vast majority of Ultrabooks have ULV low voltage dual core CPUs and integrated graphics. How successful was HP at curbing heat and noise? When doing everyday productivity work like writing this document in MS Word, editing a few photos in Photoshop and streaming an hour of full HD video via Netflix, the fans are quiet to silent. When playing Battlefield 4 they ramp up and are certainly noticeable in a small room, though they're no worse than other thin gaming laptops. The fans are a bit higher pitched than the MS Ghost Pro's, but they're by no means whiners. All said, HP did a good job of ensuring that the Omen isn't a vacuum cleaner.

The keyboard and wrist rest area never exceeded 85F, which is well below comfort level (less than human body temperature). The bottom rear section does get hot when gaming, but not hot enough to cause pain (120F). For the good of the laptop and the comfort of your legs, you should put something like a laptop platform or cooler between the HP and you when gaming... or put the laptop on a table. When doing productivity tasks, the bottom ranged from 84F to 95F, which is warm but not hot. When used as a business and school laptop, temperatures are thoroughly average and not an issue. When gaming, the laptop is cooler than the toasty Razer Blade 2014 model and the MSI Ghost with the NVIDIA GTX 870M. The Ghost Pro with the GTX 970M is about as loud and toasty as the HP when playing demanding current 3D titles, though we find the fan noise less grating on the Ghost Pro GTX 970M. The Omen 15's CPU averaged 65C and the GPU ranged from 73-80C for the most intensive titles like Battlefield 4 and Crysis 3. When playing Dragon Age II and the SIMS 4, temps were 5 to 10C cooler. Those are very good temperatures for a slim gaming laptop, and the machine's cooling is good enough that it didn't throttle, so we managed 99% GPU utilization for a full hour gaming session in Battlefield 4. Nice!

Keyboard and Trackpad

The island style keyboard is a lovely thing with damped keys that have low but acceptable travel and good tactile feel. It's much better than the old HP Envy 15 and 17 keyboards with no trampolining and a more precise feel. Alas, number pads are common on 17" laptops but not 15" models, and I know number crunchers and some gamers will lament its absence here. Instead you get a leftward column of programmable keys (P1-P6) to which you can assign macros. It takes an hour or so to get used to shifting your hands a tiny bit rightward when typing thanks to that P row. The real star is the highly customizable RBG backlighting with left, right, center, WASD and speaker zones. The speakers are on the keyboard deck, so you'll see their lighting all the time, and it can "breathe", which means pulse to music volume (that's fun for the first 5 minutes). You can control keyboard backlight levels and set the entire keyboard to be a single color if you want to look low key at work.

The oversized trackpad, and we really mean oversized here--it has the footprint of an iPhone 6, is superb. It's one of the few trackpads that didn't make me pine for the MacBook Pro. The Synaptics pad is responsive, tracks reliably and handles two finger gestures like scrolling perfectly. Our only qualm is that despite the fact that it offers button settings for trackpad and external mice separately, it was impossible to set any of our USB and wireless mouse to left handed (even when we set the trackpad to left handed). Hopefully a driver update will fix this for us southpaws.

Hp Omen 15 Video Review

HP Omen 15 Gaming Demo Video

Display

Careful what you wish for: those of you who are clamoring for 4K laptop displays should keep in mind we're talking a relatively small screen where you'd have to be eagle-eyed to see the difference. Windows 8 on the desktop side, and current games do a poor job of handling scaling, so that 4K display at 200% scaling can be a pain, or impossible to see at 100%. The NVIDIA GTX 860M is a nice GPU, but it's not strong enough to drive today's most difficult games at 4K. We're pleased as punch that the Omen 15 has a perfectly reasonable 15.6" 1920 x 1080 display. It's a great balance in dealing with scaling while offering a sharp and clear viewing experience. This is an IPS display with wide viewing angles, 309 nits of brightness (that's very good) and a wide color gamut that matches the best laptop panels on the market.

This is a touch screen, a near must for Windows 8.1 and its touch-centric Metro UI and Charms menu. Using Windows 8 without a touch screen is like racing a 3-legged horse. Of course, there are those of you who boot straight to the desktop and avoid most all touch interaction. And you'll grumble about the glossy touch screen- it's a darned mirror.

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