HP OMEN 15-5001na
£1,299 inc VAT • hp.com/uk
The HP Omen is a 15in gaming portable among company like Alienware, a lifestyle games machine with performance to match. It includes an nVidia GTX 860 with 4GB memory – not cutting-edge but certainly fast for recent games. Its processor is the heavyhitting 2.5GHz Intel Core i7-4710HQ, while storage is solid-state and PCIe-attached just like the best.
What sets the Omen 15 apart is its unique shape. It continues the angular theme set by others, only builds the main chassis as an inverted and truncated pyramid; sides are bevelled at a sharp rake, right up to and into the lid frame. Viewed on the desk, it appears to be levitating. Other idiosyncratic touches: red lights pulsating through perforated patches left and right on the deck. And a screen hinge that resembles a nickel-plated gun barrel, complete with steel temper colours decorating each end.
That incendiary theme continues in the coal-red glow from rear exhaust grilles, safely lit by cool red LEDs. Like other circa-20mm gaming laptops, the HP Omen 15 does run a little warmer and noisier than regular machines, but not unduly so.
Angled sides pushes all I/O ports to the back – handy for a cleaner desk but tedious for plugging routines. Choose from four USB 3.0, Mini DisplayPort and HDMI, plus headset jack. Missing in action is ethernet; and of course the HP Omen 15 has no optical drive.
At 104mm, the trackpad is the widest yet. The backlit keyboard is remarkable too - keys are low set with reduced travel but what took time to acquaint was dead-central chassis placement. Most 15in Windows laptops add a numberpad to fill the wider deck, awkwardly offsetting keyboard far too left. Here HP has added a row of macro buttons, P1-6, down the left, pushing keyboard unusually rightward. Our fingers frequently misaligned by one key.
Storage is a 256GB M.2 SSD, four-lane PCIe but v2.0 so just behind the curve. Wi-Fi is throttled to pre-2007 standards by single-band 11n. Fast quad-core and PCIe SSD make the HP Omen 15 a quick laptop, scoring 3096 points in PCMark 8 Home, rising to 3494 points with GPGPU assistance. Geekbench scored it 3446 points, or 12,936 all cores.
The IPS display has potential, but is marred by an untreated mirror finish and gimmicky touch control, particularly redundant on a gaming laptop. The HP Omen 15 almost covered full sRGB gamut (97 percent), and had 580:1 contrast ratio. Colour accuracy was so-so, averaged at 4.0 Delta E. But the backlight is cheap PWM, meaning flicker. Like most touchscreen laptops, the panel wobbles disconcertingly whenever it’s tapped.
Gaming is the key metric here, and as portended the Omen 15 coped well, averaging 53fps even in Metro: Last Light (full-HD, High). Extreme detail in Batman: Arkham City at native res allowed 59fps; Ultimate settings in Tomb Raider gave a more controvertible 32fps. Battery life was just three hours 58 minutes. VERDICT: The shiny touchscreen is a pointless ostentation raising the price and weight besides sapping power, and network connectivity is limited. Otherwise it’s a well built, stylish and speedy gaming laptop.
The HP Omen 15 continues the angular theme set by others, only builds the main chassis as an inverted and truncated pyramid