HP Omen 16 Review | PCMag

HP continues to refine its gaming laptop lineup with the Omen 16 (starts at $1,299; $1,579.99 as tested), a big-screen but streamlined mobile gaming rig in the middle of the price/performance spectrum. Our review configuration is an all-AMD affair with a Ryzen 7 6800H processor and Radeon RX 6650M GPU. We can't find many real flaws, with a sleek and relatively portable build with lively 1080p frame rates, but we also can't find a big draw to make you pick the Omen 16 over similarly priced rivals. Battery life could be longer and the Omen's build quality is merely good, not great. More telling, competing gaming laptops with Intel and Nvidia silicon outpace its performance. Unless you can find a discount or especially dig the design, we suggest checking out the Lenovo Legion 5 Pro Gen 7 or the pricier Acer Predator Triton 300 SE.

A Good Omen: The 16-Inch Sweet Spot

Omen laptops have gone through various redesigns over the years, with HP settling on a pretty minimal look for 2023. It's a modern and fitting choice for the current laptop landscape, moving away from the busier or more garish designs of the past decade.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

Today's Omen 16 is a slick slab with a slightly metallic finish. Our review unit is a dark gray officially dubbed Mica Silver, but it is also available in black or white, both of which look pretty sharp. The logo is even more pleasing than past versions, with a simple reflective diamond above the Omen name, for quite a clean look overall.

As a 16-inch laptop, the Omen 16 is far from the lightest gamer around, even if its footprint isn't too bulky. The system measures 0.91 by 14.5 by 9.7 inches (HWD) and weighs 5.3 pounds. It feels heavier than that, perhaps because the laptop is fairly dense, but the overall package is reasonably portable when needed. It falls right in line with the 16-inch Lenovo Legion 5 Pro mentioned above (0.78 by 14.2 by 10.3 inches and 5.5 pounds).

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

The 16-inch display gives you plenty of room for productivity and gaming. It's a welcome middle ground between 15.6- and 17.3-inch laptops and has become popular over the past year, especially in midrange to high-end gaming laptops. Considering the Omen's slim build and middleweight heft, it's a fine compromise for those who want to move their gaming laptops with at least some frequency.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

Specifications-wise, our test unit's display is relatively basic, combining full HD (1,920-by-1,080-pixel) resolution with a 144Hz refresh rate, essentially the baseline for modern gaming rigs. The latter is a marked jump over the standard 60Hz refresh of civilian laptops, and the 1080p resolution is less demanding for running games at high frame rates.

It's fair to be disappointed that the screen stops at full HD resolution at this price, or at least that the refresh rate ceiling isn't higher. HP sells other Omen 16 configurations with 1440p resolution or 165Hz refresh. Still, 144Hz is a suitable fit for 1080p gaming, and that keeps the price in the middle rather than high end of the market. The display quality isn't anything extraordinary, but it's sharp, bright, and colorful enough.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

The rest of the construction is standard fare. The keyboard gives you no cause for complaint, but neither is it especially satisfying; the keys aren't exactly mushy but don't give much feedback either. Meanwhile, the touchpad is roomy but feels slightly on the cheap side. These relatively ho-hum parts probably help keep the price down and make more sense in the base model than in upscale configurations.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

One area where the Omen 16 excels is connectivity. Each flank holds a couple of ports, with a few more around back. On the left flank, you'll find a USB Type-A (5Gbps) port, an Ethernet port, and a headphone jack, with two more 5Gbps USB-A ports on the right. At the rear are the power connector, an HDMI monitor port, and two 10Gbps USB Type-C ports with power delivery.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

Testing the HP Omen 16: All-AMD Outclassed by Intel and Nvidia

As mentioned, our review unit combines an AMD CPU and GPU, though that's not the case for all models of the Omen 16. Let's back up and start with the base model: For $1,299 (on sale for $949.99 on HP.com at this writing), you get an Intel Core i5-12500H processor, 16GB of memory, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 GPU, and a 512GB solid-state drive (SSD) as well as the full HD 144Hz display.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

Our unit is a couple of ticks higher, listed at $1,579.99 (on sale for $1,229.99 at press time). As mentioned, it features an AMD Ryzen 7 6800H CPU, 16GB of RAM, an AMD Radeon RX 6650M GPU, a 1TB SSD, and the base display. It can scale even higher, with models that include a 12th Generation Intel Core i9 and GeForce GPUs up to the RTX 3070 Ti. Depending on sale prices, they can be considerably better deals.

To rate the Omen 16's performance, we pitted it against a batch of similar midrange gaming laptops with a mix of Intel and AMD processors, listed here.

The 17-inch Acer Nitro 5 and 16-inch Lenovo Legion 5 Pro Gen 7 match the Omen's processor but rely on Nvidia GPUs. The Acer Predator Triton 300 SE and Dell G16, meanwhile, follow the more familiar Intel-plus-Nvidia recipe, with the former being the highest-priced system in the group. We should note that some laptops with 13th Gen Intel CPUs are in the wild, but we've so far seen these processors only in top-of-the-line systems, so none appear here. Comparable 13th Gen Core i5 and i7 laptops should arrive shortly.

Productivity Tests

The main benchmark of UL's PCMark 10 simulates a variety of real-world productivity and content-creation workflows to measure overall performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheeting, web browsing, and videoconferencing. We also run PCMark 10's Full System Drive test to assess the load time and throughput of a laptop's boot drive.

Three additional benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon's Cinebench R23 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Geekbench 5.4 Pro by Primate Labs simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better).

Our final productivity test is workstation maker Puget Systems' PugetBench for Photoshop, which uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe's famous image editor to rate a PC's performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It's an automated extension that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving images to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.

Their PCMark 10 scores showed that all these laptops are overkill for everyday apps like Word and Excel. But that benchmark doesn't stress systems as much as the others, so we started to see more separation in the multimedia tests. As we've come to expect, Intel's 12th Gen CPUs pulled away from their AMD rivals, though the gap wasn't too wide for the most part. The Omen 16 hung pretty close to the Triton and Dell, showing itself well suited for light to moderate content creation and media editing when you're not playing games. If you plan to use your system primarily for such tasks, you probably want to consider a more potent laptop or mobile workstation.

Graphics and Gaming Tests

We test Windows PCs' graphics with two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark: Night Raid (more modest, suitable for laptops with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs). Two more tests from GFXBench 5.0, run offscreen to allow for different display resolutions, wring out OpenGL operations.

In addition, we run real-world gaming tests using the built-in 1080p benchmarks of F1 2021 and Assassin's Creed Valhalla. These represent a mix of simulation and open-world action-adventure titles. We run Valhalla twice at different image quality presets and F1 with and without Nvidia's performance-boosting DLSS anti-aliasing.

Nvidia GPUs tend to dominate these tests, so the Omen's Radeon RX 6650M faced an uphill battle but is still a suitable option for 1080p gaming. For the most part, it can hang with or beat the RTX 3060 systems, while trailing RTX 3070 machines. Competitive multiplayer games like Rainbow Six Siege will benefit from the high-refresh display, and demanding open-world titles like Valhalla will clear the 60 frames per second target.

Battery and Display Tests

We test laptops' battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100% until the system quits. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off.

For an objective look at laptop screens, we use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its Windows software to measure a display's color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the panel can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).

Simply put, the battery life of this laptop is mediocre, particularly for a system with chassis room for a larger power pack that isn't pushing the highest-end, most power-hungry components. The Omen will work away from your desk or on shorter trips, but its unplugged runtime is unimpressive even by gaming laptop standards. Its display, meanwhile, is reasonably bright and about average for color coverage. The more premium laptops in this space are where to look for big improvements, particularly in the latter metric.

Verdict: A Reasonable Midrange Gaming Option

The HP Omen 16 is a largely satisfactory package overall, delivering midrange 1080p gaming at a reasonable price. Its all-AMD components, while a decent value, don't quite match the performance of comparably priced Intel and Nvidia rigs, however. These systems generally provide either more CPU or GPU power and sometimes both, so we can't find a particular reason to recommend the Omen despite its lack of major flaws. If you particularly like this unit's style or AMD allegiance or find it on sale, it'll serve you well, but it won't get you many bragging rights.