HP Omen 15 Review: Faster Than It Looks

One of the most exciting gaming laptops on the market – powerful, compact and well cooled

In the case of gaming, cooling is one of the main synonyms for performance. Modern processors and video cards automatically overclock and slow down if they have a headroom or if the chip overheats. This is especially important in gaming laptops: organizing high-quality cooling in a small case is still a challenge. Therefore, it was especially interesting for us to take a look at the OMEN 15-ek0039ur that arrived for the test – after all, its Tempest Cooling cooling system was made practically from scratch. Does it really work and give better results than the competition? And how are you doing with the other stats?

At first glance, the HP OMEN 15 (2020) looks like your average gaming laptop. Thin borders around the screen, a full-size keyboard without a numeric keypad but with RGB, a medium-sized trackpad and a speaker grill on top of the keyboard … But no, the speakers are at the bottom and reflect sound off the table, and the grill on top is the cooling grilles. They also occupy almost half of the bottom of the OMEN 15 (2020), not to mention the classic exhaust on the rear and right. It is somewhat similar to NVIDIA’s solution with their pass-through cooler in the RTX FE 30 series.

In the best traditions of gaming laptops, the case is “drawn” with sharp lines that hide the radiators and exhaust. This design is reminiscent of a cross between Mass Effect computers and a Lamborghini Aventador racing car. At the same time, unlike many gaming laptops, OMEN 15 (2020) is not painted with all the colors of the rainbow – it will look normal both in the office and at a business meeting.

The HP OMEN 15 (2020) screen surprised us with very pure blacks. Backlighting is completely invisible at the edges, and the monitor offers excellent contrast thanks to its matte anti-reflective coating. Why manufacturers don’t use a matte finish more often is an open question. It is a pleasure to work and play on a monitor that does not reflect all the surrounding lights back into your eyes.

The maximum brightness of 300 nits is not the highest, but the anti-reflective coating is much more useful. The 144 hertz refresh rate allows games to run much smoother than the standard 60 hertz. This is relevant mainly for network games, which are less demanding on hardware and allow you to achieve the desired FPS indicators. In multiplayer games, this is most useful – after all, the higher the refresh rate, the faster your reactions to enemy actions. Finally, the FullHD resolution in 2021 will not surprise anyone, but for a 15-inch display it is more than enough – other specifications are much more important.

OMEN 15 (2020) Omen 15 keyboard is divided into 4 backlight units – left, center, right and separately WASD. In the built-in software, they can be assigned different colors and transition effects, made to burn in one color, or simply turn off and leave WASD, for example. The keys are quiet and large enough because there is no number pad in the keyboard. In a laptop for work, this would be a disadvantage, but in a gaming solution, the designers made the right choice in favor of the size of the keys. Plus, the OMEN 15 (2020) keyboard does not get warm at all – heat is removed through the grill above it, so you can play for a long time and not be afraid that it will become simply unpleasant to touch the WASD.

Three full-size USB Type-A SuperSpeed ​​ports and support for Bluetooth 5.0 allow you to connect any necessary accessories to your laptop – mice, gamepads, keyboards, fighting game sticks, whatever. For headsets, there is a combined mini jack input / output and USB Type-C. The latter can also be used for work, connecting disks, card readers and even an external video card – support for Thunderbolt 3 at 40 Gbps allows even the most daring experiments.

Games

Game settings:

• Counter-Strike Global Offensive: 1080p, Very High
• Rainbow Six Siege: 1080p, Very High, 50% resolution
• Fortnite: 1080p, Epic, DLSS Performance
• Far Cry 5: 1080p, High
• Shadow of the Tomb Raider: 1080p, High, RTX OFF, DLSS
• Wolfenstein Youngblood: 1080p, Uber, DLSS Quality
• Doom Eternal: 1080p, Ultra Nightmare
• Watch Dogs Legion: 1080p, High, DLSS Quality

As usual, we use DLSS or other image reconstruction techniques whenever possible. Artifacts are unlikely to be noticeable on a small laptop screen, but these technologies allow you to play at high frame rates and less load the video card – and therefore the cooling system.

OMEN 15 (2020) is not the first laptop with an RTX 2070 and Intel Core i7-10750H to be tested in our tests. But by far the fastest. And the point here is the cooling system, which is so efficient that it gives the hardware a headroom for overclocking to higher frequencies and allows it to continue to work without overheating.

On the whole, the system left a good impression. The air is discharged in all directions, thanks to which there are simply no places on the OMEN 15 (2020) that are hot enough to be uncomfortable to touch. The cooling operation, of course, is audible, but the sound does not hurt your ears – the built-in speakers (by the way, very decent) do not want to be twisted to the maximum, and in headphones with normal noise isolation you completely forget about it. The OMEN Gaming Hub app is full of options to adjust the cooling volume and performance just the way you want it – there’s even CPU downvolting! In general, the application allows you to control all aspects of the laptop – up to the detailed setting of the keyboard backlight.

In work

OMEN 15 (2020) is great for almost any semi-professional job. Adobe Photoshop, Lightroom and Premiere Pro, as well as Blackmagic DaVinci Resolve 17 work great with RTX 2070 Max-Q hardware acceleration, especially in video editing, for which an SSD is vital.

The laptop can handle light rendering of small scenes as well. The latest version of OctaneBench for the popular Octane renderer supports RTX acceleration of path tracing, so OMEN 15 (2020) with the RTX 2070 Max-Q manages to outperform the semi-professional Titan X video card by one and a half times and almost compares to the desktop RTX 2080 Super, leaving RTX 2080 Max behind. -Q in a thin but very hot Acer ConceptD 7. That’s what good cooling makes!

CV

Of course, a laptop with a six-core processor, NVIDIA RTX graphics and an Ethernet input can be used for streaming. Thanks to hardware accelerated video encoding NVIDIA NVENC and Intel Quick Sync, on OMEN 15 (2020) you can play and stream (there is a webcam and a microphone), use it as a director’s console, which converts many cameras into one stream (many USB Type-A ports and Type-C, which can be divided by an adapter into several Type-A ones), or just a machine for the final encoding on Twitch, YouTube, Facebook or VK.

The HP OMEN 15 (2020) is a great example that looking at hardware options alone is not enough when choosing a gaming laptop. Cooling technologies are now being improved literally before our eyes, so the installation of a new system led to almost the same increase in performance as when changing a video card to a more powerful one. As a result, the OMEN 15 (2020) plays in a higher category than laptops with a similar configuration last year. Its performance is enough to run any modern game at maximum speed, and an excellent display and good sound allow you to get the most out of them.