HP Omen 16 (2023) review

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Playing PC games isn’t cheap. A good gaming PC can cost a huge amount of money, especially if you’re looking for top-tier performance.

Some people want the best of the best with ultra-fast high refresh rate screens and the latest hardware. But you don’t have to spend a ton of money to get good performance out of a gaming machine. That’s where this laptop from HP comes in, a 16-inch model from its Omen brand.

Design & Build

The computer has a solid build with a sheet metal chassis covered in matte black plastic. It’s a bit angular with beveled surfaces as gaming laptops tend to be, but otherwise has a clean and simple design.

You can easily fold it up in the office without attracting attention with its RGB keyboard and neon-coloured decoration. It has a standard white backlight adjustable in three steps. There are apparently other models with RGB keyboards, but not this one.

Mattias Inghe

A large cooling grid at the bottom raises the computer slightly, but otherwise it’s quite thin. That said, it’s not light, as it weighs over five pounds. This is primarily a computer that you have at home unless you have dedicated space for a desktop box.

The large format does wonders for the keyboard. It features comfortable, well-spaced keys with an excellent typing feel. This is partly due to the fact that HP has skipped the numeric keypad, but kept the “center keys”, i.e. arrow keys and buttons such as Insert, Home, Page Up, and Page Down.

So it’s like a full-sized desktop keyboard, but without the last part on the right. The mouse pad is large and functional, but doesn’t have perfect detail precision. A separate mouse is recommended if you want to tweak pixels in Photoshop or play games.

If you buy the Omen 16 through HP’s own online store, you’ll see that you can choose different configurations, with two choices each for processor, storage, display and graphics card. My test computer has the simplest version of everything, but it doesn’t feel the least bit budget-friendly. The choices are between good hardware and better.

Specs & Performance

The tested model has a Core i5 processor of the 13th generation.

It’s an H-type, the more powerful laptop processors from Intel that, unlike the P- and U-series, which sacrifice energy efficiency for longer-lasting performance peaks.

To that you get 16 gigabytes of DDR5 memory, and 512 gigabytes of superbly fast SSD.

Is it an extreme performance monster? No, but it’s a definite step up from thinner and lighter laptops for doing heavy, time-consuming jobs. For example, exporting an edited video project.

Mattias Inghe

It also has a separate, discrete graphics card for extra performance in such programs and especially for games. Here it’s a GeForce RTX 4050 with six gigabytes of video memory. It’s the simplest laptop graphics card in Nvidia’s latest 4000 series, but has proven to have the potential to deliver above expectations for such a low-priced card.

That’s partly because it shares its modern architecture with the 4000 series heavyweights, supporting technologies like DLSS 3, which allows compatible games to run much faster. With configurable power levels, a computer manufacturer can push the performance of the card at the expense of power consumption.

It has somewhat limited video memory, which limits the functionality for ray tracing. But heavy ray tracing effects are still the first thing I turn off in most games if I need to tweak their performance. And for the most part, they look good anyway.

Screen & Speakers

In the Omen 16, the computer has a modest 1920×1080 pixel screen to display the games on, but this also helps a lot to keep gaming performance high.

For moving images like films and games, it provides a good experience, but for quiet desktop work with lots of lines and text, it gets a little annoyingly pixelated at times.

Its IPS panel gives it excellent viewing angles and srb-class colour gamut with what appears to be realistic and neutral colour reproduction. At about 270 cd/m2 in brightness, you should stay indoors, but it’s plenty bright for normal use, and contrast is unusually high for an IPS display, with distinct blacks and nice dynamics.

It has no specific support for HDR viewing, other than handling HDR video, but there’s no extra dynamic range when playing it.

Mattias Inghe

Speakers hidden inside the chassis provide an airy sound with good stereo dispersion, but with noticeably higher volume on the left side.

There is a lack of weight in the bass, but otherwise you get a pleasant experience for music, films, games, and voices. I can’t find any apps or settings to adjust either the equalizer or balance. But it sounds perfectly fine without. Not great, but decent.

Ports & Cooling

If you want more control, you can plug in external audio and there’s plenty of room for that, with USB ports on the short sides of the computer.

One is type c and the other three are type a, all with five gigabit USB 3 speeds. The type c port is not full thunderbolt 4 class, but you can connect a display. You can also do that via a separate HDMI 2.1 port. A previous model of the Omen 16 had some of the ports on the back which gave a freedom of choice that I liked, but now they are moved to the sides and most are crammed on the right side.

The cooling in the computer is effective and I never feel that it would be disturbingly hot, a little uncomfortably warm at the top of the keyboard, and a lot of heat escaping backwards and out to the sides. A stress run of the processor and graphics card in 3DMark reveals no signs of performance degradation over time. But the fans can produce an intrusive noise under high load and it’s never completely free of fan noise – a semi-dampened noise is constant.

You can choose between three modes in the accompanying Omen Gaming Hub control software: Eco, Balanced, and Performance. But none of the modes, including manual control, can dampen the fans further.

The same program also provides an interface for optimising and launching installed games, network optimisation tools, system cleaning and a store tab with offers for gaming services such as GeForce Now and discounted games, seemingly exclusively from Ubisoft.

Mattias Inghe

Software & Battery Life

The Omen 16 runs Windows 11 out of the box. Beyond that, HP has a bunch of small programs for support, security, and accessories, which can be ignored until you might need them.

You also get a bit too much typical laptop bloatware, trial versions of antivirus, VPN, Office, and Xbox Game Sass that must be extended with payment after 30 days. Would it have been nicer without it? Yes, but they are easy to remove as well.

The 70 watt-hour battery is enough for a short one-hour session of intensive CPU and GPU use or at best seven hours of low-powered usage. That’s pretty much what you’d expect from a more powerful laptop, and you should keep the power adapter close at hand.

It also performs better plugged into the wall, so for demanding or semi-demanding jobs and games, you’ll want to leave it plugged in. The computer has well-functioning hybrid graphics and in standard mode switches down to Intel Iris Xe when the more powerful GeForce card is not needed. Not that it does any direct wonders for battery life, though.

Specs

Manufacturer: HP
Processor: Intel Core i5-13420H, 4 Performance cores up to 4.6 GHz + 4 Efficiency cores up to 3.4 GHz
Graphics: Nvidia GeForce RTX 4050, 6 GB
Memory: 16 GB DDR5
Storage: 512 GB SSD
Displays: 16.1 inch semi-matte ips, 1920×1080 pixels, 144 Hz
Webcam: 1080p
Connections: Usb 3 gen 1 type c with displayport, 3 pcs usb 3 gen 1 type a, gigabit ethernet lan, hdmi 2.1, headset
Wireless: Wifi 6e, Bluetooth 5.3
Operating system: Windows 11 Home
Other: Backlit keyboard
Noise level: 34-40 dBa
Battery life: 1 hour 35 min (high load, full brightness) to approx. 7 hours 10 min (low load, low brightness)
Size: 36.9 x 25.9 x 2.4 cm
Weight: 5.18 lbs

This review was translated from Swedish to English and originally appeared on pcforalla.se. It can also be found on pcworld.com.