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Somewhere in the middle lies the Omen, a slim 15.6-inch gaming laptop, starting at $1,499, (£1,299 in the UK and AU$2,199 in Australia). It's highly comparable with our favorite in this category, Lenovo's 15-inch Y50 series. Both are built around fourth-gen Intel Core i7 CPUs, offer upgrades to RAM and SSD storage, and are designed for gamers who seek something more portable, and less embarrassing, than the typical over-the-top look and feel of bigger gaming laptops. This review unit came packed with upgrades, including a big 512GB SSD and 16GB of RAM, for $2,100 (this configuration is AU$2,999 in Australia, but not currently available in the UK).
Lenovo's competing product offers touch and non-touch screens in multiple resolutions, and for the same price as the entry level Omen, you can get a Lenovo Y50 Touch 4K, which takes its screen resolution up to 3,840x2,160, while the Omen is only available with a single 1080p touchscreen.
Both systems are locked into a single choice in graphics cards, and that might be the only reason the most serious PC gamers would give pause. The Nvidia GeForce GTX 860M in both the Y50 and Omen is a very popular GPU, and certainly can play any current game at medium-to-high settings. But, it's far from the top of the line, even for mobile cards, and we've seen some laptops turn in incredible scores with the newer GeForce 980M, which has shown itself to be powerful enough to even push games at full 4K resolution.
The HP Omen has a bold design, plenty of user customization options, a great keyboard, and something often missing from gaming laptops, a touchscreen.
The Bad
The screen resolution is capped at 1080p, while the competition goes up to 4K. Routing all the ports and heat vents to the rear won't appeal to everyone, and the only graphics card available is decidedly mid-tier.
The Bottom Line
HP shakes up the world of gaming laptops with unique-looking and highly portable Omen. It offers very capable performance in PC games, despite being stuck with a last-gen graphics card.
