Big changes for Omen gamers this year – HP Omen 16 review

That doesn’t mean compromises across the board, though. Our Omen 16 test shows that HP’s gaming laptop still delivers much of what made previous Omens great — with a few trade-offs, of course.

Take the design, for instance. HP has dropped the aluminum chassis from the 2024 model and gone all in on plastic, but the Omen 16 still looks sleek and well-built, avoiding the bulky, cheap aesthetic you often see in budget gaming laptops.

The input devices are also impressive. The touchpad feels solid, with precise, satisfying clicks, and the keyboard offers a pleasantly quiet and cushioned typing experience — far from the rattly, hollow feel of many cheaper competitors.

Performance is another strong point. The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 runs at its full TGP, and the AMD Ryzen 9 8940HX with its 16 cores delivers consistently high performance.

We were also pleasantly surprised by the thermal performance. Whether in extended gaming sessions or during combined CPU/GPU stress tests, surface temperatures stayed remarkably cool. The cooling system does its job efficiently without getting noticeably louder than last year’s model.

So, is the new Omen 16 an all-around winner? Not quite — it’s still positioned as a budget-friendly gaming laptop, starting at €999 ($1,355 on Amazon), and there are a few downsides that come with that. To find out what those are, whether they’re dealbreakers, and how the Omen 16 ultimately fares, check out our full review.