Double Trouble: HP Omen X 2S 15 Laptop Review

The new Omen design has nearly the same footprint as last year's model but at a significantly thinner profile (19.8 mm vs 25 mm). It's ever-so-slightly heavier than many other narrow bezel 15.6-inch laptops by about 100 g to 200 g including the Razer Blade 15, Lenovo Legion Y740, Alienware m15 R2, and even the last generation Omen 15.

The small Precision-enabled trackpad (~7 x 6.8 cm) offers smooth gliding when moving at medium to fast speeds and some sticking when moving at slower speeds. While reliable and accurate fur cursor movements, the cramped surface area makes it cumbersome to use for long periods especially since there are two screens to work with.

Meanwhile, the dedicated mouse keys have moderate travel, very quiet clatter, and soft feedback when pressed. We still prefer it over integrated clickpad keys as multi-touch actions like dragging and dropping or highlighting are easier.

Color space covers approximately 92 percent and 60 percent of the sRGB and AdobeRGB standards, respectively, which is common amongst high refresh rate panels. Users who want even wider color coverage would have to opt for laptops with Sharp IGZO or 4K UHD panels that tend to offer both slower response times and refresh rates.

Further measurements with an X-Rite colorimeter confirm our suspicions above as color temperature is far too cool at 7742. Grayscale and color balance are therefore off and not as accurate as they could be. Calibration directly addresses the shortcomings for a significantly more accurate display as shown by our results CalMAN results below. Final grayscale and color average deltaE values sit at just 2 and 2.05, respectively. We recommend a calibration if possible to get the most out of the display or users can simply apply our calibrated ICM profile above instead.

Outdoor visibility is not any better or worse than most other gaming laptops since our backlight is average for the category at roughly 300 nits maximum. If you intend on using the laptop outdoors frequently, then an Ultrabook or Razer Blade 15 OLED would suit you better. Viewing angles remain wide with shifts in colors and contrast occurring only from unrealistically wide angles.

What makes the Omen X 2S 15 unique is its sharp glossy second screen. This screen is of the same native 1080p resolution as the main screen for a more natural relationship between the two displays. The second screen has its obvious benefits when multi-tasking and its closer positioning to the main screen makes it less tiring to the eyes when compared to the ScreenPad of the Asus VivoBook S15.

Unfortunately, the advantages end here because there are some major setbacks. Its first drawback relates to glare and brightness because you will always be looking at the screen from an angle. On any IPS display, apparent brightness will drop if you're not looking directly at the screen and this will always be the case on the Omen X 2S. The second drawback is its very poor calibration. Both temperature and RGB balance are way off and so grayscale is horrendous with its average DeltaE value of 14.3. Calibration addresses these issues, but to be so poorly calibrated in the first place is absurd for a ~$2000 laptop. Thirdly, expect to adjust the scaling of the text for more comfortable reading. And fourthly, the color space, response times, contrast, and refresh rate of the second screen are all different from the main screen instead of being 1:1.

The last drawback has more to do with Windows than the laptop itself. On a gaming laptop, the idea of playing a game on the main screen while browsing the web on the second touchscreen for guides, videos, items, and chatrooms sounds incredibly useful. As soon as you touch the second screen, however, the main game will minimize, pause or freeze because your window will have shifted focus. The experience is simply not as seamless as gamers would like it to be.

Multi-thread performance is about 10 percent slower than the average Core i7-9750H in our database taken from 40 other laptops to suggest that maximum Turbo Boost potential is very short-lived. When running CineBench R15 Multi-Thread in a loop, performance drops by 10 percent after just the first loop as shown by our graph below. Other gaming laptops with the exact same i7-9750H CPU like the Razer Blade 15 or Alienware m15 R2 are each able to sustain slightly faster clock rates for slightly faster performance.

Users upgrading from quad-core SKUs like the Core i7-7700HQ, i5-8300H, i5-9300H, or the competing AMD Ryzen 7 3750H will see a performance boost of about 30 percent. If you already have a Core i7-8750H laptop, however, then there's no reason to upgrade from a CPU performance perspective.

See our dedicated page on the Core i7-9750H for more technical information and benchmark comparisons.

PCMark benchmarks show no surprises as scores are within just a few percentage points from other high-performance gaming laptops. We experienced no hardware issues during our time with the unit aside from unusually long wake-from-sleep times of about 6 seconds.

We stress the system with synthetic loads to identify for any potential throttling or stability issues. When running Prime95, clock rate jumps to 4.0 GHz for a few seconds until core temperature hits 88 C. Thereafter, clock rates drop to 3 GHz for a cooler core temperature of 73 C. Instead of maintaining these values, however, both clock rates and temperature will begin to slowly creep higher and higher until plateauing at 3.8 GHz and 93 C. When running both Prime95 and FurMark, CPU and GPU temperatures will stabilize at 94 C and 71 C, respectively.

Running Witcher 3 is more representative of real-world gaming loads. When on the Default Balanced mode, the GPU stabilizes at 1455 MHz while the CPU can range from 2.5 to 4.0 GHz. When on Turbo mode, the CPU maintains a tighter 4.0 to 4.1 GHz range while the GPU stabilizes at a higher clock rate of 1575 MHz as shown by our table and screenshots below. CPU and GPU temperature between these two modes are about the same despite the clock rate differences since Turbo mode raises the fan noise ceiling.

Running on battery power will limit performance. A Fire Strike run on batteries returns Physics and Graphics scores of 9592 and 5607 points, respectively, compared to 16477 and 16483 points when on mains.

This HP system is not power efficient at the slightest. Merely idling on desktop draws anywhere between 46 W to 66 W depending on the power profile and brightness setting. Disabling the second screen barely makes a dent. In comparison, the basic Omen 15 draws only 4 W to 12 W when subjected to the same conditions. These high idling consumption rates are likely directly responsible for the poor battery life results in the next section below.

When gaming, power consumption becomes more normal for the CPU and GPU class at 154 W. The Lenovo Legion Y740 with the same Core i7 and RTX 2070 Max-Q specifications, for example, is within 5 to 10 percent of our HP. Running both Prime95 and FurMark simultaneously results in a maximum consumption of 222.7 W from the medium-large (~18 x 8.8 x 2.8 cm) 230 W AC adapter.