HP Omen 15 (i5-8300H, GTX 1050 Ti, FHD) Laptop Review

Despite the many similarities with its predecessor the case has been redesigned quite a bit. Most importantly, the display bezels have been reduced significantly and the overall footprint has been reduced to just 36 x 26.3 x 27.6 cm (14 x 10.4 x 10.9 inches). Many of the available ports have been relocated to the rear of the device, and instead of a continuous hinge the new model features two distinct separate hinges (probably because of the connectivity situation).

What impressed us most was the revised keyboard. Not only did HP remove the hard to read red lettering and replace it with conventional white letters instead, the engineers and designers also updated the formerly uniformly red backlight to several individually adjustable and configurable zones and changed the layout somewhat. More on that later.

Optics and haptics remained largely unchanged. The top case is made of brushed aluminum; the bottom and the display lid are made of textured plastic. Due to the many shape transitions and the ornamental use of colors the design is very distinct without being overly playful.

The overall build quality and structural rigidity matched the device’s price. While the lid was somewhat flexible - a problem found on many notebooks - the rest of the case was very sturdy and, at no more than 2.5 cm (1 inch), also fairly slim. Combined with its moderate weight of just 2.4 kg (5.3 lbs) it was even somewhat portable. Its competitors were all between 2.2 and 2.9 kg (4.9 - 6.4 lbs).

The rest of the ports have remained unchanged. The 15-inch notebook thus still contains an SD card reader, three USB 3.0 Type-A ports, a fold-out RJ45 Ethernet port, two audio ports (audio-out, microphone-in), HDMI, DisplayPort, and last but not least a Kensington lock.

At 78-87 MB/s the card reader’s performance was similar to the previous model. In the global scheme of things it was mediocre at best, although we must add that not a single one of our competitors was capable of maxing out our 260 MB/s reference card. At the low end of the spectrum the Dell G5’s and the Xiaomi Mi Gaming Laptop’s card readers managed no more than USB 2.0 speeds.

As expected of a modern notebook the Omen 15 comes with an up-to-date wireless modem: Intel’s Wireless-AC 9560. When connected to our Linksys EA8500 reference router it managed more than 600 Mbps in both transmit and receive (1 m distance between the two devices). The predecessor’s Intel Wireless-AC 7265 was significantly slower when transmitting data.

The only items we found in the box in addition to the notebook itself were a quick-start guide and the surprisingly compact (14 x 6.5 x 2 cm / 5.5 x 2.6 x 0.8 inches) and lightweight 150 W power supply.

As usual, US customers are deprived of the second year of warranty that European customers must have grown accustomed to at this point. Please see our Guarantees, Return policies and Warranties FAQ for country-specific information.

Touchpad

The silver-framed and slightly recessed touchpad was inconspicuous by and large. In other words: It was neither particularly good nor particularly bad. That not only applied to precision but also to smoothness. Gestures generally worked very well, although we noticed a minor input lag when performing them.

At 10.2 x 5.7 cm (4 x 2.2 inches) the touchpad was adequately sized for a 15-inch notebook. Unlike many other manufacturers HP has opted against a ClickPad and for two dedicated mouse buttons below the touch surface, which improved overall precision noticeably.

Our review unit’s FHD display left us with mixed feelings. On the bright side its contrast ratio was very decent (1,019:1) thanks to its low black level of just 0.27 nits.

Based on our review unit’s hardware - Core i5-8300H CPU, GeForce GTX 1050 Ti GPU, 8 GB single-channel RAM - the Omen 15 would be considered an upper mid-range device. The CPU and GPU are soldered onto the motherboard but the RAM can be upgraded up to 32 GB (2x 16 GB). In theory, upgrading the storage devices (1x M.2, 1x 2.5-inch) is also possible.

The Coffee Lake CPU has access to 8 MB of cache and can turbo-boost up to 4 GHz. In reality, the maximum turbo boost measured by us was 3.9 GHz during the first few seconds of our 30-minute long Cinebench R15 loop, after which it dropped to around 3.3 GHz.

Thanks to our base model’s SSD the PCMark scores were at an acceptable level and good enough for overall third place in PCMark 10. The operating system booted very quickly and felt very snappy during everyday use.

A secondary Seagate Barracuda Pro ST1000LM049 was installed in our review unit’s 2.5-inch slot. This particular model offered 1 TB capacity and operated at 7,200 rpm.

If you’re on a budget and willing to make sacrifices in regard to in-game details then the GeForce GTX 1050 Ti is the perfect card. The Pascal chip supports DirectX 12 and has access to 4 GB of GDDR5 VRAM. In other words: It is a perfect compromise between price and performance.

Our benchmarks were completed very similar to the Medion Erazer X6603 that was equipped with the exact same GPU. The Omen 15 was around 20-30% faster than its GeForce GTX 1050 competitors and approximately 30-40% slower than a GeForce GTX 1060 Max-Q device. In 3DMark 13’s Fire Strike a GeForce GTX 1060 performed up to 50% faster.

As long as you restrict yourself to the Omen 15’s panel’s native FHD resolution of 1920x1080 and don’t try gaming on external WQHD or 4K displays most games will run very smoothly in high or maximum details. Only very demanding titles, such as The Witcher 3, might be somewhat problematic.

The cooling solution was much better when idle, although the fans did rev up occasionally even then. Most of the time, however, they were either spinning very slowly or turned off completely. In these situations the only sound we could hear was the spinning hard disk drive.

As always, we ran our usual stress test of at least one full hour of Prime95 and FurMark simultaneously. After one hour, the GPU had reached a maximum of 83 °C (182 °F) - a more than acceptable temperature that was achieved by throttling the GPU. The Core i5-8300H, on the other hand, recorded a very high maximum of 99 °C (210 °F) while running at a turbo boost clock speed of 3.3 GHz. Nevertheless, the cooling solution seemed to have reached its limits with the quad-core already and we strongly suspect that the i7-8750H will be too much for the Omen 15’s coolers and fans.

Even though on paper our review unit’s sound performance was slightly worse than its predecessor’s we would still consider the 2.0 system to be acceptable and decent. As is almost always the case with notebook speakers they lack volume, dynamic range, and precision. Accordingly, we would still suggest using a headset or external speakers for an improved audio experience. As an interim solution the internal speakers will do, however.

Idle power consumption was very low thanks to Nvidia Optimus, and at just 12-18 W it was much lower than notebooks with G-Sync (such as, for example, the Omen 15’s predecessor) that were usually more in the realm of 18-30 W. Under load, the Omen 15 consumed between 92 and 142 W, which was above average for a GeForce GTX 1050 Ti device. The Medion Erazer X6603 only consumed 81-112 W of power.

Despite its high power consumption under load the Omen 15 still lasted longer than most other notebooks. Almost 8.5 hours in our video playback or Wi-Fi test at a normalized brightness is exceptional for a gaming notebook. Even the long-running Dell G5 only lasted for 5.5-6.5 hours and was thus unable to keep up while the rest of the competition ran out of power even sooner. When idle and at minimum brightness the Omen 15 lasted for up to 10.5 hours. Under load and at maximum display brightness it ran out of juice after 1-2 hours. 3D performance was reduced by around 20 % on battery (The Witcher 3 @ FHD/Ultra).