HP Omen Transcend 16 is three steps forward and one step back for the series

HP is now shipping its latest Omen laptop called the Omen Transcend 16 to supersede the standard Omen 16. As detailed in our review, the Omen Transcend 16 offers several benefits over the Omen 16 including a slightly thinner and lighter 16:10 chassis, faster Core i9-13900HX CPU option, and a mini-LED display. The latter in particular is the hottest feature on high-end laptops as it is an alternative to the usual IPS or OLED panels. As nice as these updates sound, however, the Omen Transcend 16 has dropped two crucial features that gamers ought to be aware of.

Firstly and perhaps most importantly, the Omen Transcend 16 is limited to the 130 W GeForce RTX 4070 GPU whereas the standard Omen 16 can be configured with up to the 145 W RTX 4080. The performance gap between the RTX 4070 and RTX 4080 can be as high as 40 to 50 percent which means that the older Omen 16 can offer faster graphics performance than its successor.

Secondly, the latest model supports just one internal SSD whereas the standard Omen 16 can support two. Users who prefer RAID configurations or need the extra storage would then be disappointed by the limited storage options of the Omen Transcend 16.

We suspect that the above downgrades can be attributed to the thinner profile and higher CPU option of the Omen Transcend 16 design both of which can limit the power envelope of the GPU and the physical space required to support more SSDs. Certain gamers may therefore want to consider the regular Omen 16 over the Omen Transcend 16 if they wish to maximize GPU performance and SSD support.