Good Omens.
PC gamers these days
don't know they're born. Back in our day, gaming on a PC required a
wardrobe sized computer and several thousand fans cooling it all
down. Today, gamers are enjoying group play and tournaments in
Starbucks as their laptops are just as capable... quite like the one
we were sent from HP. We review the Omen 4K Gaming Laptop.
First, the aesthetics:
this is a damn fine looking laptop, wrapped in matt black with deep
red accents. Black and red seem to be the colours of choice with HP's
Omen range, which also includes desktop computers and gaming
accessories such as mice. On that note; there are actually several
versions of the Omen laptop, all of which feature either 15 or 17
inch screens. We were sent model number 15-ax011na which, as far as
we can tell, is possibly the best of the bunch.
Here are the most
attention-grabbing stats: as the name suggests, the screen is indeed
4K, boasting a resolution of 3840 x 2160 pixels. Good God, it's
crisp. This is the first laptop we've ever seen with a 4K screen, and
the benefits are instantly noticeable – not just for gaming, but
for something as simple as web browsing. It's nice and bright, too,
and the pre-installed Windows 10 looks great. Ours came with a
special 'Omen' background image as well, which married together the
whole package nicely.
On the inside (of the
15-ax011na) you get an Intel Core i7-6700HQ processor, helped along
by a very welcome 16GB of RAM. And, for the gamers, there is a NVIDIA
GeForce GTX 965M, to make even the heaviest battle situations run
smoothly. So, as you might have guessed, using this day in day out
for simply word processing and streaming Netflix would be a massive
waste. Mind you, Netflix looked bloody good!
Storage wise, you get a
boost there, too. Built in to our model (other versions slightly
differ) was a 1TB SATA hard drive, and also a 256GB solid state
drive. That's basically like having a dedicated drive just for gaming
info; one that can be read from and written to far quicker than a
traditional drive. Again, this is all geared toward gaming. Oh, as
are the Bang & Olufsen crafted speakers, which do indeed
reproduce a decent sound quality (although which might be wasted, as
gamers tend to don headphones, right?).
But this won't just be
used for gaming. The HP Omen 4K Gaming Laptop is still an excellent
everyday computer, with ours weighing in at a mere 2.2kg. Obviously
one of the 15 inch models will be easier to lug around than the 17
inchers, but the Omen range seems to weigh no more than ordinary,
less-powerful, laptops. We've been using ours for gaming sessions at
night, but also just for work stuff and YouTube during the day. The
processor, RAM, and glorious screen work together to make all tasks a
real pleasure.
And the keys are
backlit red. That was actually the thing that impressed us the most
about the HP Omen 4K Gaming Laptop – that was before we downloaded
some games. Sitting in a coffee shop and typing on this, with those
fiery keys glowing beneath your fingertips, is pretty awesome. It was
nice to know that our laptop could beat up all the other laptops in
the place.
Here's the catch: all
that power and all those aggressive looks come at a price. The HP
Omen 4K Gaming Laptop 15-ax011na costs £1199, so twice as much as
the average workhorse computer. Is it worth it? Well, if you
genuinely are looking for a gaming laptop that doesn't require you to
build it yourself first, yes it most definitely is. You'll enjoy the
performance and relish in that 4K screen – something that, outside
of a laptop – could cost you nearly a grand anyway.
If you're just shopping
for a new laptop, maybe not – unless you can fork out that much.
You really are getting what you pay for here, and if you need a
machine that does everything you could possibly imagine beyond
gaming, like music and video editing, then it will definitely be a
good purchase. If you're only writing in coffee shops and streaming a
bit of Amazon Video, save that cash, bud. Just be aware that there
will be laptops out there that could beat up yours. Jus' sayin'.
£1199
Visit
store.hp.com