VERDICT:

The HP Omen 17 is the only high-end 40 series GPU laptop we’ve tested so far this year, it’s got a leg up on the competition, and at a price of Rs 3,03,501, it’s weirdly enough affordable for the specs on offer making it an enticing choice even for desktop gamers looking for an upgrade. Of course, with more and more 40 series laptops making their way into the market, this might change, but until then, the HP Omen 17 is certainly worth checking out.

The new 2023 variant of the HP Omen 17 combines the powerful processing of the 13th gen Intel Core i9-13900HX with the powerhouse RTX 4080 GPU, to give us the most powerful gaming laptop we’ve tested to date.  It’s leagues ahead of the gaming laptops we tested just last year. Of course, this package doesn’t come cheap at a premium price of Rs 3,03,501, but considering the specs on board, well, even gaming desktop users might be tempted by this one.

Let’s start things off with the gaming performance!

HP OMEN 17 – RTX 4080 Gaming

The HP Omen 17 is the first laptop we’ve tested this year featuring an RTX 4080. This is a powerful GPU, with a TGP of 175 watts which is the highest configuration that NVIDIA allows. It’s powerful enough to comfortably play the latest AAA games at QHD resolutions. 

While it’s not the best laptop GPU NVIDIA has to offer, that would be the 4090, it handily beats our previous best-performing gaming laptop, the MSI Raider GE67HX which features a 3080Ti, in every synthetic gaming benchmark.

Comparing the two laptops shows you just how much of a difference there is in scores when it comes to synthetic GPU benchmarks. We’ve used 3DMark’s Time Spy and Fire Strike benchmarks to test DX 12 and DX 11 performance respectively, and Port Royale to test DXR, or ray-tracing.

Coming to real-world gaming performance, we tested the laptop across various games, with a mix of popular and old titles, CPU-intensive games, and GPU-intensive titles.

While the HP Omen 17 has the highest FPS scores in the majority of the titles, it still falls slightly behind in some titles which comes as a bit of a surprise. 

HP OMEN 17 – How does the i9-13900HX perform?

Next comes the CPU, the 13th gen i9-13900HX is the fastest laptop processor we’ve tested to date, and comes with 16 Efficiency cores at a max clock speed of 3.9 GHz, and eight Performance cores at a max clock of 5.4 GHz for a grand total of 32 logical cores (threads). It shouldn’t come as a surprise that it aces all of our CPU and productivity benchmarks.

The HP Omen 17 scores are the highest scores we’ve seen yet on a laptop in PCMark 10.

The same applies to the Cinebench R23, with excellent single and multithread performance across the board.

It knocks encryption and decryption out of the park as well, as can be seen in our WinRAR and 7-zip benchmarks with results nearly double our previous best gaming laptop.

HP OMEN 17 RAM and Storage

If that wasn’t enough, the HP Omen 17 also features the fastest RAM we’ve tested to date in a gaming laptop as well. The dual-channel 32GB DDR5 RAM clocked at 5600 MHz scores crazy fast read, write, and copy speeds.

The HP Omen 17 comes with 1TB of PCIe 4 NVMe SSD storage. And while it may not be the best storage we’ve tested, it’s still very fast. You needn’t worry about slow loading or boot times with those speeds. The laptop comes with two slots for storage, so you could expand storage later as well.

HP OMEN 17 Noise and heat

The laptop can get very loud under stress. You can easily hear the whirring and even some whistling when the laptop is being pushed to its limits, such as during stress tests. The sound dies down significantly when the laptop is idle.

Coming to temps, the laptop ran surprisingly cool, averaging surface temps of around 29 degrees celsius under stress. The centre of the laptop was the hottest, at around 35 degrees. Clearly, the fans are doing their part, and the size of the laptop certainly helps with better airflow.

HP OMEN 17 Display – Could be better

As we mentioned earlier, you’ve got a massive 17.3-inch display with a QHD resolution, that’s 2560×1440 pixels. This is a matte IPS panel with a refresh rate of 240 Hz, and you should easily manage to actually get those frames from most games you play on this laptop.

In our tests, we got a peak average brightness of 317 nits compared to the advertised 300 nits which is good. However, we got an sRGB coverage of 95.3% which is a little less than the advertised 100%. That being said, we should point out that most high-end gaming laptop displays in this price range offer much brighter displays.

HP OMEN 17 Build and design

You’ll immediately notice that this laptop is pretty big. You’ve got a metallic build with a mix of brushed and matte finishes. We found the laptop to be fairly sturdy overall, with the hinges being the exception; there’s a fair bit of flex and the lid tends to wobble. The laptop’s also pretty heavy at around 2.8 kg which is to be expected with all that hardware on board.

You’ve got a nice selection of I/O port offerings as well, with the left side of the laptop featuring a Gigabit Ethernet port, a USB-A  3.2 Gen 1 port, a Mini DisplayPort, HDMI 2.1, Thunderbolt 4, an audio combo, and a storage card reader. The right side features two USB-A 3.2 Gen 1 ports.

HP OMEN 17 Verdict

The HP Omen 17 is the only high-end 40 series GPU laptop we’ve tested so far this year, it’s got a leg up on the competition, and at a price of Rs 3,03,501, it’s weirdly enough affordable for the specs on offer making it an enticing choice even for desktop gamers looking for an upgrade. Of course, with more and more 40 series laptops making their way into the market, this might change, but until then, the HP Omen 17 is certainly worth checking out.