HP are really going hard at their gaming range right now, launching a new high-end Omen laptop here at Gamescom. The ~$3,000 laptop is a 4K-toting, GTX 1080 sporting, overclocked beast of a gaming notebook with a mechanical-switch keyboard and B&O speakers. What’s not to like?
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The HP Omen X is a serious gaming laptop, with no pretensions towards being some sort of genuinely portable machine. This is a notebook designed to be able to offer overclocked gaming power without having to sound like an industrial turbine everytime you boot up PUBG. But that does mean it’s no shrinking violet.
The Omen X is a sizeable machine, with a 17-inch screen and a chassis built to handle the thermal demands of high-end PC componentry. It’s got a vapour chamber design at the heart of its cooling array, with four 3.5mm heat pipes dragging the hotness away from the processing and graphics goodness. Combined with the fact HP have dropped a full mechanical switch keyboard into the design, with a 2.5mm travel, the hefty cooling system means you’re looking at a device which is going to be around 25mm thick. On a good day.
In fact, as much as the mech-switch keyboard is an Acer kinda thing, the actual chassis looks for all the world like an Asus Republic of Gamers machine. It’s even got the same sort of flared, twin F35-esque exhaust on the rear, too.
I doubt that’s by accident, either. HP look like they’re chasing after the gaming market which the likes of Acer, Asus, and MSI have made their own over the past few years. While the Omen X, and its hulking chassis with overclocked parts, feels a little anachronistic in these Max-Q, post-ultrabook days of ours, it’s still a machine that will nail desktop-level gaming performance to rival those other brands. Even if it can’t survive life away from the plug for more than half an hour, and will probably give you a hernia lugging it around…
The HP Omen X is out in November, with a Euro price of€2,800.