HP Omen 15 (2019) review: A GeForce RTX 2080 Max-Q for under S$4,000
HP's Omen 15 is probably one of the better bang-for-your-buck laptops around, but there's a catch.
By HardwareZone Team -
Image Source: HP
Earlier this year, HP refreshed its line of Omen laptops with machines that featured slimmer designs and improved cooling performance. That was a much needed update, considering that the previous Omen 15 was rather thick for a Max-Q notebook.
That aside, the design is still very familiar, and you'll recognise the same tribal mask logo on the lid.
Here's an overview of its specifications:
- 1,920 x 1,080-pixel 240Hz G-Sync IPS display
- Intel Core i7-9750H processor (2.60GHz, 12MB L3 cache)
- 16GB DDR4-2666 single-channel memory
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Max-Q
- 69Wh battery
- 360 x 260 x 20mm
- 2.4kg
The above configuration will cost you S$3,999, a pretty fair price for a laptop with a GeForce RTX 2080 Max-Q. However, the laptop also comes equipped with single-channel memory. Unfortunately, from past experience with laptops like the ASUS ROG Strix Scar III GL531GW and ROG Zephyrus S GX502GW, it's clear that single-channel memory results in quite a large performance deficit in games. Can the HP Omen overcome the limitations? Find out how the Omen 15 fares over the following pages.
What's changed from the previous model?
The new Omen 15 comes with a new hinge design.
The new Omen 15 hasn't really undergone that drastic of a design overhaul, and it still looks very similar to last year's model. That said, HP has ditched the carbon fibre pattern and red accents on the lid in favour of a more subtle, monochrome look. The lid also has a brushed metal finish, which looks more classy than before.
The lid now favours a monochrome design.
The design of the hinge is different as well. The lid is now attached to the base in the middle and flares upward, whereas its predecessor opted for two small hinges that made the display look as if it was floating. I actually prefer the old design a bit more, and the new look feels a little too aggressive. The display also isn't able to recline that far, so this isn't one of those laptops that will let you lay the display completely flat if you need the flexibility.
This is as far back as the lid will go.
That said, this is a gaming laptop, and it sure looks the part. I can definitely see it appealing to folks who want more eye-catching designs.
Build quality also feels really solid for the most part. The aluminium and plastic chassis exhibits little to no discernible flex, and the hinge is smooth and easily operated with just one hand.
This year's Omen 15 is also quite a bit thinner than its predecessor, measuring 20mm thick to the latter's 26mm. That's a pretty big difference, and the new Omen is a far more svelte machine. The weight doesn't appear to have changed though, and the laptop still weighs in at 2.4kg, which is fairly hefty.
But bigger changes are afoot under the hood. The cooling system has been beefed-up, and it's got an imposing new name to go with it as well. Dubbed Omen Tempest, the vents and fans have been tweaked for better airflow. HP is also using Thermal Grizzly's Conductonaut on the CPU, a liquid metal compound that is supposed to significantly improve heat dissipation.
Here's a look at the laptop's innards.
In addition, the Omen Command Center now offers a Performance Control tab that lets you ramp up the fan speeds to maximise cooling. However, there only seems to be a toggle between Auto mode and Max speed, and it'd have been nice to have the option to create a custom fan curve. Fortunately though, the Omen 15 is one of the quieter gaming laptops around, even when the fans are set to full throttle.
I can count four heat pipes between the CPU and GPU, and there's even what looks to be a heatsink of sorts for the M.2 drive and thermal pads for the battery.
How are the display, keyboard, and speakers?
The display is vivid and bright, and I have no issues with it at all. There's no obvious bias toward the cooler or warmer end of the colour spectrum when viewed with the naked eye, and it'll do just fine for games and movies. It also has a super smooth 240Hz refresh rate and support for NVIDIA G-Sync, so you can expect a fluid and tear-free gaming experience. That said, it's still debatable whether there's any use having such a high refresh rate screen on a laptop, since the mobile versions of the RTX GPUs will still struggle to output anything close to 240fps in AAA games, even at 1080p.
The top bezel could still use some slimming down. The previous Omen 15 had better bezel management.
And while the left and right bezels are quite slim, the top and bottom bezels are still relatively thick, although they're far from the most egregious example I've seen. The webcam also sits in the top bezel, so there will be no fiddling with awkward camera angles here.
The keyboard supports just four-zone RGB backlighting. That said, I think a laptop at this price should really offer per-key customisations. The keyboard also lacks any controls to adjust the backlight brightness, and you have to contend with just and on and off toggle. HP has done a fairly good job of keeping illumination even on the keys with secondary legends, but it does feel like the LEDs could use an overall brightness boost. They're still visible under bright overhead lighting, but they look rather lacklustre.
The keyboard supports 4-zone RGB backlighting, though not obvious under bright lighting.
You control the lighting in the Omen Command Center, but there's no way to adjust the brightness here either. In a confusing turn, there's actually a slider for brightness, but instead of boosting the brightness, it seems to control the white levels, and sliding it all the way to the right simply turns the LEDs white.
Pushing the brightness slider all the way to the right simply turns the LEDs white.
Nevertheless, the typing experience is pleasant, and the keys feel bouncy and offer up decent travel.
The Precision trackpad has separate left- and right-click buttons. I still think integrated buttons make for a cleaner and more modern look, but at the very least the buttons on the Omen 15 provide decent feedback and feel good to use - better than their previous attempt.
I've saved the best for the last though. The speakers are one of the best I've heard on a gaming notebook, a continued bright spot for the Omen series. They pump out loud and lush tunes, for a gaming laptop that is, and I'm continually surprised by how good and clear vocals sound on the laptop. The one weakness is the bass, which seems to lack weight and could be a little tighter.
What ports and connectors does it have?
The Omen 15 is equipped with a rich selection of connectors, including one Thunderbolt 3, three USB 3.1 (Gen 1) Type-A, one Gigabit Ethernet port, and a headphone and microphone combo jack. For display outputs, it has one Mini DisplayPort and one HDMI connector. There's also a multi-format SD card reader here, a nice inclusion that many gaming laptops in this class still leave out.
The SD card reader sits on the right edge.
Unlike the 2018 model which shoved some of the connectors to the rear, this year's Omen 15 sticks all the ports on the sides, which means they're all easier to access. But how you feel about this really depends on how you intend to use the laptop. Rear ports are good for outputting to an external monitor because they allow for easier cable management, but ports at the side work better if you're just going to be using the laptop right in front of you most of the time.
The left edge is crammed full of ports, including a Gigabit Ethernet jack and Thunderbolt 3 port.
Unfortunately, it ships with single-channel memory
At least the second RAM slot is easily accessible once you remove the bottom panel.
One big downside of the laptop is that it only comes with a single 16GB stick of RAM. As with the ASUS ROG Strix Scar III and ROG Zephyrus S, single-channel memory is a bad idea, particularly on a high-end gaming laptop like this one.
The problem is a result of how certain games or applications manage system memory. It affects all MS Hybrid systems – this is Microsoft's implementation of NVIDIA's Optimus technology – running Intel processors, GeForce RTX graphics, and just one RAM module. So while the root of the issue doesn't lie with laptop makers, the onus is still on them to outfit their systems with the best performing configuration, especially when they're asking for this much money.
The RAM slots are easily accessible if you want to add an extra stick, and I strongly recommend that you do that, but it doesn't seem fair to expect people to have to pay more for an additional memory module. If I'm paying for a GeForce RTX 2080 Max-Q, I fully expect it to perform as such straight out of the box and not come encumbered by a 20 to 30 per cent performance deficit.
Test setup and performance
Here's a full list of the notebooks we're looking at:
- HP Omen 15
- Acer Predator Triton 500
- Lenovo Legion Y740
- Razer Blade 15
HP was only able to send us the Omen 15 with the GeForce RTX 2080 Max-Q. Unfortunately, I don't have any benchmark numbers from other similarly configured notebooks at the moment, so I'll just be comparing the Omen 15 to the other GeForce RTX 2070 Max-Q laptops we've reviewed so far.
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I ran the notebooks through the following benchmarks:
- PCMark 10
- AS SSD
- 3DMark
- Deus Ex: Mankind Divided
- Far Cry 5
- Metro Exodus
- Shadow of the Tomb Raider
- Tom Clancy's The Division 2
How good is it for work?
PCMark 10 Extended evaluates systems based on workloads that can be categorized into four distinct groups, comprising Essentials, Productivity, Digital Content Creation, and Gaming. This includes tests such as app start-up times, web browsing, word processing and spreadsheets, photo and video editing, and rendering and visualization tasks. Finally, gaming performance is evaluated using the Fire Strike benchmark.
These are all really powerful notebooks, and the GeForce RTX 2080 Max-Q doesn't offer that much of an upgrade over the GeForce RTX 2070 Max-Q when it comes to daily productivity tasks and applications. In terms of overall scores, it was only 5 per cent quicker than the Lenovo Legion Y740.
What's the storage performance like?
The HP Omen 15 is equipped with a Western Digital PC SN720 NVMe 512GB SSD and a Seagate Barracuda Pro 1TB HDD. The WD drive performed quite well in AS SSD. It never trailed significantly in any one area and consistently put up good numbers throughout.
How fast is it in games?
It's not a widely known fact, but there are actually two variants of the GeForce RTX 2080 Max-Q, comprising 80W and 90W versions. The Omen 15 comes with the 80W GPU, with a base clock of 735MHz and boost clock of 1,095MHz. In comparison, the Razer Blade 15 I reviewed earlier this year has the 90W version, featuring a more aggressive 990MHz base clock and 1,215MHz boost clock.
That said, nowhere are the downsides of having single-channel memory more obvious than in games. Since the problem is supposedly with the way games or applications manage system memory, you don't see the same deficits everywhere. For example, Metro Exodus appears unaffected, and all the laptops turned out numbers that were pretty close to one another.
The first oddity you'll notice is that the Omen 15's 3DMark scores are actually indistinguishable from that of the GeForce RTX 2070 Max-Q notebooks. That's already the first sign that something isn't quite right, and a look at the in-game benchmark scores further shows the Omen 15 neck-and-neck with the other laptops or even trailing them slightly in certain instances.
That really shouldn't be happening considering that the laptop has a GeForce RTX 2080 Max-Q (refer to the Razer review to see how much more potential was lost), and it's just further evidence of what a bad idea it is to make a high-end laptop with single-channel memory. Metro Exodus and The Division 2 were the only titles that allowed the Omen 15 to inch ahead. The HP laptop was roughly 11 per cent ahead in both games. In The Division 2 however, that advantage applied only to running the game at Ultra settings, perhaps because the CPU becomes less of a limiting factor at more demanding settings.
How good is the battery life?
I tested the battery life using PCMark 10's new Modern Office and Gaming battery life benchmarks. All the notebooks were set to 100 per cent display brightness and had Wi-Fi enabled. The keyboard backlight was disabled.
Battery life was lacklustre and the Omen 15 lasted barely over 2 hours in the Modern Office benchmark. The combination of the GeForce RTX 2080 Max-Q and relatively small 69Wh battery isn't the best choice, and that affects the laptop's score in our portability index as well, which takes into account things like battery life, weight, and the notebook's dimensions. It fared better than the Lenovo Legion Y740, but it was still quite far behind the Acer Predator Triton 500 and Razer Blade 15, both of which are also considerably thinner laptops and have larger batteries.
Is the cooling performance good?
The HP Omen 15 is one of the more quiet gaming laptops I've reviewed. The fans are clearly audible at maximum speed, but they're far more bearable than the ruckus some other laptops kick up. I'd describe it as a low whine of sorts as opposed to the literal whooshing noise its rivals produce.
That said, cooling performance seems good and at the very least the palm rests remain fairly cool to touch throughout.
Slimmer is always better
This year's HP Omen 15 is a nice step up from last year's model. For one, it's markedly slimmer, although it could still do with losing a few grams. Build quality, especially in the palm rest area, is generally solid too and the laptop is crammed with plenty of features and I/O options. The screen is a 240Hz G-Sync panel, and it features a Thunderbolt 3 port, an SD card reader, and ample display outputs. Better still, the speakers are also some of the best I've heard on a gaming laptop.
Heat and noise appear in control as well, although battery life is still unfortunately mediocre. The Omen 15 still has a long way to go before it's a leader in terms of portability, but it tries to make up for that with beefy specifications.
However, the laptop still cannot overcome the fact that it ships with a single-channel memory configuration. The impact on gaming performance cannot be overstated. While the Omen 15 may come with a GeForce RTX 2080 Max-Q, it certainly doesn't run like one. In fact, performance is indistinguishable from the GeForce RTX 2070 Max-Q, save for a few games.
You're effectively rolling the dice here with the Omen 15. Maybe the game you want to play won't be affected, or maybe it will. Put simply, you'll have to get an extra stick of RAM to really unlock the full potential of the Omen 15, which feels like an unreasonable ask, especially when it costs S$3,999.
A GeForce RTX 2080 Max-Q notebook at under S$4,000 is pretty attractive (considering Razer's Blade 15 costs nearly as much and and only features a GeForce RTX 2070), but it becomes a lot less so when you realise you have to pay extra for more RAM and install it yourself to unlock the notebook's full potential. Oddly enough, last year's Omen 15 is still listed on HP's website with 9th Gen processors and dual-channel memory, but it seems like the new model only comes in a single-channel configuration. Still, if you're familiar with your hardware and don't mind the extra expense, the Omen 15 remains a decent and relatively 'affordable' choice for a gaming notebook today with top specs. It's just difficult to recommend to someone who doesn't want to do their own upgrades (and they really shouldn't have to).
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