The Omen: HP’s High-End Monster Gaming Laptop

Despite the fierce competition in the PC gaming market, HP has decided to plunge in with its new gaming laptop. The tech company seems to be more than ready to entice consumers and battle it out with key players like Alienware, MSI and Razer. HP's new gaming device seem to be promising given its name, Omen, which refers to Voodoo term meaning "high-end tower."

Design

According to Forbes, HP has given much attention to Omen's design with the chrome hinged on its back, plus the "discoloured exhaust-pipe-style tips." The Omen sports a jet-black machined aluminum body with a lid wider than its base. It basically looks like an upside-down trapezoid. The laptop also has a line of 4 USB 3.0 ports, an HDMI port, a mini Display port and jacks for headset and power are all found on its rear.

The laptop measures 15.1 x 9.7 x 0.78-inch and weighs 4.8-pound, which is slightly heavier than its rivals. The laptop also comes with a multi-coloured backlit keyboard and an extra-wide touchpad. Given Omen's intricate design, no one would suspect that this laptop is intended for intensive gaming and not just any fancy looking laptop in the market.

Display and Audio

The Omen has a 15.6-inch 1080p resolution touch screen that can handle striking colours and vivid details. However, CNET's review says that with the competition right now for high-resolution screens, HP's gaming laptop might not come at par with its rivals. Not to mention that its rivals are mostly equipped with a 4K resolution.

On the other hand, the laptop's speakers registered a quiet 78 decibels on some audio test, which is below the 87-dB average. Its other rivals like the Pulse 15 can register for up to 91 dB, while the Blade 14 and Ghost can deliver 88 dB and 84 dB, respectively.

Gaming and Graphics

The HP Omen is powered by the impressive Nvidia GeForce GTX 860M GPU with 4GB of VRAM. However, one loophole for the Omen that serious gamers might find off is its last generation mid-tier graphics card.

Performance and Battery

The new gaming laptop is equipped with 2.5-GHz Intel Core i7-4710HQ CPU and 16GB of RAM. Its battery on the other hand is another factor that consumers might want to consider. Based on reviews, the Omen does not have very good staying power. With continuous web surfing using wi-fi, the laptop can only withstand around 4 hours of performance.

Price

The HP Omen can be considered as one of the best-looking laptops for 2014. The Omen will be available for preorder starting this week and units are expected to ship in a few weeks time. Its price would depend on its configurations. The entry-level system that has 128GB mSATA SSD is at US$1500, while the256GB SSD with PCIe version is at US$1600 and the model with 4GB of DDR5 memory for the GPU costs US$1700.

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