So if you're shopping for a new laptop with all the power and speed, for productivity and, more importantly, to play games on. There are a lot of options and factors that you need to consider. 

And something significant specifically in regards to gaming, as you probably already know, is the combination of rom, ram, CPU, the GPU and the Achilles heel of a lot of gaming laptops' cooling systems.

This is the HP Omen 16 Gaming Laptop with AMD Ryzen 7 processor up to 5.1Ghz clock speed, 16MB L3 cache, eight cores, and 16 threads. And it's rocking the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060, with dedicated 8GB of GDDR6. And then there's the 16GB of DDR 5 and 1TB NVMe gen4 M.2 SSD. 

So it is a beast on paper.

So there's just one question: Is the 2023 HP Omen 16 gaming laptop ( codename 16-XD0001na )a good omen or a bad omen? Well…Let me show you so that you can see with your own eyes how this epic combination is and how it handles the heat when gaming.

Performance

So here is the first 3DMark benchmark, and you might be thinking, wow, that's relatively low & that's because I had the Omen running on battery, and it was below 25%. And I hadn't made any adjustments in the Omen Gaming Hub…

I then plugged in power, dialled up all the settings, ultra-performance and Max power on the tempest cooling system and reran 3Dmark TimeSpy, and below is an image of the result. As you can see the performance is excellent. Everything runs smooth with minimal throttling.

I also ran the in-game benchmark on Red Dead Redemption, and the results were also excellent, with the game averaging around 77fps and maxing out at times at 165hz.  And here are the cinebench results on the multicore & the performance here is also stellar and coming just below the AMD thread ripper.

Scroll to the next image and you’ll see the cinebench score on the single core. And at the time of the video it's number 1 in the cinebench R32 app with a score of 1544. And as you probably guessed based on the spec combined HPs expertise, The Omen 16 has fantastic performance. 

And the massive Tempest cooling system certainly plays its part. And as a result, this might be one of the coolest HP Omen gaming laptops to date.

It's safe to say that this is a good omen, and it's fire for gaming on…cos it's powerful and it runs cool.

Design

You can see when you look underneath the Omen 16 how the design accommodates the tempest cooling. There are rubber rails that lift the base of the laptop off the surface, and this provides space for the fans to breathe.

The body of the Omen 16 is what HP calls shadow black, and the logo has been redesigned. It used to be a reflective diamond shape with a blue gradient. And now it's much more subtle chrome text.

It does have a good weight to it, as you would expect from a premium bit of kit. It is. 16" laptop but HP have done a good job of keeping the size down. There's a good selection of USBs, all of which support 5Gbps. The ones with the lightning bolt beside them support HP sleep and charge. And the single USB C also supports display 1.4. so this is one way to connect a monitor.

There is also HDMI 2.1 port providing you another way to output to a monitor or a TV. And because it's HDMI 2.1, you can get a high refresh rate and 4060 graphics output on the big screen & AMD free sync is supported.

The entire look & feel of the Omen 16 is incredibly premium. You can see that HP has paid a lot of attention to details. If you want to get a closer look at all the details. Check out my unboxing and first impressions video. I'll link it at the end.

The provided charger is 240watts and incredibly fast and can get you to 50% in 30mins. A d if you're gaming on battery yes you will run out if juice quite fast. Around the 3hr mark. If you're doing more boring stuff like work…spreadsheets and word documents Hp say you can get up to 8 hrs on a single charge.

Display

As for the display, it's an FHD IPS panel, 100% sRGB, 165 Hz, with a 7ms response time. Peak brightness 300 nits & has an anti-glare coating and a certificate from TUV Rheinland for its low blue light output.

And because the display on this is HD and not 4K, it's less demanding on the graphics and power consumption…so it's a win. So you can redline this and max out gaming settings, and this laptop can handle pretty much anything you throw at it.

Including work stuff, if that's what you're into, and in my specific use case, this Omen 16 can easily handle video editing and graphic design tasks. And yes, you can wire a headset with a mic or use the BT5.3. but also there are mics and camera on the top bezel. And the built in speakers have been tuned by B&O and they sound pretty good for laptop speakers.

Omen Gaming Hub

And something really special about the Omen 16 is the Omen gaming hub. Suppose you're thinking about getting this specifically for gaming. You're going to love this.

You can collate your gaming services here. The Omen Hub can combine Steam, epic, Xbox, and live pass. You can also collect screenshots and wallpapers in the gallery. And the optimiser is a valuable tool. You can use these to boost games and clean up the memory

The Omen gaming hub also provides game streaming tools which can be helpful. And then there's the light studio for customising the backlit keyboard RGB.

The most valuable menu of all. It's the model-specific menu for the Omen 16. Here you can see the system vitals, boost the network, do some basic RGB setups, adjust the performance and the fan, and on the graphic switcher page, you can max out the graphics performance by switching from hybrid to discrete mode.

So if you are in the market for a gaming beast of a laptop. If you pick up one of these the gaming gods will be on your sidn…because this is a good omen.

And if you want to check out my unboxing and first impressions you can get a closer look at the design and some of the unique features I didn't mention in this one. That's right here.