HP Omen 15t

Omen is now a long-running line of HP laptops with a distinctive design and gamer-oriented features. The 15t also builds on an existing design, but the hardware has been upgraded to Intel’s latest CPU and new Nvidia RTX graphics cards.

Omen 15t Configurations

You can configure some HP’s Omen laptops yourself when buying directly from HP, or choose one of a wide range of pre-configured models. As of 2019, the Omen 15t usually comes with the 6-core Intel Core i7-8750H processor, which is used in a majority of gaming notebooks at this writing.

More importantly (for gaming), there is also a rather wide range of graphics cards to choose from, starting with Nvidia’s previous-gen Pascal GTX 1050 all the way up to the ray-tracing-enabled RTX 2070. This will obviously affect the price of the system a great deal. There are three different display options, all with IPS panels: 60Hz 1080p, 144Hz 1080p or 4K/2160p.

The 15t can be equipped with up to 64 GB of RAM (2x 32 GB) and in terms of storage there’s room for a combination of one SATA hard drive/SSD and one PCIe NVMe M.2 SSD.

According to HP, the included 70 Wh battery is good for up 6 hours and 30 minutes of video playback with a 1080p panel, and 6 hours and 15 minutes with a 4K panel.

Performance

The Omen 15t’s gaming performance will depend entirely on your choice of graphics card (GPU). There is a very large difference between the entry-level GTX 1050 and the RTX 2070.

The above scores are rounded-off averages from a range of user-submitted benchmark runs (not specific for the HP Omen 15t). Exact scores will differ between systems and individual runs.

It’s worth noting that, although the entry-level graphics cards can be combined with a 4K panel, most recent games will be unplayable at native resolution with e.g. the GTX 1050. Since 4K gaming will put much more strain on the GPU, it is highly recommended to only combine the 2160p panel with the most powerful GPU options – preferably the RTX 2070. 

Other Features

Much like the competitors from Dell, Razer and Gigabyte, the Omen 15t has small display bezels. It’s not quite as thin and light as the competition, but still compact at 5.26 lb/2.4 kg. The keyboard is backlit in red, with highlighted WASD keys, and offers 26–key rollover anti–ghosting.

Reviews

Matthew Moniz: (Core i7-8750H + GTX 1060)