This slim 15-inch laptop has a distinctive trapezoidal profile, dressed up with a black, anodized finish and glowing red accents. The hinge of the laptop gets some unexpected visual flair with a shiny chrome hinge, and the ends of the hinge have a colored flame pattern. Across the lid is a pattern of tiny triangles imprinted into the black aluminum, with an HP logo etched into it.
Measuring 0.8 by 15.1 by 9.7 inches (HWD) and weighing just 4.7 pounds, the Omen 15 is just a little smaller than the Acer Aspire V 15 Nitro (VN7-591G-75S2)£1,129.97 at Laptops Direct, but weighs quite a bit less than the 5.29-pound Acer laptop. The chassis is milled from aluminum, making it quite sturdy, but light enough to carry under an arm or in a backpack. It also keeps things cool, with two heat exhaust vents on the back edge of the chassis, expelling hot air away from the user.
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The keyboard features RGB backlighting, with multiple lighting zones (right, left, center, and WASD keys), letting you change the backlight color to any hue you want. The same color can be applied to the speakers, and you can also set the speaker lighting to throb to the beat of whatever music you're listening to, or react to loud noises in games. The chiclet-style keyboard is similar to HP's other laptops, but adds a row of six programmable macro buttons along the left edge of the keyboard. The Omen 15 also features an extra wide touchpad, which offers better gesture support for day-to-day use, but for gaming, you'll still want to use a separate gaming mouse.
Features
In order to maintain the angled edges of the trapezoidal chassis design, nearly all of the Omen 15's ports are located on the back edge of the laptop, situated between the exhaust vents. While this does help reduce the tangle of cables snaking around the sides of the laptop, it's also inconvenient whenever you plug in a device, be it a mouse, a flash drive, or external monitor. Despite the location, the Omen does offer a good selection of ports, with four USB 3.0 ports, an HDMI-out and miniDisplayPort for connecting external monitors, and a headset combo jack. The one side-mounted feature is an SD card slot, found on the right-hand side of the laptop.
Something of a surprise: The Omen 15 isn't preloaded with much in the way of software and apps. Many mainstream companies tend to stick with their usual software loads when selling a gaming system, resulting in premium-priced machines that feel compromised with unwanted bloat. The Omen 15 doesn't have this problem, coming with a 30-day trial of McAfee Security and a 30-day trial of Office 365, but little else. HP also includes a control dashboard for the Omen which includes keyboard customization, performance monitoring, and driver controls. HP covers the system with a one-year warranty.
Performance
The Omen 15 is outfitted with an Intel Core i7-4710HQ processor, overclocked from 2.5GHz to up to 3.5GHz in Turbo mode. It's the same quad-core processor used in the Acer Aspire V 15 Nitro and the Maingear Pulse 15$2,299.00 at Microsoft Store. With 16GB of RAM, and aforementioned PCI-connected SSD, the Omen 15 manages to squeeze better overall performance out of the same CPU, scoring 3,400 points in PCMark 8 Work Conventional, where the Acer V 15 Nitro scored only 3,160 points, and the Maingear Pulse 15 scored 3,047 points. Similar performance differences were seen in Photoshop CS6, which the Omen 15 finished in just 3 minutes 24 seconds, well ahead of most competing systems.
The real question, however, is gaming performance. With an Nvidia GeForce GTX 860M GPU and 4GB of dedicated memory, the Omen offers decent gaming performance, slightly ahead of the similarly equipped Acer V 15 Nitro and the Lenovo Y50 Touch, which also feature the Nvidia GTX 860M. In 3DMark the Omen 15 scored 15,651 points (CloudGate), and 1,840 points (FireStrike). In gaming tests with basic 1,366-by-768 resolution, the Omen cranked through Heaven at 66 frames per second (fps) and Valley at 79 fps; at 1,920-by-1,080 resolution with antialiasing on, those rates dropped to 22fps in Heaven and 25fps in Valley, meaning that you can play current-generation games at full HD, but you may need to back off on the eye-candy for smooth performance. This performance is all quite respectable, but the Nvidia GTX 860M is an entry-level gaming GPU, and at this price range, you might also consider that the Maingear Pulse 15 and the Digital Storm Krypton offered slightly better gaming performance, thanks to an Nvidia 870M and 880M, respectively.
In our battery rundown test, the Omen 15 lasted 4 hours 17 minutes, which is on the longer end of the spectrum for a gaming laptop. In comparison, the Maingear Pulse 15 lasted 3:13, and the Acer V 15 Nitro 4:10, while the Lenovo Y50 Touch lasted the longest of the bunch (4:33), but only outlasted the Omen 15 by 16 minutes.
Conclusion
With its midrange price, the HP Omen 15 pits itself against some potent competitors. While it easily outstrips the entry-level gaming rigs from other mainstream manufacturers, like Acer and Lenovo, this model is priced to compete with systems from gaming specialists, like Digital Storm and Maingear. In that comparison, the Omen 15 does fairly well, with solid performance and a gamer-friendly design. But more expensive systems from boutique vendors still win the day, thanks to better gaming performance. As such, the Editors' Choice Digital Storm Krypton keeps its top spot, but the level of gaming muscle provided by the HP Omen 15 does a lot to close the gap between mainstream manufacturers and boutique vendors.
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