HP is one the biggest names in the personal computing space and the company has expanded its portfolio even further by launching its Omen gaming laptop. It is HP's first gaming laptop in India and is priced at Rs. 1,59,990. It comes with an Nvidia GTX 960 graphics card, RGB backlit keyboard with macro keys and an Intel Core i7 processor. The high end gaming laptop market is still very sparsely populated and the HP Omen can be good option. I had the chance to spend some time with the Omen and here are my first Impressions.
From the looks of it, the HP Omen definitely looks the part. The red and black colour scheme mixed with the sharp looking design does make the laptop stand out. The laptop features an all metal design which is coated with a matte rubberized material which adds grip to the sleek gaming machine. All edges taper downwards except the back to make the laptop look thin and while it does do the job, it also makes the device harder to hold from both edges.
HP has moved all the I/O ports to the back. This has been done to provide minimum hindrance while gaming as no connectors will stick out of the side ports. At the back, there are 4 USB3.0 ports, 1 mini displayport v1.2, HDMI v1.4b, 3.5mm jack and AC pin jack. The laptop however makes do without a DVD writer which seems like a trend gradually being adopted by all laptop manufacturers. The card reader however is on the right edge of the laptop.
As expected, there is a 15.6-inch IPS LCD display which is touch enabled. In the short time while I inspected the display, I couldn't see any colour shift on it. Coming to the nicely laid out keyboard, in addition to the customizable RGB colour lighting, it also gets 6 macro keys on the left side. It is an island type keyboard and, yes, while there is some travel in the keys, it wouldn't please mechanical keyboard lovers. The touchpad is also nice and large, and supports multi-touch gestures. I felt it was responsive but you may want to use a real mouse while gaming unless you are highly skilled.
The HP Omen features an Intel Core i7 processor, an Nvidia GTX960M GPU and 8GB of RAM. While all this is great and pretty much by the book for an asking price of Rs. 1,59,990, the intriguing spec is the storage. The laptop features a 256GB SSD which isn't much but it is a PCIe based SSD. Now for people who are confused, a PCIe SSD is almost three times faster than a normal SSD. However, I do feel a 500GB/1TB HDD secondary storage should have been included at this price.
All in all, the HP Omen looks like a good option in the high end gaming segment but I do feel it is overpriced. However, we will see whether it can justify that price tag once we review the device thoroughly.