I tested the HyperX Omen 15, and it almost made me forget my PS5

There’s no shortage of the best gaming laptops out there, but you might have noticed a change in HP’s lineup. Newer gaming rigs carrying Omen branding now fall under the HyperX branding. One such machine is HP’s HyperX Omen 15 that I recently tested.

That might sound like a tongue-twister, but branding aside, this is one of HP’s flagship gaming laptops, and it’s a very good one. Though the RTX 5070 with 8GB VRAM might seem limiting, you get solid gaming performance if you aren’t looking for serious frame rates. This laptop also looks sleek, even if it’s not as flashy as some other options, and it packs a gorgeous OLED display.

I’m mainly a console gamer, but after a week of testing the HyperX Omen 15, I spent less time on my PS5 and more with this laptop. However, it has the usual gaming laptop tropes. It runs hot and loud, and it doesn't last too long on battery. That said, it's still one of the best gaming laptops for what it offers. Find out why in my full review.

HyperX Omen 15 review: Cheat sheet

• What is it? A mid-range 15-inch gaming laptop
• Who is it for? Anyone looking for their first gaming laptop or seeking an upgrade.
• What does it cost? The HP HyperX Omen 15 starts at $1,499 on HP’s website. Right now, it's on sale for $1,099. As configured, our review unit is valued at $2,800, but is currently discounted to $2,099.
• What do we like? The gorgeous OLED screen, performance, and design.
• What don’t we like? The fan noise, battery life, and bloatware.

HyperX Omen 15 review: Specs

HyperX Omen 15 review: The ups

The HyperX Omen 15 gets three huge things right. It has a glorious OLED display, an appealing design, and smooth 1080p performance.

Vibrant OLED screen

The standout feature of the HyperX Omen 15 is its 2880x1800 OLED display. Not all configurations of the laptop come with this screen, but our higher-end review unit did. The screen delivers super vibrant visuals, both for office work and for gaming.

I have a Samsung S85F OLED TV at home, and movies like Spider-Man: Far From Home and games like Forza Horizon 6 looked incredible on the HyperX Omen 15’s panel. I spent more time watching videos on this laptop than I did watching my actual TV. It’s refreshing to have a really good OLED display in portable form.

When replaying one of my favorite classics, Grand Theft Auto 4, I noticed how much livelier Liberty City looked on this laptop’s OLED display. This game is famous for its dark and shaded environments, and the HyperX Omen 15 makes them all look spectacular.

When flying a helicopter high over Liberty City, every little detail dazzled me — from the lights shimmering in Star Junction to river water rippling beneath my helicopter's propellers. If this laptop could make a 17-year-old game look good, it should make the PC titles you play look even better than you imagine.

As our lab results show, this is a super-bright and vivid OLED panel. It hits 460.2 nits of brightness, which, compared to some of the other OLED gaming laptops we tested this year, is the second-brightest.

Meanwhile, its 1022-nit HDR brightness makes it the third-brightest laptop in our comparison group. The color accuracy is also top-notch, hitting 186.8% of the sRGB gamut and 132.2% of the DCI-P3 gamut, beating out all the other comparative gaming or productivity laptops with OLED panels.

Great gaming performance for most titles

The HyperX Omen 15 I reviewed packs an Intel Core Ultra 9 386H CPU, an Nvidia RTX 5070, and 32GB of dedicated RAM. You might be concerned about the 8GB of VRAM on that RTX 5070, but don’t let that fool you. This is an excellent upper-midrange gaming laptop.

I love racing games, and my go-to game on my PlayStation 5 is Forza Horizon 5. The latest entry in this series isn’t on PlayStation yet, so the HyperX Omen 15 was the go-to way to experience Forza Horizon 6. After five hours of racing on the Omen 15X, I never felt the laptop’s GPU was holding me back. It became hard to go back to my PS5 and Forza Horizon 5.

On the “Extreme” preset at full 2880x1800 resolution, I was getting a smooth 49 fps, and at 1080p, nearly double that, around 79 fps. Turning on DLSS and switching to the slightly more demanding “High with Ray Tracing” preset yielded better visuals and decent performance, with 39 fps at full resolution and 69 fps at 1080p. Combined with the laptop’s 120Hz display, I experienced no lag and had a pleasurable, winning experience in almost all my race entries.

Those results are indeed low, so it won’t really compete with RTX 5080-powered laptops, but it delivers enough performance for most modern games at 1080p with ray tracing enabled. You'll still need DLSS or lower settings to take full advantage of the laptop’s native 2880×1800 resolution.

The closest laptop to the HyperX Omen 15 is the Galaxy Book 6 Ultra, which has the same display resolution, RTX 5070, and 32GB of RAM. That means this system won’t seem as powerful as some other 16-inch gaming laptops we’re comparing it to — like a higher-end Alienware 16 Area-51. While the numbers trail RTX 5080-powered competitors, real-world gaming will be a great experience once you dial back a few settings.

Our lab maxes out game settings, including ray tracing, when benchmarking, and I found games like Cyberpunk 2077, Red Dead Redemption 2, and Assassin's Creed Shadows were playable, hovering just over 30 fps at 1080p. At this laptop’s full resolution, games hovered near 20 fps and were slightly laggy, but still playable. Again, if you lower your graphics settings to medium or rely on upscaling, you should not have issues enjoying gaming on the HyperX Omen 15.

Of note. The laptop has an Omen AI feature in HP’s Omen Gaming Hub. This can provide frame optimization with a one-click solution for each game. It’s a nifty feature if you’re not super technical like me. It can adjust operating system settings, hardware settings, and game settings on the fly.

When you’re not gaming, the HyperX Omen 15 is a solid productivity or video-editing laptop. Its Geekbench scores are strong, placing it third in our lab’s tests against competitors. For video editing and encoding, HandBrake encoding time lags a bit, but in this test, anything within the 3-minute range is pretty good for its class.

I put the HyperX Omen 15 through the paces of my workflow, and it handled a mix of 20+ Chrome tabs with ease, alongside Slack and YouTube music videos in Microsoft Edge running in the background.

Solid design

The HyperX Omen 15 is made of plastic, but it is done in a way that makes it appealing. The shadow black plastic finish is reminiscent of the color you see on Lenovo’s ThinkPads, making it blend right in with my office space. The laptop’s display also sits a few centimeters forward from the rear, making it seem like it is coming off a solid slab of plastic. Many of Lenovo’s gaming laptops have had this look recently, and it is a good one.

Ports and connectivity are great, too. There are two USB-A ports — one on each side, along with a USB-C port and an HDMI port on the rear. Other ports include an Ethernet jack and a headphone jack.

The laptop uses a 200W proprietary barrelled USB-C charger, but, interestingly enough, I found that a 65W USB-C charger can juice up the laptop just fine for basic productivity needs. I appreciated that when I didn’t want to take the heavy charger to work with me.

Two other great elements of the design are the RGB lighting effects and the keyboard. HP didn’t go over the top with the RGB. The laptop has a 4-Zone RGB keyboard, and you can customize each zone with its own lighting effect. Light Studio through Omen Gaming Hub makes this possible, but I found the default rainbow effect just fine.

The keyboard is a pleasure to use. While it does not use Cherry switches like Alienware’s flagship laptops do, the square keycaps still have a satisfying click into the chassis when typing. As a lab tester, I also appreciate the number pad on the side, as some gaming laptops ditch this for a centered keyboard.

HyperX Omen 15 review: The downs

No laptop is perfect, and the HyperX Omen 15 underperforms in several ways. Some of these might be deal-breakers if you’re hoping to buy this laptop.

Loud fans

One of the biggest issues I had with the HyperX Omen 15 is how loud it can get. During standard use, it is whisper-silent, but as soon as I start gaming, it sounds like a mini vacuum cleaner. I understand that gaming laptops need to pump up the fans to stay cool, but this HyperX Omen 15 is especially loud.

In fact, it got so loud that I preferred to wear headphones while gaming. I used a decibel meter to measure fan noise, and it hit as high as 74 decibels mid-race in Forza Horizon 6. For reference, that is as loud as a running vacuum cleaner or a noisy restaurant. My measurements came from the laptop being in the default “Performance” mode in the Omen gaming app and with my meter at the rear of the laptop.

Switching to “Balanced” in the app slightly reduced the fan noise to as low as 65 decibels, which is more equivalent to a normal office environment. This will come at a performance cost, though, as it impacts the Windows Power mode.

Part of my experience comes down to how HP is optimizing for gaming performance. This laptop features Omen Tempest Cooling. That means it has dual side fans with fewer rear ports, enlarged vents, and additional bottom vents to maximize airflow and heat dissipation. It works, too. Our lab measured a temperature of 89 degrees at the laptop’s hottest point. 15-inch gaming laptops might typically hit closer to 100 degrees in our Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition heat test, where we loop the benchmark 6 times and measure temperatures at 4 different points on the laptop.

Poor battery life

Gaming laptops aren’t known for their amazing battery life, and the HyperX Omen 15 is no different. In our Tom’s Guide laptop battery test, it lasted 8 hours and 30 minutes for web browsing and a short 1 hour and 13 minutes for gaming.

While both of our lab’s results are considered bad for the HyperX, it does tug ahead of the more powerful Alienware laptop in our comparisons. We've also seen other gaming laptops, like the Zephyrus G16, and a productivity laptop with an RTX 5070, like the Galaxy Book 6, go well beyond the numbers the HyperX put up in our battery test.

In my time with the laptop for work, it only lasted from 9 AM to 3:30 before Windows gave the low battery warnings at 10% with the screen around 32% brightness. For gaming, the laptop died after 45 minutes. OLED screens are power-hungry, and the 120Hz refresh rate with the beastly Nvidia GPU only makes things worse. It’s a trade-off you will have to live with if you choose an OLED gaming laptop like this one.

Too much bloat

This laptop, as we reviewed it, can cost well over $2,000, so it is very upsetting to see all the pre-installed bloatware on it. Right out of the box, the Start Menu was littered with pre-pinned shortcuts to various services like HP TV+, Booking.com, and a Dropbox Promotion. HP also throws in McAfee antivirus software with the laptop, which our lab always removes for our battery test.

That is in addition to seven HP apps: HP, HP Documentation, HP PC Diagnostics, HP Privacy Settings, HP Smart, Support Assist, Event Utility, and TV+. Otter.ai also makes it to the list. All of this can be easily uninstalled, but that takes extra work, and nobody should have to deal with this.

HyperX Omen 15 review: Verdict

The HyperX Omen 15 wins for its OLED display and RTX 5070 performance that handles most modern games well at 1080p. Its low-key design and comfortable keyboard also make it feel less like a gaming rig and more like an everyday laptop you'd be happy to take out in public and carry anywhere.

The trade-offs are a little painful, though: loud fans during gaming, weak battery life, and a Start Menu full of bloatware. But if a gorgeous OLED screen is high on your list and you're buying your first gaming laptop or upgrading an old one, the HyperX Omen 15 is worth the investment.

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