HP Omen 17 (2024) Review

Verdict

The HP Omen 17 (2024) is a solid mid-range Windows gaming laptop with a big screen, formidable performance and excellent battery life. The AI features it provides are more of a gimmick, and its display isn’t the best at this price, but it remains a decent choice.

Introduction

As a part of its CES announcements earlier this year, the HP Omen 17 (2024) broke cover, bringing it with a beefy mid-range gaming laptop with a degree of AI smarts.

It’s powered by an AMD Ryzen 8000 series processor, specifically the Ryzen 7 8845HS, while also coming with a laptop-grade RTX 4070 GPU inside, 16GB of DDR5-5600 RAM, a 1TB NVMe SSD, and a large 17.3-inch Full HD IPS screen with the benefit of a 144Hz refresh rate.

In this configuration, that’s going to run you £1599, although prices start at £1199 for a more affordable option with an RTX 4050 and AMD Ryzen 5 8645HS.

I’ve been testing the Omen 17 (2024) to see if it’s one of the best gaming laptops we’ve tested, and to see how well it compares against other similarly-priced mid-rangers such as the Lenovo Legion Slim 5 Gen 8 and Gigabyte Aorus 17H.

Design and Keyboard

• Hefty chassis
• Vast port selection
• Tactile keyboard and trackpad

Weighing in at 2.88kg, the Omen 17 (2024) is quite the beast. It’s a big, thick laptop, and a far cry from the trendy, slimmer choices further up the price ladder. When you think of what a gaming laptop looks like, chances are the Omen 17 (2024) is what comes into your head.

The only small amount of flair is the indented Omen logo on the laptop’s lid. Otherwise, it’s a hefty laptop that will require a fair amount of power to transport anywhere to be a traditional laptop. With the heft of the Omen 17 (2024) in mind, it’s perhaps best left on a desk at home, ready for a night’s gaming.

The port selection on offer here is solid, with most of them on the laptop’s rear. Here you’ll find a pair of USB-A ports, a USB-C, HDMI out and the DC in for the power brick.

The left side houses a full-size Ethernet port for networking, and a 3.5mm headphone jack, while the right side only has a singular USB-A taking the total to three.

Open the lid up, and you’ll come across a full-size keyboard layout in conventional form – for a laptop this big, it’s perhaps unsurprising that it doesn’t spring any funny business with a smaller or less common layout.

You get everything from a function row to full-size number pad, which are welcome for providing additional functionality. The keys themselves are reasonably tactile with decent travel while also being near-silent. They also come with a form of RGB lighting, with multiple colours supported, but no fancy patterns. The trackpad by comparison is large and tactile, and is befitting of a laptop that’s this large.

Display and Sound

• Responsive, large screen
• Excellent colour accuracy
• Meagre speakers

It’s usually on the front of displays where more affordable gaming laptops such as the Omen 17 (2024) cheap out against the rest of their spec sheet, and HP’s mid-range choice opts for a tried-and-tested Full HD IPS screen with a smooth 144Hz refresh rate and larger 17.3-inch size. This translates to responsive performance across a bigger area with solid detail levels both in games and when viewing content on Prime Video and Disney+ in testing.

As an IPS panel, the colour accuracy here is marvellous, with my colorimeter measuring 99% of the sRGB colour gamut, meaning we’re getting near-perfect representation of the mainstream colours for gaming and productivity workloads.

Both the Adobe RGB (83%) and DCI-P3 (87%) numbers are also above the requisite 80% marker, so you could also use this panel for more colour-sensitive, creative tasks, although there are ultrabooks at this price which are better suited.

Elsewhere, the 298.2 nits peak brightness just about hits our 300 nit target, and means the Omen 17 (2024) offers a reasonably vivid experience, although it is bettered by the competition, at the expense of their own colour accuracy not being as strong.

The 980:1 contrast ratio is okay, although means the panel lacks much in the way of dynamic range for impressive quality. The 0.21 black level out of the box is reasonably, as is the 6200K colour temperature.

The Omen 17 (2024) offers meagre audio from its built-in speakers. Audio is thin, with little in the way of low end. They’re fine for casual listening with some reasonable volume, although for serious gaming, you’ll want to invest in a proper headset.

Performance

• Beefy performance in benchmarks and games
• Solid RAM headroom
• Reasonably brisk SSD

Inside, the Ryzen 7 8845HS chip and 4070 GPU prove to be a formidable combo when it comes to powering through both our synthetic benchmark testing, as well as when running some games, too.

It allows the Omen 17 (2024) to feel especially responsive under load, and offers some decent results in our testing against the competition.

Results in Geekbench 6 and PC Mark 10 are strong, with the Ryzen 7 8845HS’s eight cores and 16 threads allowing for some potent results. They’re in and around the right area against Gigabyte’s Aorus 17H with its Intel Core i7-13700H, while it also matches well against the Lenovo Legion Slim 5 Gen 8, which uses a last-gen Ryzen 7 7840HS. The same also goes for the high-riding 3D Mark Time Spy score in reinforcing the power of the Omen 17 (2024)’s RTX 4070 GPU. For the price, the Omen 17 (2024) impresses under load in beefy benchmark tests.

Moving over to some games, results are reasonably strong at the maximum Full HD resolution offered by this laptop’s 17.3-inch panel. Cyberpunk 2077 at 94.71fps is solid, as is Returnal at 72fps, while the 170fps recorded in Rainbow Six Extraction maxes out the 144Hz refresh rate on offer, proving the Omen 17 (2024) to be a responsive choice for competitive titles. The 4070 inside the Omen 17 (2024) helps it along to these results and is a great inclusion here, especially when other laptops at this price stick with the lower-end RTX 4060.

There’s of course the fun of DLSS here, providing a handy boost in Cyberpunk 2077 with it pushing results up to 136.65fps, which is not to be sniffed at. Turning ray tracing on to its Ultra setting at Full HD meant results took a bit of a dive in Cyberpunk to 61.02fps, but it’s still more than playable on the Omen 17 (2024).

Elsewhere on the spec sheet, 32GB of DDR5-5600 RAM offers solid speeds with lots of headroom for intensive workloads such as gaming, while the 1TB NVMe SSD offers decent capacity for storing games and apps. It’s also reasonably quick, with tested speeds of 5062.39MB/s for reads and 3672.81MB/s for writes.

Software

• Windows 11 install comes with a smattering of bloatware
• HP Omen Gaming Hub is a useful addition

The Omen 17 (2024) comes with Windows 11 installed, although is unfortunately plagued with some bloatware bundled in such as McAfee Antivirus and its associated tools. Otherwise, it’s a reasonably clean install that features a couple of HP’s own additions.

The most important of these is Omen Gaming Hub, a tool which HP feels is so important that it’s on the taskbar by default when you boot into the laptop. This is quite a vast suite, which allows you to do everything from monitoring system temperatures and utilization to adding effects to both the built-in webcam and microphone. You can customise the RGB keyboard here, and ‘boost’ performance through toggling settings to make games run smoother. As well as this, Omen Gaming Hub can also allow you to keep apps in check and see which ones are using the most network bandwidth.

Given this laptop comes with a Ryzen 8000 processor, it also comes with some semblance of AI features, including Microsoft’s Copilot key that brings up the AI assistant.

Apart from this, you don’t get any of the same features found on Copilot+ PCs such as the Microsoft Surface Laptop 7, such as generative AI in the Paint and Photos app, or Microsoft’s clever Studio effects for the webcam. This makes the AI integration with he Omen 17 (2024) feel like a gimmick, as opposed to being something that HP could have leaned into a little more.

Battery Life

• Lasted for 8 hours 24 minutes in the battery test
• Capable of lasting one working day

The Omen 17 (2024) impresses with its endurance too, with its PC Mark benchmark test revealing a total runtime of 8 hours and 24 minutes. That’s some fantastic longevity for a gaming laptop, and actually beats HP’s own claim of up to 7 hours of runtime.

It also manages to charge the 83Whr cell quickly too, with a 230W charger. Zero to fifty percent took just 32 minutes, in line with HP’s own claims. In addition, going from zero to full took just over an hour and a half at 95 minutes, meaning if you are caught short, you won’t be waiting around for too long while waiting for the Omen 17 (2024) to charge.

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