HP Omen Max 16

HP's Omen 16 (starting at $1,699; $3,509 as tested) can range from a midmarket to a high-end gaming laptop , but whatever the configuration, it's always a well-built model with quiet performance. Our maxed-out review unit tends to the deluxe, featuring an Intel Core Ultra 9 HX processor and a tip-top Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 graphics chip. The laptop's vivid OLED display and everyday usability stand out, though its super-short battery life and relatively heavy weight compromise portability. Razer's Blade 16 delivers better gaming performance in a trimmer chassis, but it's more than $1,000 pricier for comparable parts inside. For the best high-end big-screen gaming laptop, we recently gave the MSI Raider 18 HX AI our Editors' Choice award. However, if you can find the Omen Max 16 on sale, it would serve you well as a desktop replacement.

Configurations: From Midrange Muscle to High-End Hustle

This review covers the Intel-based Omen Max 16, which starts at $1,699 and at the base price includes a Core Ultra 7 255HX processor , a GeForce RTX 5070 GPU, 16GB of memory, and a 1TB solid-state drive. Prebuilt and customizable variants scale up to a Core Ultra 9 275HX processor, GeForce RTX 5080 or 5090 graphics, 64GB of RAM, and a 2TB SSD.

HP's display options range from 1,920-by-1,200-pixel or 2,560-by-1,600-pixel 165Hz IPS panels to the 240Hz OLED screen I've tested. The company also sells an AMD-based version with Ryzen AI processors, though those models top out with the RTX 5080 and lack an OLED screen option.

In raw performance, HP's base configuration presents a significantly better value than the Razer Blade 16 , which starts at $2,399 with just a GeForce RTX 5060. Even the fully loaded review unit I've tested comes in about $1,000 cheaper than a similarly equipped Blade, making the Omen Max 16 one of the more budget-conscious routes into higher-end RTX 50-series gaming silicon, relatively speaking.

Design: Striking the Luxe-Gamer Balance

The classy Omen Max 16 limits its gaming laptop aesthetic to an RGB light bar along the front edge. It stands out more for its physical size than anything else; at 0.98 by 14 by 10.6 inches (HWD) and 5.9 pounds, the Omen is noticeably larger and heavier than the Blade 16 (0.9 by 14 by 9.6 inches and 5.4 pounds).

HP's aluminum chassis feels like it should: solid, with no flex. The laptop's upper half comprises a single piece of metal, and every edge is immaculately finished, even those that are rarely touched. The branding is tastefully minimal on the lid and beneath the display, though the bold "O16" inscription on the palm rest veers toward ostentation. For a brighter look, HP also sells the chassis in Ceramic White.

The laptop's port selection covers the bases, including two Thunderbolt 4 (USB Type-C) ports, two USB Type-A ports, an HDMI 2.1 monitor output, a 2.5Gbps Ethernet jack, and a 3.5mm audio combo jack. The AC power jack and several ports are conveniently out of sight along the rear edge, minimizing cable clutter.

The Omen 16 features Intel's BE200 wireless card, which supports the latest Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 protocols, for connecting to the internet and other devices. Though the Omen lacks a fingerprint reader, the 1080p webcam compensates with an infrared sensor for Windows Hello , a sliding privacy shutter, and impressively clear video. HP backs it all with a one-year warranty.

Display, Keyboard, and Special Features: Not Just for Gamers

Although designed for gaming, the Omen Max 16 surprises with its all-around utility. Underneath its gamer aesthetic, this machine powers through spreadsheets and creative workloads just as comfortably as it handles the latest AAA fragfests.

Thanks to the thick chassis and top-mounted hinges, the Omen Max 16's display sits closer to eye level than most mainstream laptops. While I didn't sample the Omen's IPS display panels, I can say that the 2,560-by-1,600-pixel OLED is worth the $190 upcharge. It produces rich, vivid imagery at a 240Hz refresh rate, minimizing frame tearing in games and refreshing everyday tasks. And it scrolls through content so fluidly that your last computer might seem like it was in slideshow mode. The glossy surface is the only downside, tending to attract dust and suffer from reflections in locations with lighting you can't control.

This laptop uses its generous chassis well by including a nearly full-size number pad. While the mismatched arrow keys are irksome, you'll find handy layout perks, like Fn+F10 and Fn+F11 shortcuts to turn off the Windows key and touchpad, plus dedicated buttons above the number pad for access to the Omen Gaming Hub, Windows 11 settings, and the calculator. While the light, rubbery key feel isn't a recipe for precision tactile feedback, I easily hit my personal best of 120 words per minute in the MonkeyType typing test. I'd nonetheless like to see HP provide the option for a mechanical keyboard.

The Omen Light Studio app allows you to configure lighting settings for the per-key keyboard backlighting and the light bar. HP includes many presets, such as wave, breathing, and color cycle, and several interactive modes, such as an audio visualizer. You can also create your own layered effects, and their brightness is adjustable.

HP's Omen Gaming Hub goes beyond basic tuning with granular overclocking controls, including per-core CPU multipliers, voltage adjustments, and GPU core and memory offsets. Additional tools include a macro key editor, a fan-cleaning utility, and a schedulable junk-file cleaner. On the social side, the app features a user-generated wallpaper gallery and the option to upload your own.

The chassis remains comfortably lukewarm even while gaming. The Omen runs quietly in daily use, with its fans only occasionally ramping up (within expectations for a gaming laptop). HP's built-in speakers deliver clear sound quality and enough volume to overpower the fans. The only real knock against the everyday usability is its fleeting battery life, which struggles to last more than a few hours off the plug, as I'll explore next.

Performance Testing: One Speedy 16-Inch Laptop

We tested the Omen Max 16 in a top-level configuration consisting of a Core Ultra 9 275HX processor (24 cores, 5.4GHz turbo), a GeForce RTX 5090 GPU, 32GB of RAM, a 2TB SSD, and Windows 11 Pro. This configuration is essentially maxed out except for the memory, which scales to 64GB.

Two RTX 50-series laptops—the Razer Blade 16 ($4,499.99 as tested) and the MSI Raider 18 HX AI ($3,999.99 as tested)—headline our Omen testing charts. We've also included the Acer Predator Helios 18 ($3,099.99 as tested) and the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 ($3,899.99 as tested), which feature last-generation RTX 4090 GPUs.

Productivity and Content Creation Tests

Our primary overall benchmark, UL's PCMark 10, puts a system through its paces in productivity apps ranging from web browsing to word processing and spreadsheet work. Its Full System Drive subtest measures a PC's storage throughput. Three more tests are CPU-centric or processor-intensive: Maxon's Cinebench 2024 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene; Primate Labs' Geekbench 6.3 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning; and we see how long it takes the video transcoder HandBrake 1.8 to convert a 12-minute clip from 4K to 1080p resolution. 

Finally, workstation maker Puget Systems' PugetBench for Creators rates a PC's image editing prowess with a variety of automated operations in Adobe Photoshop 25.

While not class-leading, the Omen Max 16 proved potent across the board, particularly in general productivity testing and some CPU-centric tasks. The Omen notably never won first place in this comparison set but took silver in PCMark 10's Overall Score and in the Geekbench 6 Multi-Core test.

HP's laptop couldn't topple MSI's beastly rig, in any event, but its Core Ultra 9 comfortably outpaced the older Core i9 silicon in the Acer and Asus in the Geekbench test. The Intel-equipped Omen also decisively outgunned the Razer's AMD chip in every CPU-centered test save for Photoshop. However, that older Intel Core i9 silicon showed its staying power in Cinebench and HandBrake. The 18-inch Asus laptop notably drew a lot of juice out of its Core i9 for Photoshop.

It suffices to say that the Omen 16 Max delivers more productivity power than a maxed-out Razer Blade 16 for far less cash. However, MSI's Raider blew away both laptops in every test but the PCMark Storage benchmark, proving its dominance in the category so far, though at a higher cost. And don't count out those older Core i9-14900HX chips for multicore work.

Graphics and Gaming Tests

We challenge all systems' graphics with a quintet of animations or gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark test suite. The first two, Wild Life (1440p) and Wild Life Extreme (4K), use the Vulkan graphics API to measure GPU speeds. The next pair, Steel Nomad's regular and Light subtests, focuses on APIs more commonly used for game development, like Metal and DirectX 12, to assess gaming geometry and particle effects. Last, we turn to Solar Bay to measure ray tracing performance.

Our real-world gaming testing comes from the in-game benchmarks of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Cyberpunk 2077, and F1 2024. These three games—all benchmarked at the system's full HD (1080p or 1200p native) resolution—represent competitive shooter, open-world, and simulation games, respectively. If the screen is capable of a higher resolution, we rerun the tests at the QHD equivalent of 1440p or 1600p. We run each game at two sets of graphics settings per resolution, for up to four runs total on each game. However, our Call of Duty test would not run due to a game-side issue unrelated to the Omen, so we do not include any Call of Duty results below.

Our Cyberpunk 2077 test settings aim to push PCs fully, so we run it on the Ultra graphics preset and again at the all-out Ray Tracing Overdrive preset without DLSS or FSR. F1, meanwhile, represents our DLSS effectiveness (or FSR on AMD systems) test, demonstrating a GPU's capacity for frame-boosting upscaling technologies. (We were not able to draw accurate numbers out of the Razer laptop for the F1 24 test.)

First off, the Omen's 3DMark scores were only so-so for this lot: The Razer laptop and its implementation of the RTX 5090 left it behind, and the HP laptop outran the RTX 4090-equipped Acer and Asus in just the Steel Nomad tests. HP's maximum-size gaming laptop held its own in real-world gameplay, however, scoring near the MSI in F1 24 and staying competitive in the demanding Cyberpunk 2077. These figures position the Omen among the highest performers in the 16-inch class, at least among the systems we've tested as of this review.

Battery Life and Display Tests

We test each laptop and tablet's battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel ) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off.

To gauge display performance, we also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its Windows software to measure a laptop screen's color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).

The Omen's battery life seems more like a backup plan—you'll be lucky to squeeze in a movie off the outlet. Even the powerhouse MSI lasted more than twice as long. On the bright side, the Omen's screen is a knockout, producing full color spectrum coverage and excellent brightness for an OLED panel. MSI's mini-LED screen is even more dazzling, but that system has a much larger footprint, particularly for your wallet.