Gadgetory

hey how's it going guys this is Dave 2d and this is a relatively late review of the HP omen it took me a lot longer to get this review unit in than I thought it would and when it came in last week I actually thought maybe I'm not gonna do it but you know what it's better late than never or so I thought so here it is now if for whatever reason you guys feel like I shouldn't do older products like this well relatively older products like this let me know in the comments below and I'll do my best to just avoid doing relatively older products like this I understand okay so HP's notebooks for the past couple of years I have found them very boring to be honest they're visually unexcited spec wise they're not very exciting I've actually found no reason to even be interested in them let alone purchase one for myself but when the omen was announced in November last year I thought it was pretty cool it's got a very unique styling spec wise was pretty good so I thought I'd check it out here's my review so if you've seen my other videos I like cool packaging and the omen has cool packaging the box is a trapezoid and it has pretty nice-looking sleeve so you can slide that sleeve off and you open up that box and the notebook looks pretty cool in there and underneath that is a box where they put the AC adapter and some other accessories I think the presentation of this notebook is really nice so the specs of the unit I'm reviewing it's got a 2.5 gigahertz i7 16 gigs of ram a 256 gig SSD at gtx 860m and a regular 1080p screen but the cool part about this is the price unlike more glamorous brands like Apple and Razer Hewlett Packard products actually go on sale once in a while so you can often save one or two hundred bucks on this product at big box stores like Best Buy this particular unit cost 1600 bucks on sale and so while we're staying at the lid of the notebook here let's take a closer look at the details so when you pierre really closely at it it's got an alternating pattern of these small triangles i think it's simple and it works pretty well the bottom of the notebook is also plastic so it's got these vents on the bottom and there's two fans underneath that draw the air in there is an SD slot here but we'll talk about that later I want to talk about this rubber rim that lines the perimeter of the bottom of the notebook so if you look at it you'll notice that aside from the gap in the rubber at the front in the back this rim almost makes a full seal and it kind of prevents the cool air from getting sucked into the intake vent I wish they put a few more gaps into this rubber rim just so that more air could get into there but we'll get into temperatures later HP says you can technically open this up to access the internals but it's not user friendly like there's no screws and things like that you basically have to peel stuff off and kind of ruin adhesives so I didn't bother with that the HP omen weighs a little bit less than 4.7 pounds it's a little longer than a retina MacBook Pro about an inch or so longer but similar in width in terms of its thickness The Omen is a little bit thicker maybe about a quarter inch or so and in this shot you can kind of see the design here the whole notebook has this trapezoidal kind of taper to it on the back of the notebook you can see the chrome hinge with the blue ends and you can also see the exhaust vents and all the ports here's a closer look at that blue hinge so my guess is that they were trying to mimic the look of a titanium car exhaust I mean it's not for everyone but I think they did a pretty good job to make it look good and I think it gives the whole notebook a very distinct look the easy adapter is quite big and for Holly redditors here's a banana for scale it's a hundred and eighty watt adapter so basically all the ports are on the back of this computer so the AC adapter plug lights up when you're charging it and it lights up white when the battery is fully charged along the back there's also four USB three slots and HDMI and a mini display so I was able to use this port to output 4k resolution at 60 Hertz and lastly it's got one of those combo microphone headset jacks just make sure that your headset that you're using supports this so because this thing doesn't have a built-in Ethernet port HP throws an Ethernet dongle which I thought was a pretty nice touch the dongle has a weird rubber band that goes around it it can come on and off but I couldn't really figure out what it was for so the left side of the notebook has no ports it's simple and clean and the right side of the notebook has that SD slot that I mentioned before okay here's the thing it's great that they put an SD reader onto a gaming notebook I mean some notebooks don't even have them especially gaming notebooks like the Razer Blade but the one they put in here is really annoying to use you can't insert a card unless he kind of lifts up the note book and even then it's a bit of a fumble remember how the notebook tapers in towards the bottom right so you can't see what you're doing unless you put your head down to the notebook level and kind of look underneath and removing the card is even more difficult so if you plan on getting this notebook for photography or video use you'll probably want to get an external reader okay we're finally done with the exterior stuff the trackpad feels really nice it feels like glass and has a very similar texture to the MacBook trackpad which i think is like the de facto standard for good trackpads it's also really really big I think it's actually the biggest I've seen it's bigger than an iPhone 6 and it's only slightly smaller than a moto X and the weird thing is it doesn't actually track that well it skips a bit and sometimes it doesn't register inputs I don't know if it's a software thing or a hardware thing but overall it just feels kind of janky but as a gaming notebook you may not use it that often if you have your mouse plugged in okay the keyboard chicklet keyboard feels pretty good I actually typed a lot of stuff from work on this keyboard I got used to it quickly so notice how there are six keys on the left side of the keyboard so these are programmable keys which are kind of cool like you can set up macros and stuff for them but if you notice it shifts the entire keyboard to the right so positioning feels a little bit off i misclicked quite a few times because of this so if you're trying to hit the escape button just at a reflex you're going to reach up and kind of hit the top left of that area but that's where that programmable p1 key is it happened more often than I thought it would but maybe that's just me and I really think your mileage will vary depending on the keyboard that you currently use the other thing is in the bottom right you'll see the up and down directional keys they feel a little squash I've mentioned this before but I like my up arrows above my left and right keys but aside from that the keyboard is really quite good so you probably know the backlighting on the keyboard of the omen can change colors so HP includes some software you can control the color of various zones on the keyboard including like you know the left side the right side WASD keys you can change the speaker's you can make the speakers pulse to music and stuff like that it all works really well but the novelty of it wore off really quickly for me the backlighting isn't as bright you'd think it would be especially in photos and in certain videos I actually had to film this in the evening with the lights turned down just to capture it properly it's definitely not a bright LED system I would say it's actually dimmer than most keyboard backlighting which could be a good thing or a bad thing depending on what you're into so this thing rocks a 15.6 inch 1080p touchscreen 1920 by 1080 the colors are really good and it's very bright I don't have equipment to measure the brightness but it's noticeably brighter than most notebooks means I've used I think HP put in a great screen for this notebook so fan noise when this thing's idling it's basically silent 20 decibels or just basically the sound of your room when the fans kick in it's surprisingly not that loud it's like high 30s maybe 40 decibels so a little bit quieter than some notebooks out there now in terms of its thermal signature I really wish I had my friends floor camera that I had from the razorblade review okay remember in that rubber rim I talked about in the beginning this video so I ran some benchmark programs if you leave the notebook sitting regularly it actually gets quite warm at the bottom doesn't seem like it was as hot as a razor blade but it's still pretty warm but the weird thing is if you prop up the base of some pencils or something just so that air can flow through the bottom more readily it gets so much less hot which is so weird to me I'm like why didn't HP just make a couple more holes on that RIM I mean it didn't get that hot without raising it but it was a lot cooler when you propped it up a bit the speakers are clear and the flashing lights are kind of fun but they're not very loud which is kind of surprising and disappointing because the notebook has the whole Beats Audio moniker to it but here's what they sound like okay let's talk about battery life I thought the HP omen would have a really bad battery life because it has the same size battery as a dell inspiron 7000 with the 4k screen they both share 58 watt hour batteries and if you'll remember my Inspiron review battery life was not one of its strong points but because this notebook the HP omen does not have a 4k screen the battery life is significantly better so on regular use with just regular internet browsing just using the computer regularly but full screen on time four and a half hours that's very impressive to me because I mean this is what screen at almost full brightness they advertised five and I was getting four and a half so that's pretty cool games hour and a half now this is with heroes of the storm which isn't a particularly graphically intensive game but I think if you play a game that has is more graphically intense you'll probably get closer to an hour but I tried this twice full full charge max brightness basically max volume one and a half hours playing here to the storm so that's pretty cool and the last test I did was just watching movie straight from the drive so I watched Game of Thrones three and a half hours a little bit more than that but three and a half hours which is also pretty impressive to me okay gaming on this thing this thing plays games well I tried most of my games at 1920 by 1080 on high settings and some games on ultra settings and every game ran really really well like 60 to 90 frames per second depending on the game and I think the 860m is a really perfect match for the 1080p screen the screen and the video card feel really well balanced and you're never tempted to run at a higher resolution because well he just can't so unlike other notebooks where I'm constantly trying to find the balance between higher resolution and performance this thing you just kind of set it and forget it at 1920 by 1080 every game that I tried ran really well on it and I really liked that piece of my final thoughts and the HP omen really depends on the price that you're able to purchase it for when HP first put this out on the market they were asking 21 or 22 hundred bucks for a fully SPECT out version and I mean that's expensive that's razorblade expensive but over time they've put this thing on sale a couple times and right now you can get a medium SPECT one with 16 gigs of ram 4 gigs of video ram for 15 1600 bucks to me that's very well SPECT and very reasonably so if you're a gamer and you're going to put this to use I think that's a very good option for you as for the design I think people will be torn I think some people love it and I think some people hate it just because some of the design elements are a little bit flashy and if it's not your cup of tea you might find it a little abrasive personally I think it's really cool but it's a little too colorful and edgy for me right now I think if I was younger I'd go crazy for it but currently I like my stuff a little more subtle and boring to be honest yeah that's the end of the review I hope you guys liked it if you liked it give me some thumbs and if you love to give you some subs it's been nice I'll see you guys next time