Gaming laptops used to be barely portable luggage that could play an hour on medium settings if you were lucky. However, the long boom in PC gaming has driven innovation in miniaturisation, efficiency and all-round convenience in portable gaming. And so, we have the HP OMEN 16 Gaming Laptop, a compact yet uncompromising machine that can game a little longer (and a lot harder) than you might expect while on the go.
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OMEN 16 Gaming Laptop, our review model 16-wf0008na, is a capable portable beast with an eye for detail alongside its raw mobile power.
Power Package
Our review model OMEN Gaming Laptop 16-wf0008na sports 32GB of RAM with a 12GB VRAM GeForce RTX 4080 (Laptop) GPU. That’s power enough to hit 60fps with some ray-traced elements on high/maximum settings in most modern games at the 1440p resolution of the display. That’s excellent for something that looks just a little huskier than a normal 16-inch laptop.
OMEN by HP Gaming Laptop 16 makes very little compromise to the PC gaming experience while shaving the form factor down to just 23.5mm thick. Perhaps most impressively, the unit weighs a back-pleasing 2.39 kilograms.
Stealth Rig
In keeping with PC gaming gear embracing a minimalist aesthetic alongside the rest of the world, OMEN by HP Gaming Laptop 16 wears a simple, almost demure, design.
Gone are the LED-lit strakes and aggressive lines of the gaming gear of yore, OMEN by HP Gaming Laptop 16 is a pleasant matte-black slab that whispers ‘OMEN’ in a singular gloss logo on the lid.
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OMEN by HP Gaming Laptop 16 wears its matte finish and low-key logo very well. The device is part-fashion statement, part-gaming powerhouse.
When open, a full-size, four-zone RGB backlit keyboard in shadow black puts on a nice lightshow. This can altered using the HP OMEN Gaming Hub app. But, it’s the the display does the heavy lifting in terms of visual intrigue when open. It’s colourful, sharp and offers appreciable contrast.
Gaming Show
The QHD IPS LED is sharp, offering 1440p in a 16.1-inch diagonal. The colour is excellent for a panel of its type. Contrast, again, is excellent for a panel of its type, offering decent dynamic range for better detail and immersion in dark scenes. The 1440p display is tuned for super fast response times, as little as 3ms.
300nits is more than adequate to game in all indoor environments. It’s also enough to offer a nice depth to scenes when playing darker surround. The display is definitely good enough to allow the powerful chipset to shine.
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The IPS panel may not be as striking in contrast or colour as an OLED type display, but the trade-off is incredible response times and minimal input lag. When it comes to gaming, I would wager that most, if not all, gamers would take the minimal lag over any visual finery you could offer with other panel types.
Game and Go
At just 23.9mm thick, the device is off to a good start in terms of portability. The 369mm by 259.4mm footprint is not especially large considering the 16.1-inch display and full-size keyboard crammed into its chassis.
Like the display panel choice, most, if not all, gamers will take the full-size keyboard and the minimum width that comes with it over a smaller, less convenient interface.
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OMEN by HP Gaming Laptop 16-wf0008na finds a good balance between its power and its ability to offer true portability. With the specs on board, our review model could do about 80-90 minutes with CPU- or GPU-intensive gaming sessions. Older games, or some conservatism with settings, could sail past the two-hour mark.
The four-and-a-half-hour advertised run time is doable if you aren’t gaming for those four-ish hours. For example, if you fancy some streaming (or playback from the SSD) of video or music, or need to some work on the go.
Portable Power
We tried out a few games on the OMEN 16 Gaming Laptop 16-wf0008na. During our weeks with the device, we tried wide array of games. From cutting edge to low-demand, single-player to sweaty online, graphics intensive to CPU punishing.
The automatic settings for Control running the onboard NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 Laptop GPU with 12 GB GDDR6 VRAM looked amazing hitting well over an 60fps. However, the game elected to leave ray tracing and DLSS off.
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Once these were turned on and a few other settings pushed, the game was closer to 30fps. However, it looked a half-generation better despite the lowered rendering resolution of 902p.
Sonic Mania‘s crisp pixel art, expressive animations and speedy scrolling looked amazing on the 240Hz panel.
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Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection auto-detected full ultra settings at the monitor’s native1440p. The game ran mostly between 50 and 65 frames per second at these settings, though there were areas where the game ran in the 40s.
While not as smooth as some would like, a few clicks on the graphics settings will give you a minimum of 60fps. There is a frame limiter within the options to keep the game tied to 30fps, the target framerate on PS4.
Movie Mode
War Thunder is an extremely optimised game that will run on a mobile potato. It’s no surprise that the game can run in its ‘Movie’ mode at some silky framerates. Movie mode is above actually Ultra – a graphics mode that the game advises for use only for making movies from in-engine replay files, similar to LMP files in Doom games.
Playing the game like this is quite a visual treat, it looks quite a bit better than the PlayStation 5 version which runs at 60 frames per second.
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Nevertheless, we can get a minimum of 100 frames per second in aerial battles with the HP OMEN 16 (16-wf0008na). We could expect no less than 80 frames per second in general play in ground battle mode. However, some of the more intense moments, like artillery fire on a capture point laden with companions, could tank it to the 60s.
Mobile vs Portable
There is a default power saving mode designed by OMEN for the laptop when off the charger. This aims to balance the power of the HP OMEN 16 with an acceptable running time from its six-cell 83Wh Li-Po battery.
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This will cut the framerates given above roughly in half. Some games are still playable at their on-mains-power settings, but most of you will have to tinker to get the framerates back into enjoyable territory.
Ports, Ports, Ports
HP OMEN 16 (16-wf0008na) could have done with one more USB port, be it a full-sized A or the modern C-type. As it stands, half of the two USB-A 3.1 and two USB-C ports will be eaten up already when using a gaming mouse and the provided HyperX Cloud Wireless II headphones.
A HDMI 2.1, Display Port 1.4, a headphone/mic 3.5mm combo jack, a gigabit LAN and and the proprietary smart charging port round off the I/O selection of the device. This covers the basics nicely in terms of A/V.
Power and Charging
As mentioned above, we could get around 60-90 minutes while doing the type of gaming that pushed the power-saving mode hard. A lighter gaming load could get around three hours, but that large display that is tuned for performance seems to put a limit on how long you can bleed from a full charge.
With a mixed non-gaming load of some word and image processing (like doing this review), some YouTube, some music streaming to a set of Bluetooth headphones, we could squeeze about four-and-a-half. And this is excellent considering the huge display, and that these types of activity are more like the device’s side hustle.
The provided 280W Smart AC adaptor can juice HP OMEN 16 (16-wf0008na) from 0% to 50% in around 30 minutes. A full charge from 0% to 100% will take around 75 minutes.
Interestingly, the device can powered up over compatible USB-C chargers. While you can’t charge via USB-C when the unit is switched on, and it charges rather slowly, this could be a saviour that one time you forget the charger on a trip. Using a Samsung Galaxy Pro Book 85W USB-C charger filled the battery from 0% in just under four hours.
And this has already proved its worth to us at TechStomper. Along the logistics chain, the 280W Smart AC adaptor was left out of the box. While we waited a couple of days for the charger, to arrive from our helpful PR contact, we could get a head start on the review.
Specifications – OMEN 16 Gaming Laptop (16-wf0008na)
| CPU: | Intel HM770 chipset – 13th Generation Intel Core i7 -13700HX (up to 5.0 GHz with Intel Turbo Boost, 30 MB L3 cache, 16 cores, 24 threads) |
| GPU: | – NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 Laptop GPU (12 GB GDDR6 dedicated) |
| RAM: | – 32 GB DDR5-4800 MHz RAM (2 x 16 GB) |
| Display: | 40.89cm (16.1-inch) QHD IPS LED, 300 nits, 240Hz, G-Sync, 3ms response time |
| Webcam: | HP ‘True Vision’ 1080p FHD |
| Audio: | Bang & Olufsen DTS:X Ultra with HP Audio Boost |
| Storage: | 1 TB PCIe Gen4 NVMe TLC M.2 SSD |
| Ports, I/O: | USB – USB-C x3 (USB-C x 2 with Thunderbolt 4) – 2.0 x 1 – DisplayPort 1.4 x1 – HDMI 2.1 x 1 – 3.5 mm headset and microphone 2-in-1 jack x 1 |
| Connectivity: | Wi-Fi – IEEE 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac/ax – 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz – 2 x 2 MIMO – WPA/WPA2/WPA3 Bluetooth 5.1 |
| Battery: | 6-cell, 83Wh Li-Po |
| Charging: | From 0-50% in around 30 minutes with included charger via included 280W Smart AC power adapter |
| Dimensions: | 369 x 259.4 x 23.5mm |
| Weight: | 2.39 kg |
| Colour: | Black |
HP OMEN 16 gaming laptops start from €1,649 in Ireland. Our review unit 16-wf0008na with a13th Gen. Intel Core i7 -13700HX, 32 GB RAM, and an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 Laptop GPU (12GB VRAM) will set you back around €2,300.
