HP Omen X 17 Gaming Laptop Review

Introduction

HP have been one of the major players in the laptop market since before we can remember. Whether it’s a stripped to the bone notebook style that just about covers your email and browsing needs, or an all singing and dancing gaming model that pushes the boundaries of current technology there is a model for everyone.

Now whilst we wouldn’t be against showing you what is attainable on a tight budget, when it comes to getting everyone to sit up and pay attention there is nothing quite like a gaming laptop to really open eyes and slacken jaws. The drive for ever higher efficiency of GPUs and CPUs that the market went through three or four years ago has really borne fruit in the laptop sector with its power requirements making fullest use of any spare Watt available in a manner that a desktop just doesn’t have to cope with. You might notice efficiency on your desktop in the form of lower energy bills, but in a laptop it means you can have a more powerful system that has a longer battery life without resorting to something that requires a truss and an army of sherpas to move around.

Right on cue, enter the HP Omen X 17. Ticking all the boxes of modern thinking when it comes to gaming laptops, we had to put it through its paces and see what such a major brand as HP can bring to the party. Will it be slightly staid and stuffy as some corporations can be, or has it still got enough spark and sizzle to bring in the crowds?

Technical Specifications

There are a few different variants of the Omen X in the HP range and we think this particular configuration hits the all-important price and performance sweet spot. You have some blazing fast NVMe storage for the main heavy lifting with a large HDD for the larger storage needs. The screen is 17″ which helps you get immersed in your games without peering intently at a small screen, and on that subject our review sample had the best of the available screen options with the 1080P 120Hz IPS G-SYNC model. More than enough resolution without requiring ridiculous GPU horsepower to make the most of it, and the benefits of high refresh rate screens are something we’ve been banging on about since they first arrived. Couple all this to the ever popular Intel Core i7 7820K backed up by 16GB of 2666 MHz DDR4 and you can be sure that your system will be responsive at all times. Of course a gaming laptop wouldn’t make the grade if it didn’t have a good GPU to push the polygons and the Omen X has the nVidia GTX 1070, which should be more than enough to give playable frame rates at this resolution.