HP’s Omen Transcend 16 is basically a slimmer and lighter version of their Omen 16 gaming
laptop.
But compromises often have to be made when you go more portable, as you’ll see in this
review.
My Omen has the shadow black finish, but it’s also available in ceramic white.
The magnesium-aluminum lid, interior and bottom panel feel nice and sturdy.
There was only minor keyboard flex, less than most other laptops, while lid flex was similar
to others tested.
There’s a slight indent on the front which helps with one finger opening.
The screen goes the full way back for sharing, and magnets at the front of the lid give it
a satisfying snap when you close it.
The hinges feel sturdy even when ripping the lid open fast, but I wish the rubber feet
on the bottom were more grippy, as I found it easier to slide on my desk compared to
other laptops.
It’s quite portable for a 16 inch gaming laptop, a little deeper compared to others,
but still on the thinner side.
The laptop alone weighs 4.9lb or 2.2kg, increasing 6.5lb or almost 3kg with the 230 watt charger
included.
My Omen has Intel’s Core i7-13700HX processor, Nvidia’s RTX 4070 graphics, 16 gigs of RAM,
and a 16” 240Hz screen.
You can customize the specs quite a bit with the link below the video though.
There are a few differences between the Transcend version of the Omen, which I have here, and
the regular Omen 16.
This transcend version can have the screen upgraded to a Mini-LED panel, and it also
uses the taller 16:10 aspect ratio, whereas the regular Omen 16 is 16:9.
Which just means fewer pixels vertically.
This transcend version is also a little thinner and lighter, so the larger Omen 16 is more
about getting the best possible performance.
While the goal of the transcend version seems to be a hybrid approach between performance
and portability.
Don’t worry though, as you’ll see soon in the benchmarks, the Transcend version is
still quite capable!
My keyboard has 4 zones of RGB lighting.
The clear WASD keys are one of the zones, but there is also a per-key RGB option too.
You can use the F4 key to turn the keyboard lighting on or off, but brightness can only
be adjusted through HP’s Omen Gaming Hub software.
You can change the colors of the zones, but that’s it, there don’t appear to be any
effects.
Typing on the keyboard felt fine, though I personally prefer the clicker feel of the
Legion Slim 7 that we recently reviewed.
There’s no numpad, but I prefer that as someone that doesn’t use it, as it allows
for a cleaner layout of the arrow keys.
The touchpad feels smooth, clicks anywhere, and works well.
The power button is right next to delete and backspace, but a quick accidental press doesn’t
do anything.
If you hold it for slightly longer, the laptop will sleep by default.
As for ports, the left side has two Thunderbolt 4 Type-C ports and a 3.5mm audio combo jack,
while the right only has a USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A port right at the back.
The rest is on the back, with the power input on the left, followed by gigabit ethernet,
HDMI 2.1, and a second USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A port.
Both Type-C ports can be used to charge the Omen with up to 100 watts, and they both have
DisplayPort 1.4 support, so you can connect monitors.
And monitors connect directly to the Nvidia graphics whether optimus is on or off.
The HDMI port always connects to the Nvidia dGPU too, and we confirmed it could run our
LG B9 TV at 4K 120Hz 12-bit with G-Sync.
You only need to remove 6 Phillips head screws to get inside.
They’re all the same length, but quite short.
It was fairly easy to open with my usual pry tools, I’ll leave a link to the ones I use
below the video.
Once inside we’ve got the battery down the front, two memory slots just above in the
middle, the Wi-Fi 6E card on the left, and the single PCIe Gen 4 M.2 slot on the right.
For some reason there’s only room for one M.2 SSD, which I don’t think is acceptable
for a modern 16” laptop.
That said, I consider Lenovo’s similarly sized Legion Slim 7 to be competition for
the Omen Transcend, and although that one does have two M.2 slots, it only has one memory
slot with some RAM soldered, so that may be the tradeoff.
Fortunately the single M.2 slot can at least fit a double sided drive.
The upgradeability score loses a single point for missing a second M.2 drive.
Even HP’s 16 inch Victus from 2 years ago could fit two M.2 drives and two RAM slots.
The speeds from the installed 1TB PCIe Gen 4 drive were very good, and so were the Wi-Fi
speeds, one of the better results out of the laptops tested this year.
The speakers are found underneath towards the front on the left and right sides.
They sound pretty good, above average for a gaming laptop.
They sound clear, there’s some bass, and only a little wrist rest vibration.
The Latencymon results weren’t great, but there’s still a known Nvidia bug that may
make this worse.
My Omen is powered by a 6-Cell 97Wh battery, but on the website they only list two 70Wh
options, so not sure if the second one is a typo or maybe they stopped offering the
bigger one.
The screen’s refresh rate lowers down to 60Hz when you enable the ECO performance mode.
You can tick the auto switch checkbox to make this happen automatically when you unplug
the charger.
Interestingly, unlike other laptops, the screen does not flash black when the refresh rate
changes.
However, the refresh rate only changes with optimus on.
If you have optimus off, it always runs at the full 240Hz.
The battery almost lasted for 6 hours in the YouTube video playback test, which is decent
when compared to most other Intel based laptops that I’ve tested, but not as good compared
to AMD alternatives.
HP’s own Victus from a couple of years ago lasted much longer with a smaller battery,
for example.
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Back to the laptop, let’s check out thermals next.
The cooler has two heatpipes shared between the CPU and GPU and two fans.
There are holes for air intake directly above the fans, but the plastic grate looking thing
on the bottom could feel rough to the touch.
Air gets exhausted out of the left and right sides, and from the corners out the back.
HP’s Omen gaming hub software lets us change between different performance modes, which
from lowest to highest are ECO, balanced and performance.
You can set the fans to full speed in balanced and performance modes, or set it to manual
mode where you get some control over the fan curves for the CPU and GPU separately.
The internal temperatures were cool when just sitting there idle.
The rest of the results are from combined CPU and GPU stress tests which aim to represent
a worst case full load scenario.
The rest of the temperatures were quite good, no thermal throttling happening in any of
the modes.
Setting the fans to max speed in performance mode lowered the temps a bit, and then the
cooling pad I test with, linked below the video, was able to help out a little more.
Interestingly it actually ran cooler with the lid closed.
The CPU performance was a little lower with the lid closed though, so expect some slight
performance loss if you dock the laptop, but not much.
The cooling pad gave the best CPU performance, but otherwise the GPU was always clocking
the same in performance mode.
This is because Nvidia’s voltage limit was being hit.
Normally this tends to happen at around 90 to 100 watts, but with the Omen, the RTX 4070
was barely reaching 80 watts.
I don’t know if that’s actually a problem though, because the GPU clock speed was the
same I’ve seen from all 4070’s reaching the voltage limit.
Nvidia’s control panel says that it can run up to 130 watts, but that will only happen
in certain workloads - not gaming.
There wasn’t really a performance difference between ECO and Balanced modes with a game
running, while performance mode was only slightly better.
This is kind of weird, because in Cinebench we can see that ECO mode was performing quite
a bit worse than balanced mode.
We also found general use of the laptop in ECO mode to be slow, probably due to the lower
single core performance, but it seemed to be ok with the game running.
This is only the second time we’ve had a laptop with Intel’s Core i7-13700HX processor,
and it’s not quite performing as well as the other one - Acer’s Helios Neo 16.
The Helios was scoring 8% higher in multicore, but that’s because it’s thicker, which
generally means more cooling and more thermal headroom.
I mean even the Legion Slim 7, which is similar in size to the Omen, was better in multicore
despite having two fewer P cores.
Performance lowers if we unplug the charger and instead run purely off of battery power.
The single core performance didn’t drop too much, but the multicore suffers significantly.
At the same time though, Acer’s Helios Neo 16 with the same CPU was now further behind.
But that similar sized Legion Slim 7 was still doing better here.
Most laptops I test are in the low 30 degrees Celsius range on the keyboard at idle, and
the Omen was right in line with this.
It’s much warmer with the stress tests running in the lowest ECO mode.
The middle was fairly warm, but the WASD area felt fine.
The higher balanced mode was warmer for two reasons.
Not only is it performing better, and that produces more heat, but the fan was quieter
than eco for some reason.
It’s cooler in performance mode while also performing even better, but again the fan
gets louder, let’s have a listen.
The fans were audible when just idling in ECO mode, but it’s fairly quiet.
For some reason ECO mode ended up louder than balanced mode with the stress tests running.
Setting the fans to max speed wasn’t much louder compared to not using it in a heavy
workload.
By the point of 55 decibels you’ll probably want to be wearing headphones.
HP have joined the 16 inch 16:10 screen trend this year, and although that means a taller
screen, there is still a chin down the bottom.
A lot of other 16:10 screens will completely eliminate this part and just have it as the
screen.
Which personally, I think looks better as you’re just looking at all screen, but this
does also have the advantage of keeping the screen slightly higher so when you’re looking
at the laptop you don’t have to have your head down quite as much.
There are three screen options to choose from, including a super bright Mini-LED panel, but
I’ve got the middle 2560 by 1600 240Hz option here.
The colors are decent for a gaming laptop and it looks pretty good.
Ours can get a little above the rated 400 nits at full brightness, but this can vary
a bit between panels even if they’re the same model.
Backlight bleed was fine here.
I never noticed these patches during normal use, but again this will vary between panels.
Screen response time was good, and on average was below the 4.16ms needed for transitions
to occur within the refresh window.
There’s no overdrive option available through software, but I measured some overshoot and
undershoot anyway, so HP are applying one by default with no easy option of turning
it off.
It’s a good result compared to most other laptops, and in-line with a number of other
2560 by 1600 240Hz panels.
I haven’t had an HP Omen since 2021, but the newer screen was half as quick.
The total system latency is the amount of time between a mouse click and when a gunshot
fire appears on the screen in CS:GO.
The Omen was quite good here, and again a fair bit faster compared to the last Omen
I tested.
There’s a 1080p camera above the screen.
It has a physically sliding privacy shutter and IR for Windows Hello face unlock.
Here’s how the camera and microphones look and sound, and this is what it sounds like
while typing on the keyboard.
This laptop has a MUX switch and advanced optimus.
Normally you have to use Nvidia control panel to make this change, but the Omen is the first
laptop we’ve found that actually has an interface for this in their own control panel
software.
I think this is much preferable, because unless you know to go looking through the Nvidia
control panel, you might never know about this feature.
The screen has G-Sync when optimus is off, but that’s only controlled through the Nvidia
control panel.
Now let’s find out how well the Omen actually performs in games.
We’ve tested it with these settings for best results.
Starting out in Cyberpunk 2077 at 1080p, it’s the lowest result we’ve recorded for an
RTX 4070 gaming laptop.
To be fair, it is also the lowest powered 4070 we’ve had, so that’s to be expected,
as the others run with at least 90 watts, while the Omen was closer to 80.
The difference gets smaller at the higher 1440p resolution, with those other laptops
now just a couple of FPS ahead.
Some of the 4060 options aren’t far behind, so kind of makes you wonder why it’s worth
spending more for a 4070.
Red Dead Redemption 2 was tested with the game’s benchmark.
The Omen is still the lowest RTX 4070 result at 1080p, but the Legion Pro 5 just above
it is basically the same, and the RTX 3070 Ti from last year was much the same too.
The cheaper 3070 Ti actually ends up ahead at the higher 1440p resolution, perhaps due
to having more memory bandwidth, but I’ve already got a whole video comparing those
two in depth that you can check out after this.
The Omen is closer to the other RTX 4070 laptops in Control at 1080p and 1440p.
It’s also better than the 3070 Ti now, but not by much.
Here are the 3DMark results for those that find them useful, now for some content creator
tests.
Adobe Photoshop was tested with the Puget Systems benchmark tool.
This test likes single core CPU performance, and it’s basically tied with our only other
Intel Core i7-13700HX result, nothing too amazing.
The Adobe Premiere test recently changed, so we’re still building up our data, but
it’s near the Legion Slim 7 with the same GPU, though there were higher 4060s.
GPU power matters more in DaVinci Resolve, and like the games it’s the lowest 4070
result.
The Slim 7 is within the margin of error range, while the other 4070s had a more noticeable
lead.
The Omen was a little behind in Blender too.
It’s not much, but again when it’s scoring just 4% higher than our best 4060, it makes
you wonder if the 4070 is worth bothering with.
We’ve also tested SPECviewperf which tests out various professional 3D workloads.
HP’s BIOS is simple to navigate, and there are a few extra customizations available compared
to say ASUS, Razer, or Gigabyte, however Lenovo, and especially MSI, offer far more options.
This is normally the point where I’d test Linux support, but no matter what I did I
couldn’t boot my live CD, it just got stuck here.
Pricing and availability will change over time, so check the link below the video for
updates and current sales.
And if this laptop does go on sale, we’ll be sure to add it to our gaminglaptop.deals
website.
We update that everyday to include all of the latest sales, so make sure you check it
out regularly to save money on your next gaming laptop.
At the time of recording, Bestbuy seem to have the best price on the configuration I’ve
tested at $2300 USD.
The same thing on HP’s website is $110 more, though it comes with a free HyperX headset,
but you can also customize it here if you want to spend less or make other changes.
All things considered, I think HP’s Omen Transcend 16 is a good gaming laptop that’s
worth looking at.
My main issue is that right now, it’s $200 more expensive compared to Lenovo’s Legion
Slim 7, which outperformed it a little in games, cinebench CPU performance, and battery
life.
The Legion also has an extra USB Type-A port and an SD card slot, and weighs slightly less
without the chargers.
Plus the Legion has more tuning options available through software and BIOS.
They’re both similar in size, but the Legion has an extra M.2 slot, though the Omen has
more RAM upgradeability, and the option of a Mini LED screen if you’re willing to spend
more.
Even without Mini LED, the Omen had a faster response time, but the Legion got brighter.
There are pros and cons with either laptop, but unless the Omen was on sale to at least
match the Legion’s price, personally I’d be leaning towards the Legion, but that’s
me.
If they’re both on sale for the same price, my partner said between the two she’d prefer
the Omen.
She just liked how it felt to use more, and preferred that the software has the advanced
optimus modes conveniently built in.
There isn’t a right or wrong answer, both are great gaming laptops and it’s good to
have options.
Check out this video next to find out more about Lenovo’s Legion Slim 7 gaming laptop!
If you’re considering the HP Omen Transcend 16 then I think this one is worth checking
out next.