I’m going to show you how to upgrade the HP Omen 15 gaming laptop’s battery,
RAM, storage and WiFi in this video. I’ll also run some tests before
and after the updates so we can see if they’re actually worth doing.
These are the specs that my HP Omen 15 laptop had when I bought it.
Unfortunately the processor and graphics cannot be upgraded as these are soldered to the motherboard,
the only way to change would be to swap the entire board or laptop.
Pretty much everything else can be upgraded though. To open it up,
simply remove 8 phillips head screws. The four screws down the front are shorter than the rest,
so keep that in mind when you’re putting it back together at the end.
I’m using pry tools from iFixit to get inside, links to everything used
can be found in the description, but you could also use a credit card in a pinch.
I’ve removed the bottom panel a fair few times now, and one of the plastic clips
on the sides has snapped off. I don’t think it’s really going to be an issue
as there are plenty of others to hold it in place, but just something to be aware of.
Once inside we’ve got the battery down the bottom, with two M.2 storage slots on either
side. The WiFi card is just above on the left, and the two memory slots are near the center.
Alright so now that we’ve got access to everything,
let’s upgrade starting with the storage.
By default my Omen came with one SSD installed. If you want to swap this then you’ll either need
to clone Windows first to the new disk or do a fresh installation of Windows instead.
For most people it will probably be easier to leave the drive with Windows installed
and just add another drive into the second slot. Accessing either M.2 slot is the same,
just remove a single phillips head screw and take off the heat spreader.
It’s important to note that the unused slot has some plastic covering the thermal pad
which you need to remove before use, so peel off the thin plastic layer.
I’ve added the 1TB AData XPG SX8200 Pro SSD which they sent over,
and this was giving me 3.5gb/s read speed and 3.3gb/s write speed.
With the M.2 SSD installed, to get it working in Windows you need to go to computer management,
disk management, then initialize the disk and create a new volume, as I’m showing here.
Let’s check out the battery next. The Omen 15 is either available with a smaller 52.5Wh battery,
or a larger 70.9Wh battery, and both take up the same amount of space physically, so if you
have the smaller one you can buy the larger one from HP - again links are in the description.
To take out the old battery we need to remove 5 phillips head screws.
One of them is hiding under the M.2 drive on the left, so we’ve also got to take out the
SSD that comes with it to remove the battery, a little annoying but nothing too difficult.
I removed the battery cable from the laptop by using my fingernails on both the left and right
side of the cable at the same time and pulling, but you could try plastic pry tools if it’s stuck.
Putting in the new battery is basically the same process in reverse. Connect the cable, put the
battery in place so the screw holes line up, screw the screws back in and put the M.2 drive back.
When you first power the laptop on after changing the battery,
the LED on the power button will turn on and off a few times, and after a bit it will show
this screen. Basically you need to press enter to clear CMOS settings for the new battery,
or if you do nothing after a while it will just go ahead and do it.
You might also need to calibrate the system with the new battery if it’s its first use.
The best way to do that is to fully charge the battery and then unplug the system and
let it drain down completely to zero. Now by default, the Windows settings on my Omen 15
make it go to sleep automatically at around 7%, and I wasn’t able to modify this either,
so I just had to turn it back on when it went to sleep. You don’t have to do this step,
but if you don’t the battery life estimate in Windows might be incorrect.
These are the battery life differences between the two batteries. I’ve got both results highlighted
in red. The larger battery is lasting for around 35% longer than the smaller battery,
which makes perfect sense given the battery size is about 35% bigger too. Even with the
small battery the Omen can last for almost 7 hours in the YouTube playback test,
while the larger battery pushes this beyond 9 hours.
Next up we’ll upgrade the RAM. Mine came with two 8 gig sticks for 16 gig in dual channel at
DDR4-3200. You always want to have two sticks installed for dual channel, as this will give
the best performance, one stick will be slower. We could go to two 16 gig sticks for 32 gig in dual
channel, but instead I’m going with two 32 gig sticks from AData for 64 gig in total, so probably
overkill for most people. When you’re picking memory for this laptop, the important thing
is you get two sticks of DDR4-3200 at the same size. I’ve retested some applications with the
64gb of memory to see what sort of a performance difference we get. I haven’t bothered with games
as the last time I tested 64 gig in this video here there was no difference at all, and that’s
just because there’s no change to the speed or timings - we’re just increasing the capacity here.
In Adobe Photoshop tested with the Puget Systems benchmark though, and the 64 gig
configuration was offering a 22.5% higher score here, which is more than the 8% boost
I saw in the same test when upgrading the Lenovo Legion 5 from 16 to 64 gig.
The Adobe Premiere test only reported a 3% boost with the memory upgrade in this test,
but honestly this will depend on your workload,
I know personally for me trying to edit a long 4K 60 FPS video with 16gb would restrict me.
Next up we’re going to upgrade the WiFi card, or at least try as you’ll see.
Now the Omen 15 already does already come with WiFi 6 by default which is pretty good,
but WiFi 6e did recently come out, so I thought I would try and use
that. The newer 6e uses 6GHz for increased bandwidth, though you’re not actually going
to see a benefit from that unless your wireless access point also supports 6e.
Upgrading the WiFi is a much more annoying process compared to most other laptops,
as there’s a heatpipe covering the WiFi card,
at least for the AMD model, it’s soldered on the Intel model and can’t be upgraded,
thanks to bob of all trades for pointing that out in his video, as I’ve only tested the Ryzen model.
Basically this means to get to it we need to remove the cooler,
assuming you want to do it properly.
I was actually able to swap the WiFi card without removing the cooler,
as I found the pipe to have a little bit of wiggle room. I can’t say I recommend doing it this way,
but if you’re careful I was able to get it to work, you’ll just want to make sure to not
start bending the pipe, just be gentle, and if in doubt just remove the cooler.
Basically unscrew the WiFi card, then remove the two antenna cables attached to it.
The two antenna cables are labelled 1 and 2, and the WiFi card also specifies this on its ports,
so connect the new card the same way, put it back in and screw it in place.
Now all of this was basically for nothing as I couldn’t get WiFi working. I was able to
use the exact same 6e WiFi card in the Lenovo Legion 5 without any problems,
but WiFi 6e just did not work for me at all in the Omen 15. Bluetooth worked fine, just not WiFi.
I tried installing the latest drivers from Intel as well as a bunch of
other troubleshooting. Even the HP hardware diagnostics tool thought it was good to know.
Apparently in the past HP have used a whitelist in the BIOS to only allow
specific models of WiFi card, but from what I could see online it sounded like
this was an older practice that wasn’t done anymore so I’m not sure if that’s the case.
After messing around for a couple of hours I ended up putting the original WiFi 6 chip back
in and gave up, so at this time I cannot recommend upgrading to WiFi 6e in the HP
Omen 15 - at least until it’s properly supported.
I’m not going to cover thermal paste changes here as I’m perfectly happy with the stock results,
plus I want to keep that default paste from the factory so I can do fair comparisons with the
Omen against other laptops in the future, but if you do want to do this, basically you just need
to unscrew the cooler, remove it, clean the old paste, apply new paste and put the cooler back.
So we’ve now upgraded the HP Omen 15’s battery, storage and memory,
basically pushing this machine to its limits. It was unfortunate that the WiFi
6e upgrade didn’t work, but that was probably the least important upgrade of them all anyway.
If you want more information on this machine you can check out my full detailed review over
in this video. I’ve also tested it in a bunch of different games and compared it against other
gaming laptops in this one - so I’ll see you over in one of those videos next. Otherwise if
you’re new to the channel then make sure you get subscribed for future laptop videos like this one,
and let me know in the comments which laptop you want to see me upgrade next.