Full Review: HP Omen 15 (2019) | Best Gaming Laptop Under 2 Lakhs in Nepal?

HP’s latest Omen 15 offers a great gaming performance for its asking price and could be an option for users who are looking to upgrade from the entry-level gaming experience. Under the hood, it is powered by the latest 9th Generation Intel® Core™ i7-9750H Processor with Nvidia RTX 2060, 256GB SSD with 1TB HDD and many more features.

Design

Gaming laptops are getting incredibly thinner year-after-year, edging close to being marginally thicker than MacBook Pros. Taking the Omen 15 out of the box, it feels pretty sturdy and has considerable weight. The official numbers say that this gaming laptop is 20mm at its thickest point and weighs 2.23 Kgs. It’s well built, and a combination of plastic and aluminum is used for the chassis.

The rear side of the lid still features dual-tone textures. However, the carbon fiber finish from last year has been replaced with a matte finish while the other half has a brushed metal finish to it. HP Omen’s logo is embossed in silver on the lid but isn’t RGB-lit while the name “OMEN” finds its way on the hinge at the bottom.

Besides, the Omen 15 finds itself in the same bezel-reducing race as other laptop makers. Narrow bezels support the left and right side bezels of the laptop while the top and bottom parts have thicker and are irregularly-sized bezels, flush with an Omen logo in silver at the bottom-center. The top bezel is home to an HP wide-vision HD camera along with dual-array microphones.

A rather large touchpad resides in the center of the palm rest, while a skinny power button sits in the top-left corner of the deck above the keyboard.

Display

HP Omen 15 2019 features a 15-inch IPS display with Full-HD (1920 x 1080 pixels) resolution. And you get a 144Hz refresh rate on the laptop. So while playing high frame rate games, you will get a seamless experience. The display on the Omen 15 doesn’t disappoint and is excellent when it comes to playing games or watching videos on it.

But I wouldn’t recommend this to the content editors as it has 93% SRGB color gamut and 60% Adobe RGB and the contrast ratio isn’t also that great.

Ports

So talking about the ports, this laptop has RJ-45 LAN port, a USB 3.1 gen1 Type A, an HDMI port, a mini display port, a USB 3.1 gen1 type C and the Kensington lock slot. Then there is the gen 1 Type-A USB port on either side along with the headphone, microphone, and the SD card reader slot on the left-hand side.

Keyboard & Touchpad

The Omen 15's keyboard is a bit mushy but still provides a comfortable typing experience. And I appreciate having a full number pad. I managed to hit 65 words per minute, which is lower than my usual 70 wpm. Still, the keys are nice and big and well-spaced. 

The touchpad on the laptop is a decent size with smooth-touch and slide of the fingers are also very smooth. It comes with windows 10 gestures like pinch-zoom, two-finger scroll etc.

Sound Quality

The B&O speakers on this laptop is an HP specialty. Almost all premium HP laptops have it and with this one, the clarity is mighty fine. Not up to B&O standards, obviously, but it’s tuned decently well. It favors highs and mids while the bass is non-existent.

Battery

Gaming laptops aren't known for their battery life, and the Omen 15 isn't going to change that narrative. HP Omen 15 has a 6-cell 69Wh Li-ion battery and comes with a 200W AC power adapter. After the thermal issues we faced, on normal use without any games, the laptop lasts for close to three hours which was expected. It’s designed to be a gaming laptop after all and requires you to remain plugged at all times when playing games.

Performance

The laptop features a powerful processor. With 9th Gen Intel Core i7-9750H on the board, the device is capable of handling all sorts of tasks with ease. The six-core CPU on the device does not falter even while performing intensive tasks.

You get 256GB of Solid State Drive (SSD) on this laptop. With ultra-fast storage in the system, you get a faster load up time while starting the computer or loading the apps. This gaming laptop comes aboard with RTX 2060 graphics card with 6GB of VRAM.

If you want better performance, you should definitely add 16GB RAM in its second vacant slot. Now as expected, the 9^th gen intel processor and RTX graphics are a powerful combo.

I tried playing different games like PUBG, APEX Legends, COD, FIFA 20, WWE2K20 etc. overall, the laptop was able to handle all the games well and provided good fps. So, there were very minimal frame drops and almost no lags at all.

So, is this the best gaming laptop under 2 lakhs in Nepal? Yes, maybe. For its price range, it a beast laptop and the price of this laptop in Nepal is Rs. 1,80,000 and you can buy it from ITTI Nepal.

Thermal

Our heat gun registered the touchpad at 84 degrees Fahrenheit, with the center hitting 108 degrees after 15 minutes of gameplay.

Specifications of HP Omen 15 RTX 2060

Verdict

Overall, HP Omen 15 is a great looking laptop with good design and build quality along with decent display and good performance. The market price of this laptop in Nepal is Rs. 1,80,000 which is great for this kind of performance.

Pros:

• Supreme gaming performance
• Smooth gameplay
• Well-built
• Decently loud stereo speakers
• Full-sized keyboard
• Anti-ghosting support
• USB Type-C charging

Cons:

• Extremely poor thermal performance
• Below average webcam quality