HP Omen Max 16 Gaming Laptop Review

The 16-inch game laptop is a great invention. A slightly larger screen in the 15.6-inch model, made even wider thanks to up-to-date slim frames, it looks great and allows for a chassis, which is simply a bit more peaceful, so we get full-size keys, numbads and even speakers. They are not as entertaining as 18-inch laptops-the stupid machines-and you can Actually Use them as portable instead of being attached to keeping them somewhere on the table.

HP took the opportunity to tire this 16-inch omen Max 16 using the latest game technology. There is Core Ultra 9 and the RTX 5080 laptop GPU, along with a lot of RAM and a decent SSD. This is a complete package, though a bit hefty.

There is a lot to like in omen Max 16, but I especially appreciate the way he doesn’t save. The possibility of matching one of the recent graphics systems of the RTX 50 series in a laptop is one thing, but HP did not have to insert Thunderbolt 4 on a game for a game-USB 4 or even USB 3.2 10 GBP-this would do additional video outputs next to HDMI 2.1, which is already completely adapted to the external monitor connection, as well as the possibility to utilize some external stands and A.5g. Ethernet also.

Away from choosing a port, it is also a really nice laptop for actual utilize. The screen is IPS rather than OLED, with a resolution of 16:10 2.5K and a 240 Hz refresh rate, which will still make many people cheerful. This is not a touch screen, but you get a decent track size.

Although it seems that it reacts only to taps, not clicks, despite the nicely positive click mechanism, which is a gigantic problem if you try to drag with trackpad – it will go down the problem of settings or controller and can be solved. There is also a keyboard with a 3D effect for the keys, which looks like someone has bitten the ends from toblerone segments.

Still, it is definitely gambling laptop. You can say how it brightens (the keyboard is a rainbow, and under the front lip there is a airy belt), it has a name and a tiny password written on the back. It is apparently “designed and built for victory.” Although it is outside the scope of this review to promise victory and even speculate about its probability, what he can do is to offer proof of the number of frames per second.

Pumping a GPU such as RTX 5080 into a laptop has always generated frames, but also generates heat. Having the breath of the fan down means that the heat is directed to the leg area just above the knees, which makes it an un optimal machine for utilize when wearing shorts, and back there is also enormous ventilation holes.

I need them.

I saw the processor temperature to rise to 60 ° C only when installing software and 105 ° C (brief – knife for thermal thermal territory) when starting comparative tests, with the GPU spending most of the time about 70 ° C during pushing. Although it can be said that all the laptops that we tested with this processor show the same thermal behavior.

HP has equipped the omen Max with the “AI” fan control software and the “released” mode, which sends the fan to 5000 rpm in its CPU control attempts, and they certainly transfer. The balanced fan mode keeps everything calmer, but also knocks almost a 25% discount due to Spy Extreme at that time.

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Core Ultra 9 W omen Max 16 is a 24-core Lake-HX arrow model (which means no hyperthreading), which is capable of 5.4 GHz with 36 peaks of performance AI and with maximum power turbo 160 W. This is the same chip that you will find in laptops such as Aorus Master 16 and MSI 16 Hx 16 Hx Ai Ai Ai Ai Ai ai Fordevous for mobile in 2025. It is a very talented processor that goes into both artistic work and games, and ensuring a lot of grunting in games intensively by a processor, such as Baldur’s Gate 3. This is not quite Ryzen 7 9800x3D, and BG3 certainly loves this additional hand -held memory, but I’m not sure if I need 150 fps or more in RPGS.

If you have a monitor to take it (and omen Max goes up to 240 Hz), you can utilize the DLSS 4 multi -member generation to provide your games a bit of strengthening. This is one of the more fascinating functions of the recent RTX 50 graphics processor and makes a difference, increasing the frame speed in Cyberpunk 2077 from 38 FPS to 116 FPS in native resolution 1600p.

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Elsewhere, the results of omen Max game reference points are surprisingly inconsistent. It is capable of some good frame speeds, although consistently produced so lower than lower numbers than other laptops that we tested packing the same RTX 5080 systems and suffers from stuttering in many games leading to about 1% low results that really stand out from the rest.

It can be one software or update the driver away from improvement, but we can only review what we are ahead of us.

This is not all bad news: SSD in Omen Max 16 works slightly better than those in similar machines. Its maximum bandwidth in our tests reaches 398.42 Mb/s, beating the MSI vector by almost 100 MB/SI ASUS ROG FLOW Z13 by over 70 Mb/s. This is probably not something that you will notice in the game, because it will shorten the charging time only a tiny amount, but it is always nice to know.

And although no one buys a laptop for battery life, omen Max does not do too bad … Unless you play games. Because it does it clever Nvidia Optimus a thing that switches between IGPU and the GeForce card depending on what you do. So if you only utilize it to watch movies or browse the network, you can expect from it almost four hours of utilize before hunting for a very enormous 330 W power brick.

Start playing games and stress the RTX 5080, and the time in which it can spend away from the power vault to about an hour and a half, despite the fact that GPU Blackwell is to be more productive than older generations.

As for the value, the omen max 16 must be weighted with other laptops for games with similar specifications, and many of them appeared simultaneously. There is MSI Vector 16 HX AI, which has 16 GB of RAM, but costs USD 900 less. And there is ASUS ROG Zephyrus G16 (2025), which costs $ 300 more and has a GPU version with 120 W. Therefore, it occupies the central substrate, especially when you place 32 GB of RAM in the vector, and in recent laptop tests is the cheapest to offer 175 in RTX 5080 and 32 GB of RAM.

It is still not budget Machine – and this is fine – but Omen Max 16 has a lot of competition with ordinary suspects. You will also have to keep fans high if you want the best performance, so maybe some of the best noise headphones should also be on the shopping list.