HP OMEN Max 16 review: a great laptop for gamers and creators

HP OMEN Max 16

MSRP $3,250.00

Score Details

“The HP OMEN Max 16 is fast enough and laid back enough for both gamers and creators.”

Pros

• Conservative gamer aesthetic
• Strong productivity performance
• Excellent gaming performance
• Spectacular OLED display
• Good keyboard
• Solid connectivity
• Attractive pricing

Cons

• Thick and heavy

The HP OMEN Max 16 clearly aims to appeal to a wider range of buyers than the typical gaming laptop. Yes, it has excellent RBG lighting that gives it that gamer aesthetic, but it doesn’t scream “gamer” in a way that turns off creators. And that’s a good thing, because it offers up performance that appeals to both. It’s like the heart of a sports car is hidden inside a sedan’s more sedate body.

Generally, today is a great time to buy a gaming laptop, with the introduction of Intel’s Arrow Lake-HX and Nvidia’s Blackwell GPU architecture bringing meaningful increases in performance and visual quality. I’ve reviewed a couple of them and they’ve been impressive. The OMEN Max 16 is the most impressive so far.

Specs and configuration

The HP OMEN Max 16 comes in various configurations, starting at a list price of $2,100 ($1,700 on sale) for an Intel Core Ultra 7 255HX chipset, 16GB of RAM, a 512GB SSD, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti, and a 16.0-inch QHD+ IPS display.

Interestingly, that’s less expensive than a similarly equipped Asus ROG Strix G16 that’s equipped with the same GPU but a faster AMD Ryzen 9 9955HX chipset for $2,500. It won’t be as fast, but it’s also $300 less expensive (or $700 less if you catch the sale price).

You can also mix and match chipsets, RAM, and storage, up to 64GB of memory and a 2TB SSD, and select a QHD+ OLED display. The highest-end configuration with a Core Ultra 9 275HX, 64GB of RAM, a 2TB SSD, an RTX 5090, and the OLED panel costs $4,070 ($3,670 on sale).

I reviewed the laptop with the Core Ultra 9 275HX, 32GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD, an RTX 5080, and the OLED display, which is priced at $3,250 ($2,850 on sale).

Particularly at the sale prices, the OMEN Max 16 is an attractively priced gaming laptop that not only runs at high framerates with awesome display quality, but it’s also a very powerful laptop for creators.

Design

Compared to the most recent gaming machines I’ve reviewed, the HP OMEN Max 16 is a reasonably conservative design. It’s not the same kind of ultraconservative MacBook-like aesthetic of the Razer Blade 16, but it doesn’t have the same kind of jet fighter exhaust vents as the Lenovo Legion Pro 7i, either.

HP walked a line between those two, making the OMEN Max 16 a laptop that you can use for more than just gaming without sticking out. The main nod to a gamer aesthetic is the per-key RGB lighting and the row of LEDs along the front that project onto the surface below.

The keyboard lighting is better than most in that each key is surrounded by lights that work with the LEDs in the lettering to give it a more cohesive feel.

I like it better than most such keyboards, where the light spills out the sides and seems more haphazard by comparison. In terms of the front row lighting, that’s very similar to the Asus ROG Strix G16.

The rest of the design is fairly simplistic, in the sense that there’s not a lot of gamer-like adornment. You won’t find anything like Asus’s AniMe Vision LEDs on the lid, like on the ROG Strix SCAR 18. The OMEN logo on the lid is subdued, and there’s just a bit of text on the rear chassis describing the laptop. The lines are relatively streamlined, and it’s mainly the venting that identifies this as a high-performance laptop.

As with most gaming laptops, the OMEN Max 16 doesn’t try to be a thin and light machine. Its thickness ranges from 0.90 inches to 0.98 inches, which is around the same thickness as the Asus and Lenovo gaming laptops I’ve recently reviewed. It weighs 6.1 pounds, which is half a pound heavier than the ROG Strix G16. And the display bezels aren’t particularly small, including the bottom hinges that’s quite large.

That makes it a very large laptop in width and depth, including the small portion that juts out the back. But of course, portability isn’t the objective. These laptops are meant to be carried from one place to another, but unlike a thin and light productivity laptop, you shouldn’t expect it to be something you regularly carry around with you. Consider the massive power brick alone, which is absolutely necessary for gaming.

In terms of its construction, the OMEN Max 16 is more than good enough. It has aluminum in the bottom chassis and lid, while the palm rest is plastic. That cuts down on waste, and because plastic isn’t heat conductive like aluminum, your hands won’t get as toasty. The lid is a little flexible, but it’s not egregious, while the rest of the laptop is solid enough. Again, it’s not MacBook-like in its construction, but there’s nothing to complain about.

Keyboard and touchpad

I mentioned the per-key RGB lighting above, and I’ll double down on how good it looks. You get full control over the lighting with the HP OMEN Gaming Hub utility, once you download and install the Light Studio add-in. This allows you to control the color scheme, effects, and more, which also applies to the RGB lighting along the front.

Of course, we’re also worried about how the keyboard feels, and I found it a bit of a mixed bag. The switches seem very snappy, although they don’t provide the same kind of tactile feedback as mechanicals switches, and they aren’t as deep. So that makes them just okay for gaming, but at the same time it’s a comfortable keyboard for general typing.

The layout includes a numeric keypad, which is great for binding macros, but the up and down arrow keys are small and recessed. I think gamers will be a bit torn on whether or not this is a great keyboard.

The touchpad is a bit small, with a lot of room left on the palm rest. It’s a mechanical version with buttons that seemed just a tad loose to me. I know that most gamers will use a gaming mouse, so it won’t matter as much. But using this as a productivity laptop wasn’t all that exciting. I’ll note that it’s more off-center from the keyboard than usual, and shifted way to the right. That took some getting used to.

Connectivity and webcam

I can’t complain about the OMEN Max 16’s connectivity. There are plenty of ports, including a mix of modern USB-C with Thunderbolt 4 and legacy ports, and there’s a 2.5Gb Ethernet port for anyone who wants to avoid wireless latency during gaming. And, some of the ports, including the power connection, are along the back where they’re out of the way. That’s all to the good. Wireless connectivity is fully up to date as well.

The webcam is a 1080p version, which has become the new baseline. I haven’t seen a gaming laptop yet that has a higher resolution webcam, and HP did include an infrared camera for Windows 11 Hello facial recognition. So, that’s a plus.

Note that the Intel Arrow Lake-HX chipset that this laptop is built around has a rather anaemic Neural Processing Unit (NPU), coming in at 13 tera operations per second (TOPS) that’s well below the 40 TOPS necessary to meet Microsoft’s Copilot+ PC AI initiative requirements. Of course, the Nvidia GPU is incredibly fast at processing AI, so what you’re really giving up is an NPU’s greater efficiency. And, of course, you don’t get Copilot+ features, if that matters to you.

Performance

Most of the gaming laptops I’ve reviewed in the last couple of months have been built around Intel’s Arrow Lake-HX platform, specifically using the Core Ultra 9 275HX chipset. That’s a 24 core (eight Performance and 16 Efficient) single-threaded chipset running at 5.4 GHz and consuming 55 watts of base power.

It can boost up to 160 watts, and the OMEN Max 16 can make use of all of it. It’s a very fast chipset that exceeds its predecessor and offers up some excellent gaming performance. I’ll note that I also reviewed the Asus ROG Strix G16 with the AMD Ryzen 9 9955HX3D that has some advantages with its 3D V-Cache that makes it slightly faster for gaming.

In addition, all of the recent gaming laptops I’ve reviewed have been based on Nvidia’s latest Blackwell architecture, the 5000-series GPUs. All but one have used the GeForce RTX 5080, which is the second-fastest in Nvidia’s lineup. It uses the latest CUDA cores, streaming multiprocessors, and RT and tensor cores, and it uses Nvidia’s latest DLSS 4 with on-device AI processing that offers up much faster scaling and frame generation. The thing is, it’s not a huge jump in performance in terms of framerates, but rather all that AI processing power is aimed at making things look great. The RTX 5080 can use up to 175 watts, and again, the OMEN Max 16 can use all of it.

HP built an impressive thermal system, which obviously contributes to the laptops thickness and weight. It’s fully of buzzwords, but as far as I can tell, they’re all legit. There’s HP’s first ever Cryo Compound, which differs from liquid metal in that it offers the same kind of conductivity and coverage but avoids leakage that can cause short circuits or corrosion of nearby components.

There’s a vapor chamber that covers 60.8% of the motherboard, including all heat generating components. That’s mated to two fans that have a larger gap (2.8mm) and are more separated from the motherboard and keyboard. That helps them produce more air circulation while being quieter than the previous generation. Overall, the thermal design allows up to 250 watts of power, when split as 75 watts to the CPU and 175 watts to the GPU. Clearly, that offers up advantages for GPU-bound gaming.

And interestingly, HP develop a fan cleaning system that basically runs the fans in reverse to spit out any accumulated dust. That process can run automatically or can be manually kicked off. That means that the OMEN Max 16 is considerably more likely to maintain its thermal performance over time compared to systems without a similar feature.

The OMEN Gaming Hub utility that I referred to above gives the user plenty of control over performance. HP uses AI to manage things, by default, although that can be turned off and things like fan speed can be manually controlled. There are a number of presets, of which I used Balanced, Performance, and Unleashed in my testing.

If you choose Unleashed, then you can fully control the power provided to each component. I tested those settings put at their maximum and didn’t find a meaningful increase in performance. In fact, the biggest jump is from Balanced to Performance, which was significant in some cases. The Unleashed was just a little faster in most cases, and actually slower in some others. Fan noise was a lot louder as you step up each time, and I found that Performance provided the best balance between noise and performance.

The OMEN Max 16 was a strong performer in our productivity benchmarks, where the Lenovo Legion 7i was the fastest and the other two similarly equipped machines coming in close to equal in performance. For general computing tasks, these machines are all overkill. But all that power comes in handy if you’re running more demanding tasks like creative workflows.

In the Pugetbench Photoshop bunchmark, which runs in a live version of Adobe’s Photoshop application, the OMEN Max 16 was a bit slower than the other Intel Arrow Lake-HX machines. Photoshop benefits from single-core performance in particular, which is why Apple’s MacBook Pro 16 M4 Max is much faster thanks to the fastest CPU cores around.

Then in the Pugetbench Premiere Pro benchmark, which runs in a live version of Adobe’s Premier Pro, the OMEN Max 16 was again a little slower. But, Premiere Pro can use the GPU to speed up tasks like encoding video, so these Windows machines are slightly faster in this benchmark than the MacBook Pro.

The bottom line is that the OMEN Max 16, while not the fastest for non-gaming tasks among its peers, is nevertheless fast enough that demanding non-gaming users should consider it. That matches up with the more conservative design, where someone might want a very fast creative workstation, for example, but they don’t want to carry around a laptop that screams “gamer.” Turn off the RGB lighting and this becomes a laptop that won’t unnecessarily stand out.

Gaming

Of course, gaming performance is the most important metric here, and the OMEN Max 16 was in a dead heat with the Legion Pro 7i in most of our benchmarks. The other two RTX 5080 systems were generally a little slower.

As mentioned, Nvidia’s Blackwell 5000-series GPUs are aimed more at incredible image quality than sheer performance increases, and we see that reflected here. The RTX 5080 is faster than the previous generation in most tests, but not by a huge margin. But you’ll get much better visuals, especially in titles that our optimized for DLSS 4.

In the synthetic 3DMark Time Spy benchmark, the OMEN Max 16 is the second-fastest laptop in our comparison group, lagging behind only the Legion Pro 7i. And again, that’s faster than previous generation laptops, including those running the RTX 4090, but not by a lot.

In Civilization VI, which is both CPU- and GPU-intensive, the OMEN Max 16 is the fastest laptop we’ve tested. Only the Legion Pro 7i comes close. The Omen Max 16 was faster in Cyberpunk 2077 when running at 1600p and with Ultra RT (ray tracing) settings, significantly faster than the other RTX 5080 laptops. Only the Lenovo Legion 9i Gen 9 running the RTX 4090 has come close in our database. Then in Red Dead Redemption and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, the OMEN Max 16 was in the top three or four.

The bottom line is that, as with the other recent gaming laptops with the same high-end components, the OMEN Max 16 is more than fast enough to run modern titles at 1600p and with graphics settings turned way up.

Battery life

These gaming laptops aren’t meant to be portable. If you’re looking for a laptop to take to the coffee shop for productivity work, then a laptop like the OMEN Max 16 just isn’t a great choice. Who wants to carry a 6.1-pound laptop around with them? And that’s made even worse if you have to carry the very large power adapter, too.

The OMEN Max 16 has an 83 watt-hour battery, which isn’t as much as most 16-inch gaming laptops that are usually at the maximum of 100 watts that you can carry on an airplane. It also has a high-res OLED display and other power-hungry components.

So, I wasn’t surprised that it couldn’t quite make it to four hours in our web browsing and video looping battery tests, or about an hour in our more demanding Cinebench R24 benchmark.

Display and audio

There are a few display options with the OMEN Max 16, all of them based around a 16.0-inch screen size with a 16:10 aspect ratio. There are two IPS options, one FHD+ (1920 x 1200) running at between 60Hz and 165Hz and a QHD+ (2560 x 1600) running at 60Hz. Then, the high-end display is a QHD+ OLED panel running at 240Hz. That’s the model I reviewed, and it provides the usual bright, dynamic colors and inky blacks as all OLED displays. It’s quite spectacular.

The Datacolor SpyderPro colorimeter I used to test the display agreed. It’s reasonably bright at 409 nits, which is well above our threshold of 300 nits but behind the Strix SCAR 18’s mini-LED display that generates a searing 1,084 nits. Colors are very wide at 100% sRGB, 97% AdobeRGB, and 100% DCI-P3, which excellent accuracy at a DeltaE of 0.82 (indistinguishable to the human eye). And blacks are perfect, with incredibly high contrast.

The bottom line is that you’ll love this display for everything you might want to do with the OMEN Max 16. That includes productivity work, creative tasks, and, of course, gaming. High dynamic range (HDR) support is excellent, which is great for games that run HDR as well as streaming media.

There are two downward-firing speakers, which is a departure from some other gaming machines that have quad-speaker setups. The audio is okay, with clear mids and highs and some bass, but it doesn’t pump out a lot of sound. You’ll want to use headphones while gaming, because the fans get loud enough to drown out the audio.

I had the opportunity to try out the HyperX Cloud III S wireless gaming headphones, and while I won’t be providing a review of those, I can attest that they’re awesome. They support DTS X Spatial Audio, which makes them great for games that support that technology, and overall they’re great for gaming, music, and media consumption.

By nature, they pump out a lot of bass, which supports TV shows, movies, and games a lot better than pure musical listening, but even so, I liked them quite a bit. They work very nicely with the OMEN Max 16 by supporting the Instant Pair feature that works a lot like Apple’s headphones with Apple devices. Just turn the headphones on and they automagically pair. It works quite well. They cost $180, but they’re well worth it for serious gamers.

Another awesome Arrow Lake-HX and Blackwell option

The OMEN Max 16 is just as fast as the competitors I’ve reviewed so far, and in some cases it’s capable of the highest framerates. It’s also a very speedy laptop for creators, capable of churning through photo and video editing tasks. It features a solid build and attractive RGB lighting.

It’s also a more conservative design, meaning it doesn’t scream “gamer” quite as loudly. Combine that with a relatively attractive price, especially on sale, and you have a laptop that can serve the needs of both gamers and creators. If that’s you, then the OMEN Max 16 should certainly be on your shortlist.