A near 10-pound beast of a laptop, the HP Omen X 17 is designed for the gamer who truly wants everything, and we really mean it. From blazing performance to a full complement of expansion ports, the Omen X has it all… and it’s priced to match.
Design
Like the Acer Predator Helios 500, the HP Omen X 17 is a monster 17.3-inch laptop that pushes the boundaries of what you can comfortably put in your lap. 41mm thick and a whopping 9.9 pounds in weight, it is a gargantuan machine by any measure. (Its official tagline: “Overbuilt and over engineered.”) Surprisingly, little of this weight comes from the chassis of the laptop: It’s a mix of aluminum and plastic, though it all does have a metallic, industrial look. Boldly backlit all around, the default lighting color is a dazzling red, but this can be fully tuned within HP’s configuration app. Keyboard backlighting can be individually tuned on each key, and numerous lighting animation modes let you have even more fun. Stereo speakers from Bang & Olufsen make a room-filling impact, but perhaps the most striking design feature of the Omen X is its mechanical keyboard. Instead of mushy buttons, the Omen’s keyboard is clicky, tactile, and responsive, a feeling that makes typing approach that of using a high-grade external keyboard and improves the gaming experience considerably.
Features
The Omen X features six programmable hotkeys along the side of the machine. By holding down the Fn key, you can assign a secondary macro to each of these, all configured through the Omen Command Center app. If you’re looking to overclock your laptop, you’ll find a tool to help you with this included in this app as well. Upgrades are accessible through a panel on the bottom (which includes a transparent hatch that provides some internal visibility, with significant headroom provided for overclocked and upgraded components.
Specs
The Omen X is built with the bleeding edge firmly in mind. Components include top-tier components nearly across the board, including a 2.9GHz Core i7-7820HK CPU, 32GB of RAM, plus an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 GPU. Note that you’re getting a very fast processor, though it’s a seventh generation Core CPU (vs. an eighth generation model on most other machines I tested). As well you’ll find the graphics card to be a significant step up from the GTX 1070 model that’s otherwise the standard on high-end gaming laptops. Lastly, this was the only machine in the roundup to include two storage devices: A 1TB traditional hard drive that serves as beefy companion to the 512GB SSD. Ports include literally everything: Three traditional USB 3.1 ports, two USB-C ports, full-size HDMI and a MiniDisplay port jack, full-size Ethernet, and even an SD card slot. For once, there’s nothing else I could possibly ask for here. Also note that with a 3840 x 2160-pixel resolution, you’re getting a lot more detail on the display than you are on the other machines in this roundup.
Performance
While I was slightly concerned that the older model Core CPU would impact benchmark scores, that wasn’t the case in my testing. While the Omen X was just below average on my general application testing (which looks at web page rendering, business productivity applications, and digital media creation work), it outperformed the field by a solid margin on nearly all graphics tests, beating the average scores I saw by 10 to 16 percent. Only the Heaven 4.0 gaming benchmark saw the Omen X step back a bit, but that is likely in part because the laptop does not support the exact resolution in which the other systems were tested, with a slightly higher resolution used for that test.
*tested at 1600 x 1024; as 1600 x 900 resolution was not supported
Battery
While 17-inch notebooks rarely offer much in the way of battery life, I achieved 2 hours, 50 minutes of run time on a full-frame video playback benchmark on the HP Omen X. That’s better than at least one 15-inch laptop achieved in this test, and it should be good enough for the typical gamer. Do take care to note that the power brick (while stylish) adds another 2-plus pounds to your load.
Conclusion
At $2320, the HP Omen X is the most expensive machine in this roundup, which is to be expected since it is the most capable in terms of performance and expandability. The upgraded keyboard alone is worth a good chunk of that extra expense, though at more than $600 in additional price over that of the least expensive laptop in this roundup, bargain seekers will want to look elsewhere.
