The market for gaming laptops has certainly grown these past
few years. Apart from dedicated gaming laptop makers such as Razer,
Alienware
and Asus’s Republic
of Gamers, mainstream manufacturers are also building gaming machines
usually as a separate line in their product range just like HP’s Voodoo
products a couple of years ago.
This year, HP is renewing its efforts in the gaming laptop
market with the HP Omen. The Omen is packing a 15.6-inch IPS display with Full
HD resolution and a capacitive touch panel. Performance is guaranteed by a 4th
generation Intel Core i7-4710HQ quad-core processor with 6MB cache and hyper
threading, 8GB of RAM and an NVidia GeForce GTX860M with 2-4GB of dedicated
video memory.
Users have three storage options including a 128GB SATA SSD,
a 256GB PCIe SSD or a 512GB PCIe SSD. There’s also dual front-facing speakers,
a customizable RGB backlit keyboard, HP’s TrueVision Full HD camera, Dual array
digital microphones (with beam forming, echo cancellation, noise suppression
and support for voice recognition), a number of USB ports, a miniDisplay Port
v1.2 and an HDMI port.
If you’ve noticed, the Omen doesn’t have 4K display unlike
its top competitor. The tradeoff is the device’s much lower price tag. HP will
start selling the Omen this week for $1499.
