HP OMEN 16-C0011DX GAMING

The HP OMEN 16-C0011DX GAMING is predominantly plastic with what appears to be brushed metal around the edges. It comes with a matte black finish throughout that looks nice, but is also a huge fingerprint and dust magnet. Despite wiping it down often, it will be nearly impossible to keep it looking fresh. In terms of dimensions, the laptop measures 14.53″ wide x 9.65″ deep x 0.89″ tall. The base configuration weighs in at 5.1 lbs and adding upgraded hardware will increase that a bit. I’m a big fan of the clean lines and chiseled corners. Almost reminds you of a business laptop. HP has given it a nice aesthetic without being too sharp to the touch.

Processor

The AMD Ryzen 7 5800H is an impressive octa-core processor of the Cezanne product family designed for larger laptops such as mobile workstations (DTR). The Ryzen features eight SMT-enabled Zen 3 cores running at 3.2 GHz (base clock speed) to 4.4 GHz (Boost). The chip has 16 MB of L3 cache and a Vega 8 iGPU. Ryzen 7 5800H is manufactured on the modern 7 nm TSMC process, just like the outgoing Ryzen 7 4800H was, and both CPUs have 8 cores and 16 threads. Microarchitecture is vastly different between the two though. The newer Zen 3 microarchitecture brings a massive IPC improvement over Zen 2.

Display

The HP Omen 16 has a screen similar to its key rival, the Lenovo Legion 5 Pro. It’s a 16.1-inch matte finish IPS LCD with a refresh rate of 165Hz and resolution of 2560 x 1440 pixels. These last two factors are great for gaming. You get the step-up in sharpness from 1080p, while at 165Hz the reproduction of fast motion on this display is reassuringly blur-free.

Keyboard & Touchpad

The HP Omen 16 has a pretty standard chiclet keyboard with membrane keys. Key action is good among laptops in general, but some of the top-end gaming designs have deeper action keys. Their feel is light and fast, though, which is not a bad style for a gaming laptop. There is an RGB backlight too, but not the most desirable per-key kind. Instead, there are four zones you can set independently, including a smaller one for the WSAD buttons. The intensity of the colour and the maximum brightness is not as good as a per-key system.