44 PCWorld DECEMBER 2019REVIEWS HP OMEN 17-CB0040NR
17 way below market rate.
I’m not sure how HP
pulls off this bit of
wizardry, but it’s made the
Omen 17 a hit. And the
trend continues, as the
2019 model we’re testing
(poetically monikered the
17-cb0040nr) packs in
some of the latest and
greatest CPUs and GPUs
for hundreds of dollars
less than the competition.FEATURES AND OPTIONS
Okay, latest and greatest might be a bit of an
overstatement. The Omen 17 we reviewed
(available on Amazon [go.pcworld.com/omen])
is a mid-tier gaming laptop with an Intel Core
i7-9750H, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070, 16GB
of DDR4 RAM, a 250GB NVMe SSD system
drive, and a supplemental 1TB HDD.
Of note is the fact that this is a full-size RTX
2070, not the 2070 Max-Q we see in a lot of
laptops. We’ll talk more about that later.
If you move to HP.com, the company’s
Omen 17 shopping page (go.pcworld.com/
b17t) offers options for moving up or down a
bit in budget. For instance, a model with the
same Core i7-9750H, an Nvidia GTX 1660 Ti
(i.e., no ray-tracing), 16GB of RAM, and a
512GB SSD is $1,300 from HP.com (go.
pcworld.com/hpcn). Swap in an RTX 2080,
and the price jumps to $1,930 from HP.com(go.pcworld.com/hpcn).
Then waaaaay up at the top is HP’s kitchen
sink configuration, $2,630 on HP.com (go.
pcworld.com/hpcn). It packs in an 8-core
i9-9880H, an RTX 2080 with a 240Hz 1080p
display; 32GB of DDR4 RAM, and a 1TB
NVMe SSD. I think the 2070 is a better sweet
spot for the price-to-performance balancing
act, but if you need to go all out, this top-end
Omen 17 is a pretty great bargain. The only
similarly spec’d machine we’ve seen is the
Acer Predator Helios 700 (available on Acer.
com [go.pcworld.com/p700]), where that
hardware would run $4,000.DESIGN
The Omen 17 is a good-looking laptop. It’s a
bit aggressive for my taste, but HP has a way
of bringing elegance to its game-centric
designs. I admired that ability when reviewing
HP’s Mindframe headset (available on HP.com
[go.pcworld.com/omnd]). While I think the