DECEMBER 2019 PCWorld 45Omen 17’s heft works against it, there are
still some alluring elements.
The centered hinge is the major one.
It’s the feature that caught my eye the first
time I opened the Omen 17. Even now,
writing this, I’m still impressed by it. Other
laptops have done the single centered
hinge, but the Omen 17’s implementation
has a lightness, an airiness to it, that belies
the laptop’s actual weight.
That weight is significant. The Omen 17
is pretty average-sized for a 17-inch
gaming laptop, at 15.9 x 11.6 x 1.1 inches—
maybe even a bit slim, considering there’s a
full-size RTX 2070 inside. The Omen 17 is
dense though, weighing in at a whopping 7.2
pounds. The power brick exacerbates the
issue, measuring nearly a foot long and an
inch thick, and adding another 1.6 pounds to
the total package.
Call it the elephant in the room, and we’ll
acknowledge it
right here. The
Omen 17 is a great
laptop, but when
asked to pick two
from the list of
“Fast,” “Cheap,”
and “Portable,” HP
sacrificed
portability.
Okay, so it’s a
good-looking
laptop as long as
you admire it while it’s resting on a desk,
where it belongs. It’s mostly plastic, but HP
uses brushed textures on the lid to add some
character. I remain a fan of HP’s minimal
branding: Like most Omen products, it
doesn’t actually say HP anywhere on this
laptop. “Omen” is inscribed on the hinge,
and the lid has the fierce-faced Omen logo.
But that’s it, as far as branding.HP’s Omen 17 gaming laptop puts all the ports on the sides, where they belong.