Shane
Small, light and ready to play with the big boys.
The HP Omen Transcend 14 laptop has the goods to play almost any PC titles. Almost.
To get straight into it, you’ve got a dedicated NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 graphics card with on-board 6GB, Intel Ultra 7 155H processors clocking in at 3.80 GHz and 16GB RAM.
However, HP Omen skimped on the storage. A 512GB SSD is not going to store a lot of your Steam, GOG or Epic games library, and this is of course a drive shared with Windows 11.
For Xbox Cloud gaming you’ll be fine.
The 14 inch OLED screen is bright and vivid enough with a resolution of 2880 x 1800 and refresh of 120Hz, but it is not a touch screen. I found this to be unusual given most current laptops are.
Forza 7 ran very well, but during on track high speed moments the HP Omen Transcend 14 laptop started to lag.
Toning down the game settings didn’t help much.
Star Wars: Jedi Survivor faired a lot better as did Diablo Immortal. Gameplay on both titles was smooth.
The HP Omen Transcend 14 laptop doesn’t have great audio.
The downward facing dual speakers deliver crisp and clear but without any oomph. So if you’re considering one of these to get you into PC gaming I’d recommend some decent PC speakers or gaming headphones.
Not the same can be said with the keyboard however. This is magic.
Soft to touch and beautifully RGB lit, you can game on this keyboard for hours comfortably.
External ports are there, and pleadingly you have a few options. Two USB-A, 3.5mm audio, HDMI conveniently positioned at the back. HP Omen have also adopted USB-C charging.
There’s also a single Thunderbolt USB-C port, but it seemed to be under powered.
A USB-C external drive will work, although not at top speeds. It most definitely does not power and external screen via Thunderbolt / USB-C. I tried.
Battery wise, it’s purported you’ll get around 8 hours (non-gaming of course), but should include media streaming and some light content creation. I was only able to get around 3.5 hours. This is standard for most laptops, but a far cry from the 8 hours.
The HP Omen Transcend 14 laptop is a mixed bag.
It’s got the graphical prowess, mixed with enough RAM for most games, but it falls short in storage and audio.
I’d recommend the HP Omen Transcend 14 laptop as a good starter for those keen on playing PC games, or someone that tends to play games that don’t have a massive data footprint, unless you opt for a high speed external drive, or of course cloud game.
A very good laptop, but with some limitations.
