HP OMEN – Transcend 14″ 120Hz 2.8K OLED Gaming Laptop – Intel Core Ultra 9-185H – 32GB Memory – NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 – 1TB SSD – Shadow Black

I came from a Lenovo Legion Slim 14 (16GB) which Bestbuy still has on sale for $1050 as of writing this review. The Legion Slim is an excellent machine, it’s got a nice chassis (albeit with a plastic palm rest), a very nice OLED panel, and a high power 4060.. For my use case, which is using the laptop on a lap desk, on the couch, with a controller, the Omen is a considerably better machine. At the same GPU wattage (around 40w), the Omen is much quieter. This is probably thanks to the vapor chamber, vs heat pipe setup the Legion has. Keep in mind, this is not a full power 4070. If you buy this expecting a full bore gaming machine that will max out every modern title at 120fps, this is not the laptop for you. I lock my games to 60fps (with the exception of older titles) to keep frame-times consistent and for that goal, this laptop does great. When it comes to smaller laptops there is always a compromise. HPs goal seems like it was to make a powerful multimedia laptop that has some gaming prowess but isn’t a giant 17″ 240w desktop replacement. A couple more plusses for the Omen over the Legion Slim: + Edge to edge glass, looks better, easier to clean + Marginally brighter OLED + Considerably better speakers, very good for downward firing + Metal chassis all around + USB C charging @ 28v 5a (unlike the Legion Slim proprietary 20v 7a) this is huge, being able to replace the factory power supply (which is nice quality and not large) down the road with a off the shelf 140w USB C charger is a huge win for the Omen.

So about my title… I think the Omen TRANSEND 14 is a fantastic laptop that will be a great option for a lot of people. But the 4070 in this laptop is basically wasted at 50 watts and 65 max with boost. But the 15watt boost is exactly that! Some people think you can turn on the boost and the GPU will run at 65watt now but it is just not the case. It can boost to 65watts but it will not run at 65watts consistently. So HP hamstrings you in this way because this is the only model with 32gb of RAM. If HP made a 4060 version with 32gb of RAM it would be a huge seller for them I believe. the 4070 is underperforming majorly in this laptop. I think HP did this with “cooling & power” in mind but I think it was a mistake. If they set the 4070 to 65watts with 15watt boost to 75watts this laptop would be one of the best options of the year and a huge winner. If you can live with 16gb of RAM then the 4060 version is by far the clear winner. But you do get 32gb of RAM, the Ultra 9, and the 4070 for an extra $300 so it is a good priced upgrade. Just wish the GPU was better. But oh well!! SCREEN – The screen is prolly the best part of the laptop with 2.8k/120hz and OLED. The screen looks really beautiful! The HDR is nice and accurate after calibrating to 500 nits, at least for my eyes. KEYBOARD/TRACKPAD – The keyboard is really nice as well and something new and different that has not been seen with the pudding keycap, which is a nice change of pace these days. The keys are very comfy and accurate to type on. The OMEN software has some decent options to control the RGB but hope they update it with more options. There are 4 zones to control which is nice and they are going to release a “per key” version later this year. The trackpad is large and accurate! Nice and smooth with a good click to it. CHASSIS – The laptop is really well made with no plastic parts. It feels really nice and firm and just has that really premium feel. Don’t know what the previous Best Buy review was talking about when they said it was flimsy. It is an all metal design that would be a bit softer then a BLADE 14 but also lighter. I also saw a review of it that said there was significant screen wobble (Andrew Marc David’s review on youtube) but mine does not do that at all so hopefully his was an anomaly… It is super light and easy to carry around/transport even with the power brick. I cant get an exact but combined it is about 4.2 pounds which is good for an all-around productivity/gaming laptop. I don’t know if best buy will ever sell the white version of this laptop but I got the shadow grey version and it is finger print magnet. But M2 skins does sell a skin for this exact model so I put a skin on mine and it looks great (almost like there is not skin) and is way better on finger prints now. The cassis also has good port selection but not great. With two USB-C ports that are both PD and DP1.4 (the left one is thunderbolt), one HDMI 2.1 port, and two USB-A port that i think are 10gbps. COOLING – Cooling is where I think this laptop beats the G14 hands down. The vapor chamber and exhaust design is better then the G14 because of the screen hinge location. Having that small back lip on the back with rear exhaust that also houses the HDMI port/USB-C port allows the TRANSEND to fully exhaust the heat without hot air bouncing of the hinge like on a G14. It says really cool out of the box but I took my vapor chamber off and put liquid metal on the GPU & CPU. Now the CPU stays around 37 degrees at idle. Even doing an older Cinebench 2023 run mine does not go over 68-70 degrees on the CPU. While idle the GPU is right around 40 degrees and when gaming goes to 64-65 degrees at the most. But before putting liquid metal in it still ran well. The fans can get decently loud if you put them on max but you are also able to create specific fan curves in the OMEN software after 50 degrees. PROCESSOR & RAM – The processor is great and runs as well as an ULTRA 9 can run in a 14 inch chassis. My cinebench run gets over 16000 which is great for a laptop this small. the RAM is good too and runs at a whopping speed of 7467! It is Samsung RAM that is soldered obviously, but still runs good! But I don’t know that anyone would be able to tell the RAM speed is high based on pure performance. BAD THINGS/MISSING/WEIRD – There are some bad and maybe weird things with this laptop as well. Obviously the weakened 4070 GPU but there is also no MUX switch. Just my option but all laptops that are marketed for gaming should come with MUX switches. Don’t know why this one does not have it. Also, the screen is not G-SYNC for some reason even with the supposed VRR. that is weird to me but the HDMI port in back does connect to the 4070 and you can do G-SYNC with an external monitor. Like I said before, the RAM runs good but I would think it would be better (especially on benchmarks) running at 7467. It gets beat a lot in benchmarks by 5600/5200 RAM. I don’t do much battery testing cause I hardly ever use my laptop unplugged so I don’t know the battery life real well. I do know that I have mine set for max power no matter what (high performance power plan, set to 120hz no matter what, no battery saver enabled) but I can say it beats my other gaming laptops. I haven’t pushed it but I can watch youtube/hulu unplugged for about 5 hour before i need to plug in. WRAP UP – So I would for sure recommend this laptop just maybe the 4060 version if you dont need 32gb of RAM or an ULTRA 9. Dont get me wrong. You can game on on this 4070 at high settings. I play COD on mine all the time at high and still get 75-85 FPS. The GPU runs well just a little under powered.