HP is changing everything about how it sells its gaming gear, and I think it might be a mistake

For the longest time, when you’ve wanted a gaming machine from HP, you’ve been funnelled into its Omen lineup. A few years ago, it got a lovely new design language and a super clean white diamond for a logo, but its status as HP’s premier gaming brand is seemingly now coming to an end.

HP confirmed at CES, and at a New York preview event I attended back in December, that it was promoting HyperX, the sub-brand largely associated with peripherals and accessories, to become its leading gaming sub-brand as of now. Omen isn't dead, though, but is now the smaller name of the two.

This means that newly launched monitors, laptops and more at CES are all branded somewhat confusingly under the “HyperX Omen” brand, blending the two names together but with a clear hierarchy putting HyperX on top.

I’m not going to beat around the bush here – I think this is a mistake. The Omen brand isn’t necessarily gold-tier in terms of recognisability, but it’s been around for a good while and has always meant solid and reliable gaming machines. HyperX has that exact same reputation in the world of headsets and microphones, so I can just about see how HP thought rationalising the two might be sensible in the long run.

Still, for that to result in this confusing mishmash, where Omen is still around but no longer as its own brand, rather as almost a product label under HyperX, is pretty weird. When you’re sitting in front of new machines like the 2026 HyperX Omen Max 16 and struggling to remember how its name goes, even with a label in front of you, it’s never a great sign.

I’m pretty sure that this part of the problem will ease with time, to be fair, and the more products that launch, the faster that’ll go. HP showed me a HyperX curved monitor, for instance, with no Omen branding to be found, and that made sense to me in the context of the brand change.

What I can’t quite believe, though, is that in some cases (and particularly where laptops are concerned), new devices will now have an extra word (HyperX) in their product name, at a time when naming simplicity is the white whale for brands.

I’m also saddened to see that white diamond Omen logo disappear. The HyperX logo is arguably one of the most dated in gaming at this point, sadly, and while its embossed version on the back of the new laptops didn’t look terrible by any stretch, there’s no way I can pretend it’s as clean as the Omen diamond had been in recent years.

Still, with that naming drama aside, the new laptops I saw look extremely solid. The old Victus equivalent is now “simply” the HyperX Omen 15, with up to an RTX 5070 under its hood and a sleeker, less gappy design than previously.

The HyperX Omen Max 16, meanwhile, is an absolute titan (just like its 2025 version was), with 300W of power at its most highly-leveraged settings – making it one of the joint-most powerful laptops on the market (since others are also pushing to that 300W mark this year). It can hold basically any Nvidia GPU you like, provided you have the cash to spec it up that way.

So, this is a bit of shake-up to accompany some new launches. With the likes of Dell doing the same type of rationalisation in recent years, slimlining is in vogue. That said, plenty of people would observe that Dell's lineup is no less confusing after the change, so time will tell quite quickly if HP's HyperX shakeup works out better.