HP Omen Max 16 review (2025)

There are so many gaming laptops on the market that, at this point, telling them apart can be pretty tough. So, for every insurgent and disruptive brand aiming to make one of the best gaming laptops possible, there's a giant of the industry that's been around for years.

That label definitely applies to HP's Omen 16 and Omen Max 16 – these are gaming laptops that get refreshed every year, and have long been a shortcut to great specs that don't always break budgets.

I've tested a whole heap of Nvidia GeForce RTX 50-series gaming laptops this year, and it took a little longer than expected to get my hands on the 2025 Omen Max 16, but I've been using it for a fortnight for this review to see how it stacks up.

Price & Availability

HP's Omen Max 16 is widely available now and comes in a few different configurations, as you'd expect from a gaming laptop.

You can kit it out to cost a whopping £2999 or $3200 with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 powering your gaming, or more for the frankly unnecessary 5090, but cheaper configurations can be built.

The standard Omen 16, of course, comes in more affordably, starting from £1,449 or $1,799.99 with a 5070 on board.

Design

The Omen 16 lineup doesn't tend to get radically different designs each time that HP refreshes its components, and that's a fair read on the 2025 versions of these laptops.

They're still recognisably Omen – not least because they now have that logo written out on the back, rather than using the slightly generic logo.

The Max 16 I tested has a very small rear end that extends out past the hinge of the display, something that I tend to prefer laptop-makers to avoid.

This one is small enough to be forgivable, though, although it contributes to a fairly sizeable footprint that's on the edge of being actually usable on the lap (not least because it also weighs in at 2.68kg).

Most of your gaming will be done on a desk, of course, and opening up the laptop reveals its 16-inch display, complete with a 1080p webcam at the top. There's a privacy shutter included, which is great to see.

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The laptop features a generously proportioned full keyboard with full RGB backlighting, including numpad keys for maximum options.

Below this is the large trackpad, and there are no other buttons to worry about beyond this.

The keyboard has an interesting look thanks to the transparent sides of each key – this works well for enhanced backlighting, but I do think it looks a little ugly when you just glance at it.

The left edge of the laptop houses two USB-C ports and the headphone jack, while the right edge has a single USB-A port.

The rest of the laptop's connection options are on its back edge, comprising the power port, an Ethernet, a full HDMI slot, and another USB-A port. That's a decent array of options, plus you always have the option of getting a dock or dongle.

The bottom of the laptop also houses a light strip at the front, which can illuminate while the Omen Max 16 is powered on – for those who want it, that's nice, but it's subtle enough to remain pretty inoffensive if you don't care for extra lights.

Overall, this is an appreciably stealthy laptop by industry standards, with only the keyboard's odd visual design making it obvious that it's got more under its hood than many non-gaming competitors.

Specs & Features

A gaming laptop can't just be boiled down to its specs and nothing more, but you do need to know what it's cooking with before being able to confidently buy one. The Omen Max 16, as the "Max" in its name suggests, has a lot of power to spare.

Its processor is a powerful Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX (although you can opt for a more affordable Intel Core Ultra 7 255HX).

On the graphical side, the laptop defaults to a GeForce RTX 5070 Ti, but I tested a machine with the powerful 5080.

That means you get access to the latest generation of DLSS, and frame generation, with the latter being particularly impactful for performance gains.

The display is typically a high-quality 2,560 x 1,600 IPS panel, with a 240Hz refresh rate, but you can also pay to upgrade this to an OLED if you want inkier blacks and more vivid colours. The price of these upgrades is sizeable, needless to say.

You can configure things with up to 64GB of RAM, which is more than enough to futureproof you for a good while.

But I'm a little disappointed that the default storage amount remains just 1TB. That's increasingly paltry given the size of modern games, although HP is far from the only big laptop-maker being tight on this.

One thing that deserves shouting out is the HP software that ships with the laptop. Compared to the many alternatives from other brands, it gives you a genuinely impressive and surprising amount of control over how your laptop is clocked. This can really unlock another level of tinkering and performance tweaks, and it's great that HP allows customers to make their own decisions on these sorts of settings.

Performance

I'd been playing a lot of Doom: The Dark Ages as a testing game earlier this year, but while I had the Omen Max 16, EA ran both weekends of the superb Battlefield 6 beta, which took its place as my workhorse. This isn't a full release, so there's every chance of performance gains when it comes out.

With the Ultra settings preset enabled, I was seeing extremely impressive performance from the Omen Max 16 at native resolution, even in a build that didn't allow for frame generation – with FPS counts that never dropped as low as 60. It took very little tweaking to see this soar up to around the 100 mark, too.

That's fantastic work, since BF6 is as good-looking a large-scale multiplayer game as I've tried in a long time, and the strength of its lighting and atmospheric work really shone through on HP's hardware. The display was pin-sharp, and while OLEDs do get more vivid, I have no issues whatsoever with the IPS panel's colours, which were extremely accurate.

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Swapping over to Doom to sense-check, these results were validated by frame rates that indeed could climb into the high 100s after different levels of frame generation were activated – a setting that I think makes even better sense on smaller laptop displays than it does for desktop gamers.

Cooling is always a question mark for these laptops, which can sometimes get punishingly hot under strain, but HP has again managed some very impressive engineering. I never found the Omen Max 16 got worryingly hot, and the fan noise was far from the worst I've encountered this year.

I found the keyboard actually quite tactile and impressive to use – it's not clicky, per se, but I like the amount of travel it offers per key, and it felt good to type on, which is a rarity. The trackpad below it is nothing special, but there are few things more rarely used than the trackpad on a gaming laptop, to be honest.

Battery life is completely mediocre, which shouldn't surprise anyone – I could get a few hours out of the laptop at a stretch when doing relatively standard productivity, while gaming without plugging into the power supply is all but pointless thanks to the amount of throttling going on. This is absolutely par for the course, though, and is no real knock against the machine.

HP Omen Max 16 (2025) review: Verdict

The HP Omen Max 16 is a genuine beast of a laptop, and joins the competition with something to prove. I found it a well-designed and exceptionally well-built machine that lived up to my performance expectations in almost every regard.

That said, it's pricey compared to some of the alternatives on the market, and it's chunky enough to not really merit all that much praise on the design side of things. If you want something sleek, it's a bit of a halfway house, but there's no arguing with the results it delivers.

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Also consider

The obvious contender with the Omen Max 16 comes from Medion, in the form of the Erazer Beast 16 X1 Ultimate, which basically matches HP on every count as far as specs are concerned, but undercuts it on price.

If you want something entirely different in scope, meanwhile, and don't mind spending more money for your performance, the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 (2025) blew me away when I tested it. It can actually work as a normal day-to-day laptop when you're not gaming, too, which is a dramatic rarity.