HP OMEN Max 16 Gaming Laptop Review: Beauty And Brute Force
We'll get to the battery life results shortly, but first we have noise output results from the HP OMEN Max 16. We perform our noise testing on laptops with the measuring device placed approximately where the user's head would be while using the machine—about 18" away, above the keyboard, facing the display. As you can see, the Omen Max 16 is capable of being quite well-behaved at 37.3 dB—but that turns into a bit of a roar when the fans kick up during gameplay.
There's no question—under heavy workloads, that 59.9 dB is loud and noticeable. Fortunately, the sound of the rear exhaust on the Omen Max is a soft whoosh—not shrill or biting. It resembles a desk fan more than a hair dryer. This measurement wasn't taken with the fans set to max, by the way; we used Cyberpunk 2077 to test the cooling solution with a representative gaming workload. Regardless, while gaming on the Omen Max 16, you will want to employ headphones if audio fidelity is important to you.
These temperatures during a Cinebench 24 run are spicy.
At least all that fan noise is getting the job done, right? The good news is our system's GPU remained cool, no matter what. HP engineering delivered on that front, and ultimately, that's the component that's going to heat up the most in games. You can see from our gaming results below that the GPU temperature is rarely a concern. However, the CPU does get very hot in this system, and that might be a concern if you're interested in productivity workloads, or certain gaming tasks (like streaming with CPU encoding, for some reason). OEMs often configure systems to hit their CPU thermal design limits for quick, bursty responsiveness rather than to stay cool over extended stress tests, so this isn't all that surprising.
There's some quirkiness to our results, because the temperature values reported by HWiNFO don't line up directly with the temperature values reported by the Omen Gaming Hub, but the package temperature seems to be pretty close. However, Omen Gaming Hub never reported a temperature above 100°C in our observations. According to HWiNFO, the chip is configured for a 105°C "Tjmax", or "maximum junction temperature", which is the hottest temperature the chip will tolerate before throttling, and we did see that temperature several times.
For further evidence that there seems to be a thermal issue with the CPU on this machine, we present the "Performance Limit Reasons" category. These values are reported by the CPU itself, meaning that the CPU thinks there is at least occasionally a thermal event limiting performance. It's not constant, and it doesn't appear to be particularly serious as clock rates remain over 5 GHz under load for the most part, but it's definitely worth pointing out. All of these screenshots were obtained in "Performance" mode, by the way, not "Unleashed."
It would be easy to say that it's simply not possible to cool a 160W Intel processor in a 16-inch form factor, but we're not so sure. In its briefing for us, HP talked about its decision to avoid liquid metal thermal compound in favor of traditional (if high-quality) paste-style TIM. Some folks on Reddit have reported significantly improved CPU temperatures on this system after replacing the stock paste job with liquid metal—but that will void your warranty, of course, and liquid metal has a host of problems all its own.
To be 100% clear, the thermal performance of the Omen Max 16 is not bad. It's just not perfect, and we think that this is what explains some of the results in our testing, such as the worse Cinebench 2024 result in comparison to the ASUS ROG Strix Scar 18, which does use liquid metal TIM.
HP Omen Max 16 Gaming Laptop Battery Life Benchmarks
When you consider an Intel Core Ultra 9 and a GeForce RTX 5090 are under the hood, in combination with its svelte 16-inch chassis, battery life expectations should be tempered, although the real battery life drain on this system may not be limited to just its CPU nor GPU, but perhaps this machine's gorgeous OLED display. Check it out:
This is a long chart and it includes a lot of systems with significantly less horsepower than the Omen Max 16. However, the ROG Flow Z13 at the top of the chart beats this system in a few benchmarks and hangs tough surprisingly well in gaming. For a better comparison, though, check out the identically-equipped ROG Strix Scar 18 in the middle of the pack at 548 minutes.
272 minutes is about what we would expect from a system of this caliber, but it's a little surprising considering how well the Strix Scar 18 did. That system has a larger display and a triple-fan cooler. However, that machine also has a mini-LED display, which are notable for their extremely high power efficiency. Meanwhile, the panel on the Omen Max 16 is an OLED, which are noted for brilliant colors and deep blacks, but also less competitive power efficiency when displaying bright scenes. We ran this test multiple times and got similar results each time.
Doing the math puts HP's new beast at about half of the battery efficiency of its component cousin. However, it's nowhere near the least-efficient machine we've tested. Frankly, this system more or less meets the usual battery life expectations of gaming laptops with desktop-class CPUs and 24GB GPUs, even if the actual delivered battery life isn't great.
In PCMark's Battery Gaming test, we see a more competitive result at 84 minutes. With an 84-Whr battery, that means the machine was drawing right at 60W total (on average) from its battery across the duration of the test. This is actually pretty solid efficiency for a gaming workload with this hardware, but it also has to do with the 30 FPS cap in place on PCMark's test.
To be honest, if you were actually playing an intense 3D game on this machine in Performance or Unleashed mode, battery life would leave you flat, but that's true of all of the RTX 4090 and 5090 laptops here. At least you could sneak in an hour of Holocure, Balatro, or Shantae on your lunch break; just keep screen brightness turned down a touch.
HP Omen Max 16 Gaming Laptop: Our Thoughts
We just reviewed the ASUS ROG Strix Scar 18 before this machine, and its a darn hard act to follow—especially when you're packing the exact same hardware into a smaller form factor. But make no mistake: this machine delivers very nearly the exact same gaming performance as the larger ASUS machine for about two pounds and two inches less. It also retains the second M.2 socket for storage expansion—although we would prefer if the system were easier to open, and having to remove its thermal solution to get to it is a downer.
The main pain point with this new HP gaming laptop, which may be a dealbreaker for some, is its price, but we'll circle back on that. Aside from its pricing, the system’s fan noise can be high at times, it offers mediocre battery life and HP's software setup on this machine could use some refinement, at least currently. As it stands today, HP's software experience on the OMEN Max 16 has a decided large corporate feel to it, rather than a true gamer-focused solution.
There's plenty to like about the Omen Max 16, though. With this machine, you get a very sturdy-feeling gaming laptop with sharp looks that sheds some of the size of an 18" desktop replacement luggable, yet has all of the gaming horsepower of such a system. You get a gorgeous 16" OLED with inky blacks and perfect response time. You get a no-compromise laptop gaming experience, and you get lovely-looking RGB LED accents to tie it all together.
And that brings us to the make-or-break moment: pricing. HP tells us that the suggested retail price for this system is $4309.99, but when we priced out this exact same system on HP.com a few weeks after receiving it, we came out to $3939, so there's been some movement there. That still puts this laptop solidly into the ultra-premium category, which means it needs to reach a very high bar.
Plenty of laptops fail to deliver on their spec sheet promises. The Omen Max 16 is not one of them—it tears through games like the beautiful beast it is, and it does it without requiring a full featured hiking backpack just to carry it around in. If its form factor is attractive to you, the Omen Max 16 will serve your gaming and creation needs very well. Just make sure you carry around its 330W power brick and some good headphones with you, too.
