HP test Omen 15-EK1047NF: a good laptop gaming, sober and balanced

Technical sheet Design screen Software Performance Autonomy Price and Availability Conclusion Commentary Moving the Product sheet

Renewed and announced a little later that the majority of competing offers, the OMEN 15 range of HP returns at the beginning of spring 2021.Accompanied by a GeForce RTX 3070 graphics card and an Intel Core i7-10750H processor, the Omen 15 intends to stand out for high performance contained in a fine and relatively light chassis.A 2021 vintage that is worth the detour?Answer with this test.

Source: Matthieu Legouge

Placed under the sign of rarefaction, even shortage, some believe that at the start of 2021 is clearly not a period conducive to the acquisition of computer equipment, in particular components as graphics and processors.The Laptop universe is doing quite well, but the high demand leads to frequent stock breaks for gaming laptops equipped with RTX 30 GPUs Series.However, this does not prevent manufacturers from continuing their way, like HP who takes the opportunity to upgrade his Omen 15.No variants with AMD CPU on the program, however, but two models that embark RTX 3070 and processor i7-10750h, with a smaller IPS panel (144 Hz against 300 Hz) and less bulky storage (512 GB against 1 TB)For the least expensive model.

Technical sheet of Omen Laptop 15-EK1047NF

The PC was loaned by HP for this test.

A design without false note

HP provided a lot of efforts to see the design of its laptops Omen last year, last year, the design of its laptops.Enjoying a much more sober aesthetic than before, the Omen 15 now shows a much less aggressive look and curves;To tell the truth, we would almost confuse it with a classic ultrabook without its large air intakes, its RGB backlight keyboard and the Omen logo certifying that we are well in front of a game machine.

With its 2.45 kg and its 15.6 -inch screen, the Omen 15 is a fairly good travel companion and gets carried away everywhere, something that was already less the case with MSI Ge76 Raider with its slab17.3 inches and its almost 3 kg on the scale.Nevertheless, the OMEN 15 remains in the average, the dimensions of its chassis are very correct (357 x 239 x 22.9 mm), but also a stone's throw from being as fine and light as a Razer Blade Advanced for example(15.6 for 2.01 kg).

Source: Matthieu Legouge

Omen is finally a fairly discreet device, we appreciate this updated design, even if HP ended up swapping the brushed aluminum of the cover by plastic.This undoubtedly results on a less heavy pc (and less expensive to produce) since the weight of the machine before the upgrade was more around 2.6 kg, but we have to do with a much less rigid lid.This is indeed quite flexible, the backing on the back of the screen moves with simple support;This will probably not be disturbing as long as we are careful, but we must say that this flexibility of the material sounds a bit like a fragility.

Source: Matthieu Legouge

Apart from this aluminum is there for the point rest, a good point which nevertheless appears a contrast between the materials and a small lack of consistency for a machine which wants to position itself on the "premium" segment.There is, however,, in our opinion, not too much concern to be made: the finishes are generally very good and the choices taken by HP to give birth to this machine are justified.

Keyboard and touchpad

Like the other laptops gaming passed into our hands recently, the Omen 15 has a standard keyboard that is not specially designed to play.The space is well occupied in width since there is only one strip of barely two centimeters on each side, we have however already seen better on this point, as with the Asus Tuf Gaming A15 for example.The space between the keys is however generous enough to avoid entry errors;Overall, the keyboard is pleasant to use in office automation, but will never replace a real game keyboard, anti-glosting (Rollover on 26 keys) and RGB lighting is not enough to compensate for chiclet type contactors.

Source: Matthieu Legouge

Alas, the backlight is not configurable touch per key, but in four areas only.Small wink to the players: it is possible to configure the lighting of the ZQSD keys, in addition to the left, central and right areas.The lighting brightness is more than enough to offer good visibility for night game sessions, but we regret the absence of a shortened key to manage the light intensity, and a somewhat confused setting in the Omen Gaming Hub, something we will talk about below.A regret that does not come alone, the absence of double functions on the arrow keys, or the narrowness of the CTRL key that can hinder certain users.

The touchpad is quite generous, pleasant to the touch and built in a material that does not keep fingerprints.The two clicks are still a little soft and slow to trigger, with a little frustration in use as to this reactivity and this feeling of imprecision.Nothing unacceptable, but we had to emphasize it.

Source: Matthieu Legouge

Connectors

The Omen 15 is good in terms of connectors.Provided with 2 USB 3 ports.0 and a USB 3.1 Type-C with Thunderbolt 4 on its right edge, without forgetting the Kensington notch (K-Lock), it also provides a third USB 3 port.0 on its left edge.

The whole is completed with an SD card reader, an RJ 45 connector, a mini-jack combo output, and finally an HDMI 2 port.1.Wireless connectivity rests on the 6 Ax201 Wi-Fi standard (2 × 2) and Bluetooth 5.0.

Audio and webcam section

Signée Bang & Olufsen et composée de deux haut-parleurs, la solution audio qui équipe l’Omen 15 bénéficie d’un rendu suffisamment clair pour un usage multimédia occasionnel, mais il ne faut pas s’attendre à beaucoup plus.Located on both sides of the chassis, as close as possible to the listener, they lack power and balance to satisfy, the sound suffers from the noise emitted by ventilation when it runs at full speed.In short, we will largely prefer to connect an speaker, or even a pair of headphones like the GTW 270 Hybrid of EPOS, or better with a micro helmet.

Source: Matthieu Legouge

The camera offers a limited image quality and a definition too low to provide a good service, as is too often the case.Note also that biometrics has no room here, fingerprint and infrared sensor for facial recognition are absent subscribers.

An IPS 300 Hz slab Welcome

Announced with a Screen-to-Body ratio of 80.95 %, the Omen screen benefits from relatively fine borders, or at least no wider than the majority.Only its lower border seems to us a little too generous, but that does not affect the feeling of immersion once at stake.

Building a lot on responsiveness and fluidity with its refresh rate of 300 Hz and its management of the G-Sync, the IPS slab signed to the optronics, howeverOur colorimetric probe.

Source: Matthieu Legouge

The manufacturer's promises are held;This notably mentions a brightness of 300 nits and an SRGB coverage up to 100 %.In fact, we measured the light peak at 321 cd/m².If this figure is not very high, the brightness is nevertheless sufficient to enjoy the screen in light conditions, but will indeed show its limits in certain situations.The colorimetric cover perfectly covers the SRGB space, with a 99.5 % measure;Adobe RGB coverage is displayed at 76.8 %.

With the luminosity cursor placed on the maximum threshold, we obtain an attractive contrast for an IPS panel, of 1256: 1.The brightness of the black is then 0.257 cd/m², and drops to 0.113 cd/m² by halving the brightness, without the contrast rate does not move too much.

Colorimetric fidelity is there, but the slab of Omen 15 is not impeccable on this point.Basic, the color temperature is too high, and therefore too cold, with an average 6,815 k and a RGB balance that lacks balance.The gamma curve also lacks stability, something that only a more extensive calibration can correct effectively.

The precision is however there on the colors in SRGB, we note there an average delta e of 2.51, with a maximum value at 4.56 on certain shades of skin color and pure white.Fairly light chromatic drifts and ultimately a screen that ideally combines precision and responsiveness.

A preinstalled software festival

HP does not do things by halves when it comes to sealing partnerships, things that we see again this year with the Omen 15.We thus find the antivirus suite McAfee, but also Dropbox, ExpressVPN, and Lastpass to finish.Of course, each of these services offers us a trial period before taking out the portfolio.

There are also many HP software whose usefulness will depend on your needs.We can cite HP Smart, which requires a brand printer, HP Quickdrop to transfer documents between your HP or to a smartphone devices with the application of the same name, or even Omen Audio Control, minimalist but effective to quickly modifyAudio settings.

Finally, Omen Gaming Hub is still there.It brings together many features related to video games, in particular with launcher which acts as a game library, a gallery which offers a few dozen screens, as well as the "training" and "distance play" modes, two features thatrequire to create an HP account, as well as a Mobalytics account for the first.The latest function fulfills a similar role in Steam Link, with an application to download on Android or iOS.

Finally, Omen Gaming Hub gives access to a more oriented menu on practicality.We thus take advantage of a global view of the performance of the system, an intelligent or personalized overclocking function, a network booster, performance mode and manually adjustable thermal control, and a switchgraphic allowing to choose between hybrid operation or only on the dedicated graphics card.The Omen Gaming Hub requires additional software to configure RGB lighting on the keyboard if you do not want to be satisfied with static lighting.Still in beta, Omen Light Studio does not bring real added value here, except that it allows to configure effects and colors on 4 zones.We quickly access lighting parameters thanks to the "Omen" key, but there is no shortcut allowing to directly decrease the brightness or change effects, you have to go through the software.

Performance

For this upgrade, HP seems to be content to propel its Omen 15 with a single processor, the i7-10750h, which the manufacturer already offered last year on this same range.No evolution on the CPU side therefore, and even a more limited choice since at present HP has not announced any configuration of AMD processor.

With 6 cores and 12 threads clocked between 2.60 and 5.00 GHz, a unified 12 MB cover and a 45 W thermal envelope, this Intel processor holds the road for gaming use but this offerleaves us a little hungry when it comes to watching the performance/price ratio of this machine. À vrai dire, en attendant les modèles à 8 cœurs des puces Tiger Lake H35 de 11^e génération, les solutions d’Intel restent inférieures à ce que propose AMD, avec des puces 8 cœurs / 16 threads qui montrent d’excellentes performances, même face au i7-10875H et i7-10870H.To summarize, if single-core performance are relatively close between these different chips, the multi-core results are logically thanks to the 8-core models.

We thus see it under Cinebench R23, where our I7-10750H obtains a score of 1205 Single-Core points, similar to that of MSI Ge76 Raider and its i7-10870h, but a multi-core score limited to 7,411 points here.It is therefore necessary to expect performance contained in application, where the i7-10870h displays 9,378 points and where the Ryzen 7 5800H culminates at 12,797 points!

Naturally, the results of the PCMARK 10 benchmark takes us to the same observation.With an overall score of 5,964 points, the Omen 15 displays good results in the different categories of this test, results to be nuanced however since they are influenced by the whole configuration and not only by the processor.

Equipped with an SSD NVME Toshiba XG6 (reference KXG60ZNV1T02 KIOXA) of 1 TB, the OMEN 15 benefits from very correct storage performance, the flows are however slightly below the best models on the market.

Source: Matthieu Legouge

Performance en jeu

Appearing with a 100 W TDP Max (with the Dynamic Boost 2.0), la RTX 3070 qui équipe ce PC profite en partie des technologies Max-Q de 3^e génération.We find it resiz-bar and Dynamic Boost 2.0, but the Whisper Mode 2.0 is not in order here.

It is however possible to reduce the noise pollution in play by activating the Whisper Mode within GeForce Experience, but without however taking advantage of the recent improvements of this functionality which is based on artificial intelligence.

We started by assessing the graphic part of this configuration using 3D Mark and the Benchmark Time Spy Extreme.The Omen 15 obtains an overall score of 4,151 points, with 4,341 points for the graphic part and 3,328 points for the CPU.The first graphic test holds a rate of 28 fps, against 25 fps for the second part of the benchmark.

The results are up approximately 5 % compared to the RTX 3070 and its 95W TDP of the Asus Tuf Gaming A15, but a much lower score on the side of the processor.Logically, the performance is 23 % lower compared to the 125W TDP Max version which equips the MSI GE76 RAIDER.There are similar differences under Time Spy, with a score of 8,382 points (8,667 for the GPU, 7,068 for the CPU).Time Spy's stress test was carried out without worry, the stability of the frame rate is evaluated there at 98.8 %.

Ray tracing performance results are honorable.With an average of 23.28 FPS noted via the Benchmark DirectX Raytracing and a score of 5,433 points on Port Royal, a value that shows that the effects of Ray Tracing are perfectly managed here.

Finally, the Night Raid test, allowing us to gauge the performance of the IGPU Intel UHD Graphics 630 displays a graphical score of 6,053 points, far from what we have raised on the processors equipped with a graphic partXex.By selecting the dedicated graphics card on this same test, we get a graphics score of 73,307 points.

Apex Legends

As usual, we tried to appreciate the 300 Hz refrash with Apex Legends.In Olympus, we hold an average of 168 FPS by adjusting all the graphic parameters to the maximum.By adjusting the graphic quality down, we reach an average of 207 FPS.An ideal fluidity for a shots like this.

Red Dead Redemption 2

The masterpiece of Rockstar Games turns very properly here in Full HD.Via the benchmark tool integrated into the game, we see an average framerate of 64 FPS in Ultra.

Benchmarks in the games with Ray Tracing

Control

Ray Tracing adds an indisputable added value to the games that offer it, as is the case with control.We first launched the game without Ray Tracing, with the graphic parameters pushed to the maximum;In this condition, the title of Remedy Entertainment runs on average at 89 fps.With the Ray Tracing this time, the framerate drops to 54 FPS on average.We are doing much better by activating the DLSS, with 90 fps.

Watch Dogs Legion

It is with Watch Dogs Legion that the activation of Ray Tracing begins to ask our Omen 15.The game turns to 52 fps on average in this situation, while it reaches 67 FPS in Ultra, without Ray Tracing.The DLSS saves performance mode, with 65 fps.

Thermal dissipation and noise

The Omen 15 manages the heating relatively well, but it is necessary for that to adjust the ventilation cursor to the maximum within the Omen Gaming Hub, something we highly recommend as soon as it is a question of launching gamesor applications that strongly request the CPU.For classic office use, the "self" mode is perfectly suited.

In performance mode, with ventilation at the maximum, the Omen 15 obviously emits fairly strong noise pollution, which is ultimately a reproach that can be made to the vast majority of laptops gaming.Nevertheless, the evacuation of hot air is particularly effective in this situation.During our game sessions, as well as during the various benchmarks that we made, the maximum processor temperature did not exceed 85 ° C.The same goes for the GPU with a temperature that rarely exceeds 65 ° C.

A total of two locations M.2 are accessible.The RAM is so easily replaceable since it is not welded. Source: Matthieu Legouge

This cooling system is effective and avoids dealing with a thermal throttling which would restrict the frequencies.Despite everything, you have to expect average temperatures and higher peaks if you want to best avoid noise pollution.

Autonomy

Autonomy is often the Achilles heel of gaming laptops.Equipped with a battery made up of 6 cells with a total capacity of 70.9 Wh, our test model is no exception.The PC Mark 10 "Modern Office" benchmark, dedicated to autonomy, has exploited an integral charge in just 4:43.Note that during this test, the brightness is adjusted around 150 cd/m² while the PC uses its "hybrid" mode, which therefore uses the dedicated graphics card as integrated according to situations.With a performance index of 5,635 points, it remains in the average, and finally quite close to an ASUS TUF GAMING A15 (6,589 points), which has a much better autonomy but also a more generous battery.This is ultimately what can be criticized for Omen 15: for being satisfied with a battery of 70.9 WH associated with an RTX 3070 energy in energy as soon as it is requested, a capacity that is ultimately closerof an ultraportable than a laptop gaming.

Source: Matthieu Legouge

The 200 W charger is one more element to take into account when it comes to winning the PC somewhere.With 270 g on the scale, it is however quite light, but remains bulky.Fortunately the load is fairly fast, the machine goes from 20 to 100 % battery in less than 2 hours.

Price and availability of Omen Laptop 15-EK1047NF

HP Omen 15 is currently available in two versions.The model in testing here, reference 15-EK1047NF, is sold for € 2,1919.The second reference, the 15-EK1094NF and its 144 Hz slab, is marketed at € 1,999.

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