The HP Omen Max 16 is a beast of maximums, for better and for worse. Its base model would be enough, by any other gaming laptop standards, packed with an Intel Core Ultra 7 and Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070Ti laptop GPU. But that's not the model HP shipped us. We got the flagship of flagships, with an Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX, GeForce RTX 5090 mobile, the largest storage size, the fastest Wi-Fi chip, and the 240Hz OLED display.

It's also $4,500 in this configuration, which is a lot of money for a gaming laptop, even if you're another company whose logo is a three-headed snake. The good news is that no matter which hardware configuration you pick, the OLED screen is a mere $190 upsell, and you're going to want that because it is absolutely gorgeous. It's bright, colorful, accurate, and super-silky smooth thanks to the 240Hz refresh rate and G-Sync.

It's got good cooling overall, a great design that will turn heads without being garish, but the battery life sucks, and you won't be able to be apart from a wall socket for long, even if you're only typing up reports. Not that you'll be typing up much of anything, as the keyboard could do with a redesign to get some tactile feedback between the keys.

About this review: This article was written after two weeks of testing an HP Omen Max 16 loaned by the company with the top CPU, GPU, SSD capacity, and OLED display options. The company had no input in the review.

Price, specs & availability

The HP Omen Max 16 was released at the end of March 2025, with an MSRP starting from $2,500. The base model has an Intel Core i7-255HX, Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti mobile with 12GB of VRAM, 16GB of system memory, an FHD IPS display with up to 165Hz refresh rate, and a 512GB NVMe SSD. It's available from HP and Best Buy right now, but we expect Amazon and others will have it in stock at some point.

The pricing increases substantially as you start adding better components. As tested, the HP Omen Max 16 costs $4,500—a hefty chunk of change for anyone.

This is one gorgeous gaming laptop

The OLED screen is divine and the GPU powering it isn't half bad either

The HP Omen Max 16 is a gorgeous gaming laptop from every angle. The matte black aluminum shell is stylish, and the hinge positioning makes it look edgy but sophisticated. It just draws your eye from across the room. Part of that is from the RGB lighting on the keyboard and front edge of the chassis, which combine nicely when gaming to give your desk a glow-up.

It's also got a neat trick with the cooling system, where the fans will spin the opposite way every so often, to clear off accumulated dust on the vents. I was able to test that, but didn't have it long enough for appreciable dust to build up.

It's large, it's heavy, but that's to be expected from a 16-inch gaming laptop. You do get plenty of ports, with two Thunderbolt 4, two USB-A 10Gbps, HDMI 2.1, gigabit Ethernet, 3.5mm audio jack, and the "smart pin" AC adapter hole. It can technically charge when the lid is closed and the laptop is sleeping from the Thunderbolt ports, but not at a very fast speed. It will charge substantially faster with the AC adapter, up to 50% in half an hour.

Just don't forget the charger

You'll want to budget for a large laptop bag, because you won't want to leave home without the charger. It's rated for 330W, and the HP Omen Max 16 needs every watt of that. While it will (barely) charge from the Thunderbolt 4 ports, it can only get enough power for the CPU that way, and not the 175W the RTX 5090 mobile can command at full speed. The Procyon office battery benchmark ran the battery down in just over two hours, so this is not a power-sipping ultralight laptop.

I also noticed some odd behavior when benchmarking without the charger plugged in, where FPS would drop to a fraction of the tested scores. No combination of Windows power settings and the HP Omen power settings changed this behavior, although I did get it increased slightly. It's not like you'd want to play games without the charger, because the battery life will not last that long, but it's important to know that unplugged performance is not there at all.

Punches according to its weight

This isn't a lightweight machine in any measure

Going into this, I thought the pairing of the Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX processor with Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 would blow me away. And, well, it did, but not quite for the reasons you might think. The synthetic benchmarks show that the CPU isn't that much ahead of its other Core Ultra brethren, but the Time Spy Extreme score shows how far the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 mobile can go when it stretches its legs, nearly twice the score of the RTX 4090-equipped ROG Zephryus.

Almost every game I threw at it played well, as expected from this hardware level. Alan Wake 2 is a system crusher, and with RT set to High, the HP Omen Max 16 did its best at 33fps average. With 4x frame generation turned on, that turned into 113fps, with no perceptible level of blurring or latency hit. Maybe due to how Remedy's game engine works, but frame latency was 109ms without framegen, and only 112ms with 4x framegen running. Dropping RT to low improved latency to 67ms.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is currently in controversy over its required hardware acceleration, but it was no match for this laptop. Even at Supreme graphics settings, it averaged 136fps, with 4x multi-frame generation bringing that up to 258fps. Turning the fully path-traced lighting to max only brought it back to 155fps, when my desktop RTX 4080 Super can only manage single-digit frame rates at that setting.

Star Wars Outlaws was able to break 100fps with 4x frame gen on, but it made every UI element turn into a cloud of pixels until I stopped moving, which kinda defeats the point. Turning ray tracing and settings down somewhat gave smoother performance without needing frame generation, and I don't recommend using frame generation at least on this title.

The OLED screen needs to be seen to be believed

Seriously, it's THAT good

Normally, OLED screens on laptops are color accurate, but not that bright because the manufacturers know you'd rather have battery life. Except, HP knows you're not going anywhere without the charger, so this fast, accurate OLED is also brighter than expected. Measured at 433.5 nits SDR brightness, that's good, and with DeltaE of under 0.9 for white point and 0.63 DeltaE average on color accuracy, this is one gorgeous panel.

It is glossy, though, which helps with perceived contrast levels, even if it makes it pick up every item in the room that could potentially cast a reflection. It covers 100% of sRGB, 94% AdobeRGB, and 100% P3, while a quick calibration increased AdobeRGB to 96%, while the other two stayed at 100%. It measures at a perfect 2.2 gamma curve and is a fantastic panel overall.

Okay but let's talk about that keyboard (and the touchpad)

This is not a keyboard for typing on, but it's good for WASD

The pudding cap style membrane keys on this keyboard are okay, for gaming on at least. For typing, they're slick on the top, don't have much tactile feedback between keys, and it wasn't an enjoyable experience typing on. The touchpad fared slightly better, with decent accuracy, but it made an echoey clunk whenever I pressed the bottom corners for left or right clicks. There's no excuse for a bad touchpad, even if you don't think gamers will use it much.

Plus, thermals aren't great. At least the Intel CPU is warmer than expected, idling at 60C and regularly reaching Tjmax on some cores, which is 105C before throttling. It was mostly the E-cores that were overheating, which I find odd, but maybe future microcode updates can fix that. And yes, the fans are very loud on full, which they'll get to often thanks to the CPU temperatures. On the other hand, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 mobile chip didn't get above 65 °C at any point, even when under 99% usage for long gaming periods.

Should you buy the HP Omen Max 16?

You should buy the HP Omen Max 16 if:

• You want the most powerful gaming laptop around
• Don't mind staying close to a wall socket for power
• Want a fast OLED that will turn heads

You should NOT buy the HP Omen Max 16 if:

• You want a quiet laptop
• You plan on getting any work done on the keyboard
• You want a light laptop with long battery life

The HP Omen Max 16 is one of the first models on the market with Nvidia's RTX 5090 laptop GPU as an option. It stylishly showcases DLSS, multi-frame generation, and ray tracing. It's not a budget laptop in any way, shape, or form, but then it starts with upper-midrange GPU chips on the base configuration, so that's to be expected. And the OLED option rivals any of the screens I have in my house, so go for that one if you pick up one of these bad boys.