HP Omen owners? Any tips and advice?

[Draeger]

Hi all,

Pulled the trigger on a low end budget gaming laptop at the weekend, it arrives this afternoon. I went for the HP Omen 17 with the following spec:-

• Intel® Core™ i7-10750H Processor
• RAM: 16 GB / Storage: 1 TB HDD & 512 GB SSD
• Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 6 GB

Any owners of these care to share any tips or suggestions for a new owner? First thing will be to uninstall any bloatware but as far as I've read it doesn't come with much pre-installed anyway, save maybe McAfee security and trial Office installs.

Any suggestions/advice appreciated on how to get the best out of the Omen.

 

[Draeger]

Make sure to update it fully; install the latest BIOS, HP software etc as the latest control panel added CPU undervolting directly but it may be unavailable for the 10-series CPUs.
The 17" Omen will come with a MaxP full fat 2060 also, not maxQ so maybe look into overclocking.

Have loved both of mine

Will do, cheers. The control panel you mention - is that the one that comes up if you press the 'Omen' key with the profiles, performance temps etc? Where is the undervolting option in the control panel do you happen to know? Any ideas what undervolting involves, is it a simple case of dialling in the required values using the control panel?

Enjoying the Omen so far, Ghost Recon Breakpoint is running at 144Hz at 1080p at 75 and over fps. Seems like this thing will cope easily with the latest games at 1080

 

[Draeger]

Mine had very little bloat save for McAfee and the Office 365 trial.

And yes, if its available for your machine, then just a case of trial and error, albeit there's also a new automatic variant which will be less effective but easier (or should be!).

Have now updated the Omen Game Control panel and it has the undervolting option in there. Is this what you meant by the automatic variant? Will try the auto option but what do you recommend for adjusting manually?

The sound volume continues to be an issue on these so use the Omen audio app (should be pre installed) to change the setting under Output to ‘Powerful’ and also ‘Movie’ to get the best sound volume.

Thanks, have now done that and you are right, audio is improved considerably. Thanks.

The Omens 17s are amongst the best value machines to have Max-P GPUs in the UK full stop

Excellent value and the i7 you’ve got is a great CPU beating the 10th gen i9 on many 3dmark total scores too.

Good to know, I think I made the right decision then. I had a hissy fit the other night, was playing Ghost Recon BP without the power brick plugged into the mains. FPS dropped to around 28 . So I Googled it and realised that the system throttles right back when running on battery power. Plugged the charger in and voila......back to 80-100 fps. Doh!!

 

[Draeger]

So had mine for a couple of weeks now. Off work on leave this week so decided to have a few hours playing the Division 2 this afternoon. Was rather concerned about the temperature the power brick got to, it was absolutely roasting hot. I assume this is fairly normal?

 

[Draeger]

Quick question guys - when installing programs and especially games do you recommend installing to the C O/S drive or to the other Data drive? In my Omen the C drive is an SSD, I believe the data drive though is a conventional HDD of 1Tb.

Just thinking about seek and access times for running games, better on the SSD C Drive?

Ta