HyperX - HP OMEN 16" 165Hz 2K Gaming Laptop - Intel Core Ultra 7 356H (2026) - 16GB Memory - NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 - 512GB SSD - Shadow Black

The HyperX Omen O16 is a well-rounded mid-tier at best, with LOTS of room for you to upgrade in SSD and RAM. The computer is kind of on the CHONKIER side, but average weight for gaming laptops in the 16-inch range. The Intel EVO line of chips is as efficient as they come on battery power for the perfect mix of speed and power. This package comes running Win11 Home, on a 16" 2K IPS display @ 165Hz refresh, an i7 Ultra 356H CPU, an RTX 5060 GPU with 8GB VRAM, a 512GB gen4 NVME, a 70070mWh battery, and an upgradeable 16GB DDR5-5600 DRAM (single stick + 1 slot unsoldered). The power supply is massive and power-hungry, drawing power from a 330 W AC adapter. Build and Setup 4/5 This package offers a unique value proposition for all those gamers on a budget. With DLSS and other AI software, it tries to make up for the difference. However, in my testing, 16GB just isn't enough, and it would often hang during setup. Additional RAM is a MUST and should be the first upgrade/purchase for all buyers. I love the stealth-like aesthetics of the total blackout in silky-smooth matte plastic. The display bezels are thick, and there is a HUGE fan intake underneath that keeps things running without much thermal throttling. Aesthetics are right where you want them for those who like minimalism. All branding is subdued in black with subtle touches of gray for OMEN and HyperX on the interior. Not too much RGB to waste battery for a good compromise on flash vs performance. The body is mostly a fingerprint magnet that looks great at first, but once you touch it, have a microfiber cloth if you like your stuff clean! In all, EXCELLENT job on the design HyperX! There is also self-cleaning fan tech, which I haven't used yet, but I look forward to trying it in the future if things get dusty. Performance 4/5 The 512GB NVME 2.0 Gen4 from SK Hynix and is blazing fast but I would say UPGRADE to at least 1 TB if you are gaming heavy in your library and not much cloud gaming. My benchmark on Crystal DiskMark scores were exceptional running fast at 6977.93 MB/s READ and 5020.25 MB/s WRITE. RAM is Samsung memory E-Die snappy 5600 DRAM and runs amazing, but we need another stick to make 32GB if you want a good experience overall. I believe 32GB should be standard now, but with the RAM crisis, I understand why not. FPS was just average barely hitting 50fps in Fortnite on higher settings. Connectivity and I/O 4/5 I love the selection of I/O but wish there were a few more ports. On each side, you have USB-A for the keyboard and mouse, with one 10Gbps signaling rate USB-A on the rear to support your streaming setup, right next to the RealTek RTL8168/8111 RJ45 gigabit Ethernet port, for neat cable management. Wireless is handled by an Intel WiFi 7 (2x2) BE211 @ 320 MHz for blazing-fast speeds. There is 1 HDMI 2.1 and 1 USB Type-C 10Gbps signaling rate supporting Power Delivery 3.0, DisplayPort 1.4, and HP Sleep and Charge with 1 Headphone/microphone combo and 1 AC Smart pin rounding out the I/O. It advertises InstantPair with OMEN products, but there is no InstantPair. I tried it with my HyperX Pulsefire Saga Pro and after further reading, OMEN only added InstantPair to the MAX model. Be prepared to use the dongle or go bluetooth, that is a glaring mistake I found in the marketing. Keyboard and Typing Experience 3/5 The keyboard is a large 4-zone RGB board, covering almost the entire chassis, with a huge touchpad in the center. I love the font, it is a fresh feel and easily read. The keys are responsive and not mechanical. They feel like a higher quality membrane keyboard if you can imagine that. Key spacing feels cramped due to the inclusion of a number pad in this form factor, but the stroke is satisfying. The numpad is very rare on 16-inch gaming laptops these days so if you do work on this you will appreciate that if you are a numbers person. The RGB’s are beautiful and bright, and they are zoned off so you can do different things separately or the entire keyboard as one in the BEST software implementations for RGB and Gaming hub. Response time is great due to the 8000Hz polling rate. I love the font and how HyperX Omen software handles everything and one of the best experiences hands down. Display and Visuals 3/5 The display is made by BOE, nothing exciting. It gets bright and crispy, with inaccurate, sometimes washed-out colors. Budget gamers may like it as part of the budget-friendly compromise. Contrast is average with all colors appearing decent. Overall images are nice but nothing exciting to report out of a basic IPS display aside from 165Hz refresh rate. Color gamut representation is weak with the most basic sRGB barely 66% supported. Below there is a list of supported color spaces for those who need to know. There is NO color accuracy to any standard (see below). I would go with OLED if I could do it again. Color Gamuts Supported: SRGB 66.297% AdobeRGB 49.147% DCI-P3 48.872% BT.2020 35.063% Essentially, if you are one who needs your panel to also be color accurate but chooses to also game, this isn't for you. If you do video or photo work on the go, this isn't for you unless you have an external monitor. There are no licenses or certifications for calibration on the IPS panel. AMD Freesync is supported but not NVIDIA Vsync which is senseless being there is RTX 5060 inside. Another sacrifice to keep pricing down. Things to Know -No color accuracy. Not even sRGB is 100% covered which is the most basic of all. -LOTS of typos - The keyboard layout is tight, but with practice I will adjust. -Inconsistent Branding - HyperX, OMEN, then HP Support Assistant? Gamers notice the little things, it cheapens the feel of a NEW HyperX line by not masking the HP name completely. -During testing, standby battery drain was higher than expected. Power off when not needed during times of extended battery needs or inability to charge. -16GB RAM is not enough. 16GB is just enough to run your PC. Idling, just running Windows, I was sitting anywhere between 70%-87% RAM usage, 11GB/15GB used, and there wasn't a game even loaded yet! Buy RAM day one, lagging is real RAM is the bottleneck here. -The RAM is not soldered so you can upgrade both sticks! -Power supply is HUGE and still rocks HP branding (Booooooo). -Not a fan of Ads in Omen Gaming Hub Verdict 4/5 Should you get it? Not quite sure, for a few hundred more you can go up the line and get 1TB SSD and OLED panel for instant performance. I would say look at the higher offerings and go for the Transcend or Maxx versions if you are already in at this price point if you want to get the best OMEN experience out the box. This is a recommendation for a mid-tier budget option for those who don't play heavy AAA titles as this.

I’ve been testing the new HyperX OMEN 16” 165Hz 2K Gaming Laptop and this generation feels like a real step forward in design and day‑to‑day usability. While it’s clearly built for gaming, the overall experience is more refined than I expected — especially in the way it looks, feels, and handles long sessions. 💻Design & Build Quality: The first thing that stands out is the Shadow Black finish. It’s deep, uniform, and covers the entire chassis — including the keyboard deck and trackpad — in a rubberized, soft‑touch material. That texture isn’t just for looks, it adds a subtle grip that genuinely helps during gaming, especially when your palms get warm. The laptop has a sleek, modern aesthetic that feels more premium than many gaming laptops in this price range. No loud accents, no overdone gamer styling — just a clean, stealthy look that fits anywhere and most of you will apreciate as soon as you first start to use it. 📺Dispaly Quality: The 16-inch 2K 165Hz panel is sharp, fast, and responsive. Motion looks clean, and the high refresh rate pairs perfectly with the RTX 5060 for competitive gaming. The IPS panel is good, but once you’ve used OLED — especially for deep blacks, contrast, and color pop — it’s hard not to notice the difference.If someone is deciding between this and the OLED version, I’d honestly recommend paying the extra for OLED. It’s worth it for both gaming and creative work. 🏎️AI(Copilot)/Performance&Gaming: Powered by the Intel Core Ultra 7 356H and NVIDIA RTX 5060, this machine is a legit powerhouse. Games run smoothly at 2K, thermals stay under control, and the system feels snappy even under heavy multitasking. For a mid‑range GPU, the RTX 5060 punches above its weight here. And the Copilot on this laptop just fits into my day. I use it constantly — quick summaries, organizing notes, checking settings, even helping me draft messages — and it never feels slow or in the way. It’s the first time an AI assistant on Windows actually feels built into the workflow instead of something I forget exists. 🔋Baterry Life/Keyboard/Ports: -Surprisingly solid for a gaming laptop. You’re not getting ultrabook numbers, but for browsing, streaming, and light work, the battery holds up better than expected. Gaming on battery is still limited (as with any gaming laptop), but overall endurance is a plus. -The keyboard feels responsive with a high polling rate, and the rubberized deck makes long sessions more comfortable. The trackpad is large and accurate. -Port selection is excellent — plenty of USB‑C, USB‑A, HDMI, and the layout makes cable management easy whether you’re gaming or docked at a desk. 🤔💭Summary: The HyperX OMEN 16 (2026) delivers a strong mix of power, aesthetics, and comfort. The Shadow Black rubberized finish is one of the best design choices I’ve seen on a gaming laptop — it looks premium and feels even better. Performance is excellent, the port selection is generous, and battery life is respectable. My only real critique is the display. The 2K 165Hz IPS panel is good, but if you care about image quality, OLED is the upgrade to go for. It elevates the entire experience so TRUST ME on this one JUST GO With OLED!

The HP Hyper-X Omen Series gaming laptop is a nice little power house offering a number of this features to support your gaming needs while building the previous foundation machine. The shadow black color is intense and really give the machine a nice sleek look. There is a strong focus with this machine for performance while gaming. Initial machine overview reflects it through easily seen changes to the cooling system for the machine when looking at the bottom and sides of the machine for the cooling path areas. The power adapter has increased in size to provide the additional power needed by the system for the upgraded GPU (graphics card) in the unit; NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060. The I7 series in the system is very responsive and does not show any signs of lag or hiccups when maxing out the machine. You do hear the cooling system as you increase overall use of the machine. This latest series CPU is designed to support power while maintaining battery life due to the overall power most processors utilize creating longer battery life during those sessions using battery power only. The keyboard has a mechanical feel and touch to it, keeping it in-line with that feel almost all gamers desire with customizable RGB settings. The number pad is a little squished into the main keyboard layout with the arrow keys, which can be troublesome for some that are not used to the way the pad is laid out. I did find myself at times hitting the incorrect key, but I did evolve to it. System Overview. The storage and RAM in the system are NVMe and DDR5 while the GPU has dedicated 8GB. This unit tested has the 512GB series, to which I found adequate for system utilization and use. It does have the latest iteration of WiFi while still retaining the traditional network and headphone ports. You still have the USB-A x2 and USB-C x1. One item I was really hoping to see was a conversion from you standard pin hold charging port to a magnetic charge series to save your port when trying to grab and go or trips to prevent damage to the machine. The Omen gaming hub continues to grow and become of a central point for all things related and interface. Out-of-the-Box. Setup is quick, until you hit the standard MS network wall that requires a network connection to proceed and bind the machine to a Microsoft account. Once in, there are initial important HP updates that must be applied from BIOS and Firmwares to bring all of the additional software to its current state. Following this, the are your Windows updates. After about 3-4 hours even with a fast internet connection, the machine will be fully up and running.

Let me start off with what’s great. The feel of the keys is exceptional; there is just enough bounce back so you wont get tired from hours of gaming. This is perfect for those that want to play without a controller. The gaming hub is also really good; I loved that it works unlike other gaming hubs. I was able to change GPU settings on the fly and they worked as requested, even switching between discrete GPU and integrated GPU. Most gaming laptops can never get the dual GPU setup to work correctly, HyperX nails it. The Intel chip inside is snappy and can handle just about anything you throw at it, even with the integrated GPU I was able to get 25 FPS on triple A games without any AI frames. The cooling solution for the Omen 16 is nice because the laptop was never uncomfortably hot no matter where I touched it or how long I used it. The discrete GPU , while limited on VRAM, is great. I was able to play all the games I wanted and for the extremely intense games all that was needed is turning on DLSS. With all the great things about the laptop there are areas where improvement is needed, for instance the screen. While it is high refresh a rate panel that can dynamically go 60 or 165 Hz the color accuracy isn’t great nor is the brightness. The panel has decent color for gaming or looking at normal content but its not for professional editing. The keyboard is also I bit tight so you will get accidental key presses. While I discussed the cooling was great because you don’t feel the laptop is hot , the CPU temps are a different story. No matter what I was doing the CPU temps were always high, I’m not sure if this is a driver issue or cooling issue but it does give me some concern. Overall the laptop is an excellent GAMER laptop, its not the highest end so you don’t get the full premium feel and there is some deck flex. But these are small things that in all honesty don’t matter, the biggest thing is that this thing can run just about any game you want and it does it without a sweat. The Omen gaming hub is excellent and adjust things as requested, I was blown away with how well it worked. Things not mentioned but should be considered. Good: • Ports are in the back • HDMI 2.1 • Trackpad • WiFi 7 ( I was able to get connection on 6 GHz across 3 rooms) • Upgradable RAM Bad: • Speakers • At times the Intel chip feels sluggish, this could be because of the limited RAM • Ads in the Omen software • Bloatware • The USB-C is 10 Gbps and can only run a 4k monitor. • HDMI 2.1 is only usable for discrete GPU • Battery drains while on standby more than most new laptops

I highly appreciate a well-designed, well-built and well-performing laptop computer, especially one built with the latest technology for the budget conscious gamer. Fitting the bill, the HP HyperX OMEN - 16 Gaming Laptop Model # 16-am2013dx /D5CD0UA#ABA PC is configured with an Intel Ultra 7X 356H mobile CPU (new 3nm Architecture) with 16 total cores / 16 Threads running from 1.5GHz to 4.7GHz at TurboBoost with 18MB of Intel Smart Cache (L3). This newly designed and released (1st Quarter 2026) Series 3 Evo Edition Panther Lake CPU has 4 Performance cores and 8 Efficient cores. This CPU is designed for maximum power efficiency to provide extended battery life, along with massive AI capabilities through its onboard Neural Processing Unit (NPU) that can handle up to 50 TOPS or Tera Operations Per Second, which essentially is how many trillion calculations a Neural Processing Unit (NPU) can perform every second locally on board the laptop. The Ultra 7 also has an onboard Intel Graphics GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) which works well for lower-end gaming graphics, but for high-end gaming should be bypassed by enabling the discrete NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 Laptop GPU with 8GB of GDDR 7 VRAM to achieve the 165Hz Refresh Rate on the OMEN’s 2K (1080p) IPS built-in display or up to 1440p and higher Refresh Rates for your connected gaming monitor. (Note: Use the Graphics Switcher tab in the OMEN Gaming Hub to switch to Discrete GPU Mode.) As for the OMEN 16’s DRAM, this laptop comes with one 16GB stick of Samsung M425R2GA3EB0-CWMOL 1 x 16GB SODIMM DDR5 clocked at 5600MHz MT/S (mega-transfers per second) which is a fully sufficient amount to support gaming and all standard business and school applications. Storage is provided by a superbly performing SK Hynix PVC10 HFS512GEM9X173N 512GB PCIe Gen4 NVMe m.2 Solid State Drive, which provides outstanding Read / Write Speeds and high performance. All of this is amply powered by a 230W PSU (Power Supply) mainly required by the NVIDIA GeForce 5060 GPU. When I received my new HyperX OMEN 16 laptop, I went through the normal Windows 11 64-bit Home setup and then made sure to run all the Windows updates. After that, I opened the HP Support Assistant provided with the laptop and ran updates from HP. These updates included the latest UEFI BIOS update for this model. (I highly suggest making sure that the latest BIOS and component drivers are installed to ensure you have all the latest features and bug fixes.) Once updates were completed, I went to the HP website through the HP Support Assistant application for the ‘HyperX OMEN 16 inch Gaming Laptop PC 16-am2000 (CR0V7AV)’ page under Utility-Tools. I downloaded and setup the ‘OMEN Gaming Hub SDK Package’. Note that the Support Assistant identifies the laptop with an older model, but when you go online to download the software and choose Windows 11 version 25H2 (64-bit) it will show HyperX OMEN 16-am2013dx (D5CD0UA) correctly. This Gaming utility allows you to set power modes, to monitor system vitals, to tweak cooling profiles, to perform Advanced Performance Tuning, to set Lighting Options, to use Network Booster to increase your Bandwidth when running online gaming, and to set keyboard Key Assignments. Using the utility, you can even use AI to tweak your system to optimally run OMEN AI Supported Games (see list of games in the application). After some tweaking, I did bench-marking on all components using UserBenchmark. UserBenchmark reported that the HyperX OMEN 16 was “Performing above expectations (63rd percentile) overall, with the Intel Ultra 7 CPU performing “as expected at the 48th percentile with an ‘Outstanding’ Bench score of 110% and stating that it tested with a single core out of 16 cores, and this “CPU is the cat’s whiskers: It demolishes everyday tasks such as web browsing, office apps and audio/video playback. Additionally, this processor can handle intensive workstation, and even full-fledged server workloads. Finally, with a gaming score of 110%, this CPU’s suitability for 3D gaming is outstanding.” The RTX5060 GPU performed below potential at the 39th percentile with a ‘Above Average’ 3D Bench score of 51.3% stating that the 3D score was “Reasonable” since RTX 5070 = 100%. “This GPU can handle the majority of games but it will struggle with resolutions greater than 1080p at ultra detail levels”. The SK Hynix SSD came in at an ‘Outstanding’ 261% Bench score, making this drive “suitable for heavy workstation use, it will facilitate fast boots, responsive applications and allow for fast transfers of multi-gigabyte files.” The Samsung M425R2GA3EB0-CWMOL 1 x 16GB SODIMM DDR5 clocked at 5600MHz MT/S performed ‘Outstanding’ at 100% Bench, ‘Performing way above expectations (97th percentile). In all, the HyperX OMEN 16’s results were very impressive and the GPU performance will be better with some more tweaking. As for upgradeability, this HyperX OMEN 16 is thoughtfully designed to allow for installation of extra components. HP put together a very comprehensive “Hardware Reference Guide (for the) HyperX OMEN 16 Gaming Laptop PC” stating that “This guide provides information about components, power management, security, backing up and more.” It goes over all the computer’s features in detail and gives step-by-step instructions on how to identify, disassemble, access, install another piece or replace the System DDR5 DRAM, and to replace or add an SSD NVMe m.2 drive. This is an awesome guide and really shows you how-to upgrade these components when you are ready. This guide is downloadable from the HP site which can be accessed through the HP Support Assistant application. HP has once again designed, built, configured and provided extensive support to this HyperX OMEN 16 relatively budget-conscious and well-performance gaming laptop. I highly recommend this laptop to any serious gamer who is on a budget or to anyone who wants a great performing computer in general.