HP Updates OMEN 15 Laptop Design, Now Features AMD Ryzen 7 4800H and GeForce RTX 2060

[Raevenlord]

A refresh of HP's OMEN 15 seems to be about to hit the market, as HP UK has already put up a page for the revised laptop. The most appealing changes are, as usual, under the hood: the updated model now features AMD's Ryzen 7 4800H CPU, an 8-core, 16-thread solution that features a 45 W TDP and basically beats anything Intel has on the market against it. However, it seems that the scarcity of high-end mobile GPUs for any AMD-based platform continues, as the most powerful graphics solution available for this particular version of the OMEN is an NVIDIA RTX 2060 graphics card. Perhaps OEMs don't want to spoil us with both the best CPU and GPU solutions available on the mobile market? Go figure.

The OMEN 15 has seen a redesign from its previous version, now featuring thinner bezels, a different hinge system, no number pad, and the panel supports Adaptive Sync, though the refresh rate hasn't been detailed. It also features a Bang & Olufsen sound system, as well as RGB-backlit keys. The product page for the product has since been taken down and can now only be accessed via a cached version, so there's that. But the laptop was priced at 1,199 GBP (1,370 EUR).

It's not just a gaming laptop, it's THE gaming laptop. Obviously, the OMEN 15 has a powerful AMD processor and NVIDIA graphics in a compact frame. Did we mention it has a fast display and long battery life? Yeah, it has everything and you can take it even further with OMEN Command Center. So, just enjoy those envious looks while you play, it's only natural.

Powerful in all the right places
The OMEN 15 is a perfect example of how there can never be too much of a good thing. With a powerful AMD processor and NVIDIA graphics cooled by OMEN Tempest Cooling, it makes you think how it all fits into such a tiny little package.

Beautiful doesn't begin to describe it
We don't need to tell you how good it looks and feels to play on, but we're going to do it anyway. It's easy on the eyes with a luscious design and fast display. Crafted with Audio by Bang & Olufsen and super long battery life, so that means you won't stop farming those wins or those admiring looks.

Now it's personal
The OMEN 15 doesn't just stop at having powerful specs and an amazing look. With OMEN Command Center, you can customize and optimize everything from performance controls to the customized keyboard. It's easy to upgrade and has all the ports you need, so you can take it even further beyond other mere gaming laptops.

HP

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[AnarchoPrimitiv]

I'm not one for conspiracy theories or paranoid delusions, but I will say this, if by the time Zen3/Ryzen 4000(desktop)/ryzen 5000(mobile) is released, there isn't a single Laptop with a Ryzen 4000 CPU and a High end GPU, I would definitely attribute that to anti-competitive, possibly illegal practices by Intel. If Intel hadn't been found guilty if bribing OEMs to not use AMD in 2000s, I probably wouldn't think it possible, but Intel set the precedent with its own actions. Considering that Intel is even more desperate now than they were then, and mobile is their last bastion against AMD... I could totally see them working out an exclusivity deal with OEMs in the mobile market.

 

[SL2]

I'm not one for conspiracy theories..

In worst case, you're right. But, that doesn't mean that Nvidia is innocent here.

Another alternative is that it takes one generation for laptop makers to catch up, like you suggest. When the first Ryzen U CPU's were launched, we didn't see many models with it, only a few with worse panels and high idle power consumption. A year later we saw more models with better parts and specs, and even MS bothered making a Ryzen version of their Surface Laptop (and that's not a given).

So maybe it'll take a generation for gaming laptops as well?

 

[TheLostSwede]

I'm not one for conspiracy theories or paranoid delusions, but I will say this, if by the time Zen3/Ryzen 4000(desktop)/ryzen 5000(mobile) is released, there isn't a single Laptop with a Ryzen 4000 CPU and a High end GPU, I would definitely attribute that to anti-competitive, possibly illegal practices by Intel. If Intel hadn't been found guilty if bribing OEMs to not use AMD in 2000s, I probably wouldn't think it possible, but Intel set the precedent with its own actions. Considering that Intel is even more desperate now than they were then, and mobile is their last bastion against AMD... I could totally see them working out an exclusivity deal with OEMs in the mobile market.

Have you designed an AMD based anything? If you knew how much harder the device makers have to work to make a functional product with AMD hardware, you might have understood that it's a much greater investment in time, manpower and money to make a product based on AMD, rather than Intel hardware. This is mainly due to AMD not having the same support infrastructure that Intel has, nor the same kind of resources and financial backing. So no, it wouldn't only be down to Intel and how they deal with things behind the scenes.

 

[Imsochobo]

Have you designed an AMD based anything? If you knew how much harder the device makers have to work to make a functional product with AMD hardware, you might have understood that it's a much greater investment in time, manpower and money to make a product based on AMD, rather than Intel hardware. This is mainly due to AMD not having the same support infrastructure that Intel has, nor the same kind of resources and financial backing. So no, it wouldn't only be down to Intel and how they deal with things behind the scenes.

The first who does will be rewarded for sure, also the intel design is a chain of refreshes hence why it's cheap.

 

[zlobby]

Seems quite gimped in comparison to its intel brethren, even the 15-dc1xxx series.

If that little grille on the right is all the cooling there is... For comparison, the other Omens with 45W intel CPU have 2 scram jets, err, fans with a double heatpipes that run throught both the CPU and the dGPU, so one fan can help the other in case of need.

Also, the intel ones have 144Hz displays.

So, in summary - to this one seems like a waste of a good CPU. HP should have made a decent ZBook with it.

 

[Totally]

I'm not one for conspiracy theories or paranoid delusions, but I will say this, if by the time Zen3/Ryzen 4000(desktop)/ryzen 5000(mobile) is released, there isn't a single Laptop with a Ryzen 4000 CPU and a High end GPU, I would definitely attribute that to anti-competitive, possibly illegal practices by Intel. If Intel hadn't been found guilty if bribing OEMs to not use AMD in 2000s, I probably wouldn't think it possible, but Intel set the precedent with its own actions. Considering that Intel is even more desperate now than they were then, and mobile is their last bastion against AMD... I could totally see them working out an exclusivity deal with OEMs in the mobile market.

You sure it's Intel? not Nvidia, that currently wrecking havoc with OEM (e.g. play by our rules or don't play at all, this how Nvidia wants to do things deal with it).

 

[zlobby]

Insert 'why not both' meme here.

 

[AnarchoPrimitiv]

You sure it's Intel? not Nvidia, that currently wrecking havoc with OEM (e.g. play by our rules or don't play at all, this how Nvidia wants to do things deal with it).

I definitely thunk Nvidia would have zero hesitancy to involve themselves in such a conspiracy, and again, they have historical precedent too in nefarious acts, like the GeForce Partnership Program...perhaps I didnt mention Nvidia in the first post because I didnt want to deal with the inevitable attacks against me by unrelenting hive-mind of nvidia's fanboy army.

Have you designed an AMD based anything? If you knew how much harder the device makers have to work to make a functional product with AMD hardware, you might have understood that it's a much greater investment in time, manpower and money to make a product based on AMD, rather than Intel hardware. This is mainly due to AMD not having the same support infrastructure that Intel has, nor the same kind of resources and financial backing. So no, it wouldn't only be down to Intel and how they deal with things behind the scenes.

How does my personal experience have anything to do with the strength of my argument? In logic, thats called an "ad hominem logical fallacy", but Ill indulge...have you ever designed AMD hardware? Can you fulfill your own requirements for being able to voice an opinion? Regardless, OEMs usually have first access to hardware, so Im not buying the "not enough time" argument.

 

[holyprof]

The most probable cause is the market itself. 99% of the users have tunnel vision about laptops - it's "intel inside" or nothing. It would be risky for a manufacturer to put out $3000 laptops with 2080 GPUs and AMD CPUs, targeted at a small portion of the 1% informed buyers that aren't Intel fanboys.
Specs wise, the 2060 seems a perfect match for the 4800H for professionals and creators. If you want better GPU, I'm sure there are, or will be, NV Quadro / AMD Radeon Pro laptops/desktop replacements. Gamers will still prefer Intel for their 2070 / 2080 equipped gaming laptops.

 

[Cranky5150]

I'm not one for conspiracy theories or paranoid delusions, but I will say this, if by the time Zen3/Ryzen 4000(desktop)/ryzen 5000(mobile) is released, there isn't a single Laptop with a Ryzen 4000 CPU and a High end GPU, I would definitely attribute that to anti-competitive, possibly illegal practices by Intel. If Intel hadn't been found guilty if bribing OEMs to not use AMD in 2000s, I probably wouldn't think it possible, but Intel set the precedent with its own actions. Considering that Intel is even more desperate now than they were then, and mobile is their last bastion against AMD... I could totally see them working out an exclusivity deal with OEMs in the mobile market.

I don't think you are too off the point really. Nvidia and Intel have both been caught doing this in the past that’s true. It doesn't mean they could or will do it again but, The behavior is still there. Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me..

 

[TheoneandonlyMrK]

Regardless, it's good to see a main OEM put out something like this, it's a start.
And this is probably the sweet spot of affordable gaming on the go.
Mobile rtx2060 is plenty powerful for any games out now.

 

[Assimilator]

How does my personal experience have anything to do with the strength of my argument? In logic, thats called an "ad hominem logical fallacy", but Ill indulge...have you ever designed AMD hardware? Can you fulfill your own requirements for being able to voice an opinion? Regardless, OEMs usually have first access to hardware, so Im not buying the "not enough time" argument.

It's far more than just hardware, it's the infrastructure and support around that hardware and integrating it into your own design. Intel and AMD have been doing this for OEMs for literally decades, AMD (due to lack of good product and lack of funds) has not. In short, it means that fitting AMD hardware into your own design is far more of a challenge and risk - not only is there more potential for the end result to not work out, it also takes more time and has the potential to take even longer, which means you may not make the deadline for launching your design.

When you're a multibillion-dollar company, and things aren't working right, you want to be able to pick up the phone and call someone from your partner company, and have them send a troubleshooting person or team to your front door by the next working day. Intel and NVIDIA have this support available, AMD does not.

A personal anecdote to illustrate: my team worked on a software project where we had to interface an Android device with another proprietary hardware device. The latter used a controller chip by a well-known and established manufacturer, who had provided an Android driver for that chip, which means we didn't have to write our own driver. That shaved literally months off the development time.

However, the controller driver had some rather severe bugs. But because the manufacturer of that controller provides easily-contactable support, I was able to get in touch with a real engineer at the manufacturer, explain the problem to them, and send them crash logs of the bugs. Two weeks later, they provided me a beta driver that addressed the issues, and my team was able to get back to actually writing the software we were supposed to be writing, and deliver it on-time and on-budget.

If a less-well-supported controller chip from a less-well-known manufacturer had been used, it's quite possible - in fact likely - that my project would not have been able to meet its deadlines. This of course, does not mean that an off-brand controller chip would have objectively been worse - it's quite possible that the opposite would have been true. But there was no way to know, and no time to perform that investigation. In contrast, we were very aware that the manufacturer of the chip chosen was renowned for its good support - it was a known quantity on a project that had many unknowns.

At the end of the day, the choice of controller chip ensured that my team's software project, worth a few hundred thousand dollars, succeeded. When you are designing laptops, you're talking hundreds of millions. Those are projects that hurt big if they fail, they are projects that pretty much can't fail. And the best way to ensure success is to stick to what you know.

Right now, Intel and NVIDIA are known successful quantities, and AMD is not. It takes a lot of time, a lot of expenditure, and a lot of dedication to build up proven world-class support, and AMD simply isn't there yet. If they continue to iterate as well as they are, there's absolutely no question they'll get there - but they are starting from scratch against competitors who have been doing this for literally decades.

 

[TheLostSwede]

How does my personal experience have anything to do with the strength of my argument? In logic, thats called an "ad hominem logical fallacy", but Ill indulge...have you ever designed AMD hardware? Can you fulfill your own requirements for being able to voice an opinion? Regardless, OEMs usually have first access to hardware, so Im not buying the "not enough time" argument.

I have designed hardware, not with AMD bits, but even so. I also know a lot of what goes into the motherboard and notebook designs, as Intel hands over reference designs, AMD, not so much. You want to make something based on AMD hardware, you start with a bag of bits and then it's more or less up to you how to figure out how it works. Obviously you get some design guidelines etc. but compared to get a full reference design, it's quite a different way of doing things. As such, a lot of companies are reluctant to work with AMD, due to the much more costly design phase.
You seem to be quite clueless about these things, based on your comments.

 

[bencrutz]

When you're a multibillion-dollar company, and things aren't working right, you want to be able to pick up the phone and call someone from your partner company, and have them send a troubleshooting person or team to your front door by the next working day. Intel and NVIDIA have this support available, AMD does not.

so there should be no reason because they can easily ask support from nvidia in using more powerful GPU, right?

 

[Assimilator]

so there should be no reason because they can easily ask support from nvidia in using more powerful GPU, right?

I don't understand your question.

 

[Vayra86]

How does my personal experience have anything to do with the strength of my argument? In logic, thats called an "ad hominem logical fallacy", but Ill indulge...have you ever designed AMD hardware? Can you fulfill your own requirements for being able to voice an opinion? Regardless, OEMs usually have first access to hardware, so Im not buying the "not enough time" argument.

That wasn't his point. The point is economy and margins... if it costs you more R&D and more time to design an AMD product your time to market is longer. Its a thing, because the next chip release is always around the corner. If you can't market things fast enough, the momentum is lost and you release behind the optimal curve of sales. So not only does it cost more to develop product, the risk is also greater a competitor or your own product line cannibalizes it.

Its a theme with AMD products. GPUs are the same... Nvidia releases mobile friendly versions and has a tight driver regime, AMD is winging it (look at the pre-launch 14Gbps driver for Navi...) and has no consistency in releases. And look at Ryzen. The mobo / RAM compatibility issues. Yes, its a new platform, but that's not an excuse, it is an observation and it counts.

 

[medi01]

I have designed hardware, not with AMD bits, but even so. I also know a lot of what goes into the motherboard and notebook designs, as Intel hands over reference designs, AMD, not so much. You want to make something based on AMD hardware, you start with a bag of bits and then it's more or less up to you how to figure out how it works. Obviously you get some design guidelines etc. but compared to get a full reference design, it's quite a different way of doing things. As such, a lot of companies are reluctant to work with AMD, due to the much more costly design phase.
You seem to be quite clueless about these things, based on your comments.

This would be a nice post in "why aren't there any AMD mainboards" you know.
But we are asking why one could slap 2060 into AMD laptop, but not something faster.
Or how adding better screens to AMD offerings is more complex than having crappy TNs or worst of the IPS on them.

HP cannot add 144Hz laptop to AMD lineup, while tiny MSI can, how convincing.

Or why there still isn't a goddamn Spectre based on Renoir.

 

[TheLostSwede]

That wasn't his point. The point is economy and margins... if it costs you more R&D and more time to design an AMD product your time to market is longer. Its a thing, because the next chip release is always around the corner. If you can't market things fast enough, the momentum is lost and you release behind the optimal curve of sales. So not only does it cost more to develop product, the risk is also greater a competitor or your own product line cannibalizes it.

Its a theme with AMD products. GPUs are the same... Nvidia releases mobile friendly versions and has a tight driver regime, AMD is winging it (look at the pre-launch 14Gbps driver for Navi...) and has no consistency in releases. And look at Ryzen. The mobo / RAM compatibility issues. Yes, its a new platform, but that's not an excuse, it is an observation and it counts.

Actually, Nokia/HMD is a great example of this right now, their "flagship" phones have been 6-9 months behind the competition to market. They've most likely lost market share due to this.

 

[RandallFlagg]

I'm not impressed with what I'm seeing on actual laptop offerings.

Just to put this in perspective, my laptop is a PowerSpec 1510 i7-7700HQ, 16GB DDR4-2400 RAM, 256 Samsung EVO 960 M.2 + 1TB WD Blue SATA SSD and GTX 1070 w/8GB.
This has a PCMark 10 overall score of 4689 which is better than about 75% of submissions with this same CPU.

I'm looking at their list of 4800H laptops, and the #1 laptop is an Asus Tuf with 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, and a 1660Ti

It has a score of 5560. This is only 18.6% faster than my 2 1/2 year old laptop with a quad core i7-7700HQ.

To put this into perspective, the top laptop score for an i7-9750H with a 1660Ti is almost 5966 (27% faster). Bumping up to a 2070 will push that to as high as 6458 (37% faster). To add insult to injury here, the 9570H based laptops are being discounted to make room for the 107xx and 108xx laptops while the AMD laptops are charging a premium. Not talking chump change either, in some cases you'll pay 40-50% more for the amd based laptops.

Yes this probably has nothing to do with the CPU, it's just cheap parts and lack of optimization. Possibly there's something up with the chipset as well.

But from a consumer standpoint, I don't care. It's like telling me your new car has a powerful motor but skinny tires and a 3 speed transmission on it.

 

[R0H1T]

If you can't market things fast enough, the momentum is lost and you release behind the optimal curve of sales. So not only does it cost more to develop product, the risk is also greater a competitor or your own product line cannibalizes it.

Pretty sure this should be a non argument currently. Let's see if things improve at the back end of the year, with more powerful mGPU being rolled out for AMD or not!

 

[lexluthermiester]

Ok HP, You've given us some AMD goodness. Now give us a 17" or 18" version with better cooling and an RTX 2070. Yes Yes.

 

[bencrutz]

I don't understand your question.

they already had a 2060 working with ryzen 4000, what's the difficult part in incorporating higher RTX series?

 

[Caring1]

they already had a 2060 working with ryzen 4000, what's the difficult part in incorporating higher RTX series?

It's not aimed at gamers, so the 2060 is enough for most in that thin and light laptop form.

 

[Iluv2raceit]

Now if only they made a version with a RTX2070 Super....