Are you Team Core Ultra or Team Raptor Lake Refresh? HP’s new Omen laptops offer a choice.
In 2024, laptop makers have a choice: launch laptops with Intel’s “Raptor Lake Refresh” mobile CPUs or use Intel’s AI-powered Core Ultra “Meteor Lake” chips instead. HP is launching two new Omen Transcend laptops this week at CES 2024 and you’ll have a choice between both processors as well as a new OLED display option.
HP is launching both the Omen Transcend 14, a 14-inch gaming PC, with your choice of either the Core Ultra 7 155H or the Core Ultra 9 185H inside–the top echelon of the mobile Core Ultra chips Intel launched just before the holiday. Alternatively, you can choose the Omen Transcend 16, which will feature the mobile version of Intel’s Raptor Lake Refresh microprocessors, either the Core i7-14700HX or the Core i9-14900HX, which Intel is debuting at CES 2024.
Providing two processors to PC makers like HP offers them a substantive choice: select the power-efficient Core Ultra or decide upon the older but more performance-optimized Raptor Lake Refresh architecture instead, which has already debuted on the desktop. On the desktop, at least, that chip doesn’t seem to offer much more performance than the 13th-gen Core alongside similar power levels, though features like Wi-Fi 7 make the platform attractive.
For that reason, HP seems to be focusing on the Omen Transcend 14, which HP is billing as a device “designed to play games anywhere”. As a gaming laptop, this isn’t a surprise. But HP is trying to play up the battery life, not usually a strong suit for gaming laptops: 11 hours, at least measured by the (non-gaming) MobileMark 25 benchmark. In part, that’s due to a new feature within the Omen Gaming Hub app, where you’ll be able to disable the discrete GPU and use integrated graphics only, alongside an Eco mode, for long battery life during the daytime office hours.
