HP Omen Transcend 14 review

I'm seriously impressed with the new HP Omen Transcend 14 gaming. I love a good 14-inch gaming laptop at the best of times, but there's usually a pretty prohibitive price tag attached. Not so with this wee beauty. I mean, it's still more expensive than most RTX 4060 gaming laptops, but you won't find one at this scale, nor with such a lovely design and gorgeous, high-res OLED screen attached.

The standard sticker price for this Meteor Lake machine is $1,660 for this RTX 4060 version (just $70 more than the RTX 4050 option, so why wouldn't you?), but since receiving this review sample in the labs I've not seen it sitting at that price. In fact, right now this spec is just $1,360 and that's a great price for this little machine.

I did get sent the bundle with the HyperX Cloud III wireless headset in the box, which is a ludicrous extra $150 for the privilege. It's another reminder that HyperX is no longer a Kingston brand and is fully HP'd up, though I'd probably suggest another wireless gaming headset and save yourself the cash.

But what you do get with the base unit is enough that a bundled headset isn't something you're going to be at all concerned with. The Intel Core Ultra 7 155H chip at its heart is a decent 16-core, 22-thread device, which will turbo up to 4.8GHz if you really need it to. For all those cores, it's not a workstation-level 16-core CPU, though it's still able to keep up with the likes of the AMD Ryzen 9 7940HS and 7840HS chips in either the Razer Blade 14 or Asus ROG Flow X13 we've reviewed previously.

CPU: Intel Core Ultra 7 155H
Cores | Threads: 16 | 22
Memory: 16GB LPDDR5x-7500
GPU: Nvidia RTX 4060 (65W)
Screen size: 14-inch
Screen type: OLED
Native resolution: 2880 x 1800
Refresh rate: 120 Hz
Storage: 1TB WD SN810 SSD
Battery: 71 Wh
Warranty: 1 year
Price: $1,360 | $1,800

So, you're not going to be lacking in either the single-core or multi-threaded grunt you'd want from a standard gaming laptop. And it's easily able to keep the Nvidia RTX 4060 fed with