HP Omen Transcend 14

As much as I love the editor's favourite, our test laptop Lenovo Legion 5 and as much as I like the performance of the MSI Titan 18HX, I don't appreciate how they look. The design is mostly hideous. The exhausts on the back look like details from a Transformer while the keys are adorned with letters in the Terminator 2 font. Hideous, is what it is. And for me, as an almost 100-year-old gamer with what I think is a certain design awareness and penchant for the stylish, it's downright embarrassing to take those computers out in public. This is where HP comes in again. After having cleaned up their design department with the release of the amazing 45L, they have now taken the next big step forward in the design thinking of their gaming laptops. Transcend is a brand new line of computers that transcends and surpasses everything they have done before in terms of clean, tidy, successful minimalism. It's quite simply the best-looking gaming laptop in the world, in every category.

The inspiration is the Mac Book Pro, for obvious reasons. Cupertino-based Apple's iconic Jony Ive design stands out as the best in the entire segment and it is these lines, shapes, proportions and even details that HP's design department has tried to mimic. The Transcend 14 is super thin, tidy with stylishly rounded edges and perfect proportions. The aluminium casing is stylishly adonised in dark grey metallic and the frame around the screen itself is wafer thin.

Inside the computer we've been testing for the past five weeks is an Intel Core Ultra 9 185H processor, 32GB of RAM, 2TB SSD and an RTX4070. The 14-inch wide screen is OLED with a 120Hz panel (2880 x 1800), which responds in 0.2 milliseconds. Lightning fast, in other words. The battery lasts for about four hours per charge (HP claims eight hours and 33 minutes, but that's probably only for less demanding games or text editing) according to our five rounds of running various games from 100% to 1%, and the screen itself is an Imax Ready monitor thanks to its 16:10 ratio. HyperX (which HP now owns) is responsible for the sound, which is delivered in either DTS X Ultra or Hyper X Ultra via dual stereo speakers. The computer weighs 1.63 kilograms, making it super light, and it measures just 1.69 centimetres in height when folded. It's incredibly thin, yet it stays cool during tough gaming sessions.

In terms of performance, it's good, too. It gets spanked by the Razer Blade 14 and others in some games, but also gives back in others according to our experience, which makes them equal in terms of how many frames per second are painted on the screen. For example, in Cyberpunk 2077, in 1080p, the Transcend 14 managed 40-42 frames per second while the Razer Blade 14 stayed at 34-38 frames per second, at best. The same was true for Call of Duty: Warzone 3.0, where the Omen beat the Razer, while the situation was reversed in Shadow of the Tomb Raider. Overall, the Transcend 14 performs very well in all the games we tested and it stays relatively cool and above all quiet even at max-load, too.

The keyboard is another aspect that is very good on this computer. I love the feel of the keys and as I said, I also like that it doesn't look like an RGB fountain with "tough" Terminator fonts and all the other gorm. The best thing about the Transcend 14 though is the screen. I've never seen such a phenomenal OLED monitor in a laptop, and especially when it comes to HDR material, it manages to convince really well. There's no doubt in my mind that HP has succeeded very well with the first computer in its new product line and I would love to keep this thin, powerful, gorgeous box and hypnotise HP's press department into forgetting that we have it here, forever.