HP Omen 15

Some mainstream PC manufacturers jumped to play last year, with mainstream laptop featuring parts and entry-level pricing. These systems generally provide an off-the-shelf notebook that will play current-gen game, but can not compete with the performance you see on customizable systems from vendors that specialize in boutique powerful gaming rigs . HP is now jumping into categories, resurrecting the last remnants of the brand of voodoo PC, and it looks like HP is playing to win. The first laptop in the new line is the vision HP 15 ($ 2,099.99 as tested), and getting our unit tests all the bells and whistles, from a customizable keyboard and extra wide trackpad higher- end lots of RAM and storage. It's a real competitor to the system such as Digital Storm krypton, our Editors Choice 'for midrange gaming laptop. If the vision 15 is a sign of things to come, consider me a believer.

design
This slim 15-inch laptop has a unique trapezoidal profile, dressed in a black anodized finish and glowing red accent. The hinge of the laptop gets some unexpected visual flair with a polished chrome hinge, and at the end of the hinge is colored flame pattern. Throughout the cap is a pattern of small triangles imprinted in black aluminum, with an HP logo etched on it.

Measuring 0.8 by 15.1 by 9.7 inches (HWD) and weighs only 4.7 pounds, the 15 vision just a little smaller than the Acer Aspire V 15 Nitro (VN7-591G-75S2) $ 1,299.99 on Amazon, but with weight somewhat lower than the 5.29-pound Acer laptop. Chassis is milled from aluminum, which makes it extremely strong, but light enough to carry under an arm or a backpack. It also keeps things cool, with two vents heat vent on the back side of the chassis, expelling hot air away from the user.

Open the laptop, and you'll be greeted by a 15.6-inch In-Plane Switching (IPS) display with 1920-by-1080 resolution, a perfect combination for a gaming laptop, some offering premium screen system of higher resolution, but the limitations of the current notebook GPUs make it almost impossible to take advantage of all the pixels for playing. It's also a touch screen, a feature that had previously been rare in gaming systems, but we found another, as Y50 Lenovo Lenovo Touch $ 1,399.00, which offers touch-screen capabilities for a more full Windows 8 experience. In addition to the display, proud of vision 15 also wonderful sound, thanks to the two front-facing speakers and Beats Audio.

The keyboard on the RGB backlighting, with many lighting zone (right, left, center, and WASD keys), and lets you change the color of the backlight in any color you want. The same can be applied to the speaker, and you can also set the speaker lighting to throb to the beat of whatever music you're listening to, or react to loud noises in the game. The chiclet-style keyboard is similar to other HP laptop, but adds a row of six programmable macro keys on the left side of the keyboard. The vision also 15 extra wide touchpad, which offers better support for the motion guide day-to-day, but for gaming, you'll still have to use a separate gaming mouse.