HP Omen Max 16 (2025) Review

Design and Keyboard

• Blander all-black chassis
• Solid port selection
• Tactile keyboard and smaller trackpad

Of the slew of these high-power premium gaming laptops I’ve tested recently, the Omen Max 16 (2025) just feels a little dull in the aesthetics department. It’s a thick black slab with a little bit of flair with HP’s Omen branding across the lid and on the inside, but there isn’t much else to it, whereas MSI and Medion have used contrasting colours and finishes to create something that looks altogether more exciting.

It’s a solid chassis, though, and feels substantial with a smooth, matte finish. There is a smattering of RGB across the front underside of the Omen Max 16 (2025), though for a little bit of welcome flair. At 2.68kg, it tips the scales with a similar weight to the competition, and can feel quite bulky and heavy. That is the way of these larger-screen gaming laptops, though.

The Omen Max 16 (2025) is blessed with a good selection of inputs, with the left side housing a pair of Thunderbolt 4-capable USB-C ports and a 3.5mm jack, while the right side has a USB-A port. This is joined on the rear by a second USB-A port alongside an HDMI 2.1 port and 2.5-gig Ethernet for wired networking. That’s pretty solid.

The keyboard here is a full-size one with a number pad, arrow keys and function row. It comes with a solid scissor-actuated feel that benefits from good tactility and a crisper keypress. There is some bright RGB lighting under finger if you want it for aiding after-dark working and adding to the overall aesthetic.

As for the trackpad, while responsive and accurate, I couldn’t help but it feel it was a little on the smaller side against the competition that can provide more real estate for your fingers.

Display and Sound

• Bright screen with decent dynamic range
• Okay colour accuracy and black levels
• Speakers can be tinny at higher volumes

The Omen Max 16 (2025) can be specced either with an IPS or an OLED screen, depending on which model you go for; the SKU I have is the former, with a 16-inch 2560×1600 240Hz panel that benefits from a large, high-res and high refresh rate screen for detailed and responsive output.

It’s certainly one of the punchiest IPS screens I’ve used in recent times, with a peak SDR brightness of 522.2 nits alongside solid contrast and dynamic range with a measured 1080:1 contrast ratio. At that peak brightness, the 0.48 black level can leave them with a tinge of grey, although the 6500K colour temperature is perfect.

Colour accuracy is a mixed bag, with 99% sRGB coverage helping this laptop to be perfectly suited for productivity and workloads involving mainstream colours. However, the 79% DCI-P3 and Adobe RGB results are just shy of the 80% requisite level where I could theoretically recommend this screen for more colour-sensitive and creative tasks.

The Omen Max 16 (2025)’s speakers are fine for casual listening, although they can sound quite shrill and tinny at higher volumes. As is typically the case, you’re better off using a dedicated set of desktop speakers or a headset for much more immersive, high-quality audio.

Performance

• Core Ultra 9 275HX provides fantastic performance
• RTX 5080 in here is performing closer to a 5070 Ti
• Immensely fast SSD

It’s gotten to the point where once I know the price of one of these 2025 gaming laptops, I can guess the specs – this Omen Max 16 (2025) doesn’t exactly spring any surprises with its internals, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

It comes with the same power core as both the recent MSI and Medion options I’ve tested, with a potent Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX and RTX 5080 laptop GPU. This, in theory, means some serious gaming performance, not least from having Nvidia’s second-in-command laptop GPU inside.

The Core Ultra 9 275HX is a highlight, with a monstrous 24 cores and 24 threads split asymmetrically between eight Performance and 16 Efficiency cores, as well as a boost clock of up to 5.4GHz when needed.

In the Omen Max 16 (2025), it shows itself as one of the best laptop chips we’ve tested across the board in both the Geekbench 6 and Cinebench R23 tests. It’s on par with the Medion and MSI compatriots that also utilise this Arrow Lake Ultra chip to good effect, with strong single and multi-threaded results, even if Intel has ditched hyperthreading in recent times.

It’s with the presence of the RTX 5080 that things can either go very well or be quite disappointing. It can depend on whether this card is being used to its full power, as to whether we get class-leading results, or whether it performs more like a slightly better 5070 Ti, as it does in the ROG Zephyrus G16 (2025), where it is instead paired with a Core Ultra 9 285H.

I’m afraid to say that it’s more of the latter with the Omen Max 16 (2025), with results some way below both MSI and Medion’s competitors. At 1080p with no ray-tracing or upscaling, we’re getting 103.92fps in Cyberpunk 2077 and 106fps in Returnal. This comes alongside 125fps in Rainbow Six Extraction, which feels quite low for an esports title.

Going up to 1440p, Cyberpunk 2077 drops to 72.89fps, while Returnal sits at 79fps average. Weirdly, Rainbow Six Extraction’s result increased to 134fps – this was seen again with the ROG Zephyrus G16 (2025). These results are still more than playable, but they are just disappointing given how much better the competition is.

The DLSS Transformer model upscaler in Cyberpunk 2077 helped the 1080p result up to 104.35fps, and at the Omen Max 16 (2025)’s native 2560×1600 output, it was as high as 91.14fps – that is a win over MSI’s option. DLSS helped push the RT: Ultra result up from 47.66fps at 1080p all the way to 71.02fps, while at 2560×1600, it went from 29.37fps to 54.78fps – still some way behind.

Of course, coming with a 50-series card inside, the Omen Max 16 (2025) has Nvidia’s Multi-Frame-Gen tech inside that adds in up to three ‘fake frames’ for every traditionally generated one using the powers of AI for a perceivably smoother experience. This is designed to take advantage of higher refresh rate displays without much of a latency penalty, just as long as your base frame rate is high enough to mean the displayed image with MFG isn’t choppy or laggy.

With the maximum 4x multiplier applied, it took RT: Ultra Cyberpunk 2077 to 163.36fps at 2560×1600 resolution, and 225.77fps at 1080p, getting rather close to the 240Hz refresh rate of the screen.

The Omen Max 16 (2025) has 32GB of DDR5 RAM inside and a 1TB SSD that is of a solid capacity for storing a decent set of games and apps. It’s one of the fastest laptop SSDs I’ve tested, too, with measured speeds of 11381.14MB/s reads and 8662.27MB/s writes.

Software

• Clean Windows 11 install
• Minimal HP-specific apps
• Not enough AI horsepower to be a Copilot+ PC

The Omen Max 16 (2025) comes with a clean Windows 11 install, with only the HP-specific app preinstalled. It’s Omen Gaming Hub, the brand’s catch-all app that allows you to do everything from checking on your system’s vitals to configuring its RGB lighting, and a lot more besides, including playing games over the cloud with Nvidia’s GeForce Now service.

As much as there is a Copilot key on this laptop for waking Microsoft’s AI assistant, this laptop isn’t powerful enough on the AI front to become one of Microsoft’s Copilot+ PCs with its extra AI gubbins.

Battery Life

• Lasted for 2 hours 19 minutes in the battery test
• Barely capable of lasting for half a working day

For the Omen Max 16 (2025), HP has put in a large 83Whr cell, which is slightly smaller than the 90Whr and 99.9Whr cells I’ve seen fitted to this laptop’s key rivals. As with MSI too, they don’t make any specific claims about endurance.

In the PCMark 10 battery test with the brightness at 150 nits, this HP laptop only lasted for 2 hours and 19 minutes, which is a disappointing result. Virtually-identically specced laptops from Medion and MSI have lasted for twice or three times as long as the Omen Max 16 (2025), and it’ll mean you’ll be spending a lot of time plugged into the mains. Of course, to get the maximum power out of this laptop, you’ll need to do that anyway.

It comes with a 240W DC charger that does a reasonable job of getting juice back into the Omen Max 16 (2025) fast, taking an hour or so to get back to 50%, while a full charge took two hours and 10 minutes.

Should you buy it?