HP Omen 15 (5XXX series) Gaming Notebook

Getting mine tonight.. Very nervous. Has anyone not had any problems? It seems like everyone is having problems so I have no hope lol.

 

Ah, don't be too worried.

People with problems are a lot more vocal than people without... :thumbsup:

 

Don't worry the least. The only issue I have is a the charging thing, and I'm pretty sure it's a software related issue since I unplugged the laptop and kept having the frame drops. I'll look into it but I really hope somebody could provide me a with a solution. I doubt the charger is at fault which I read on other forums.

 

Got the Omen from Amazon. Very impressive Windows laptop.

My question is: How does one turn off the bloody lights in the back fan grills?? They glow red no matter what. The higher the fan speed, the more they glow red.

 

Haha! Those lights are freaking cool but I also worried about it - especially when taking my laptop to lectures. I don't think it's possible, but maybe it can be done through the bios?

 

My FedEx shipping says it is now in the area and on a truck being delivered! I have never been more ecstatic. It was due to arrive Monday, but it looks like it's getting here soon. I'm hoping within the next 2 hours... Finally! :'D

Have you made sure you've received all of the windows updates you should be getting at this point?

Try using the laptop unplugged until it warns you about low battery at 10% and then plug it back in and charge it all the way to the top without use. That'll reset the battery and may resolve the issue. It could be that the feature that helps maintain the battery life longevity is doing that - at 100% charge and plugged in, it'll automatically stop using the battery until 95% and then charge it back up again. It'll go up and down as long as the battery is plugged in. That might be the cause, although I am uncertain... If you do end up doing that, come back and keep us posted of any changes.

 

So you're saying fps is fine, but occasionally it will dip to low fps once in a while? Are you running origin? I heard that there is some problem with origin overlay in game causing fps lag.

 

Totally agree. I read what the earlier fellow said, and I asked "What has the HP Co. done that is so terrible?" and went to find out. They supplied electronic equipment to Israel. THAT is such a monstrous act? Puhleese!
And also this is not the place for religious or political issues.

 

Edit: I just called HP to find out and it does have a standard sized hard drive bay


You are 100% certain of that? Or are you just quoting what some other person told you, who likely just tossed off a reply. There is no "standard sized hard drive bay" that is known here?

 

With all the discussion about Screen Flickering and the correct procedure how to return the machine and get your money back, the situation seems to have deteriorated.
The SF does indeed seem to be a consistent, and serious, issue, but what to do? No one seems to have any answers.

I called the HP Co..and asked if they knew anything about the SF.
Which now realise was about as futile as calling the American Tobacco Co. to ask if they knew anything about lung cancer.

So, when the machine I ordered does finally arrive, will have to, as one fellow said, pray to God it's ok.
If not, am hoping He will understand and forgive my curses. This is, after all, an expensive item.

worse: Doing a BIOS update to try to fix the SF; finding that doesn't work, and being told in addition that, because you were so cheeky to do the update, your AC adapter is now no good.
Wot a revolting development! Chester A. Riley

 

Thanks for your recommendation, I'll do that.
For now, I'm testing another game, the planetside 2.
It takes 10 hours to complete the download (should be done in 7,however).
I updated everything. Please note that the issue only occurs when gaming and charging simultaneously.

Btw

I got an SMS on the day of delivery and I was tripping all day till I received it.

 

K. Just try doing the thing with the battery and keep us posted when you get the chance.

 

Sure!
Will you please test gaming and charging on your device on you receive it?

The thing is - 1.5 hours of gaming is plenty for me, but the battery won't last for 1.5 hours the rest of its life. So at some point I'll have to change and game simultaneously

 

The whole bottom is not open. Only the fan area is open.

Right. The bottom hatch marks, which appear to be openings, are just faux.
The top area also is mostly closed, with perhaps a fifth of its space vented.'
Why they were so stingy in this regard is unknown.

 

How do you mean? You should rarely game on the battery. For the best performance, plug it in.

To soft reset the battery, do what I suggested once to see if there is any change. I'm not saying to do that always. It's recommended to do that once or twice a month on moderate usage anyway.

 

Well, that's the thing. Gaming while the laptop is plugged in results in random lag spikes (or frame rate drops, whatever is most appropriate).
The game starts out fine but after some time the first lag occurs and lasts for 3-5 seconds where after the game runs perfectly fine for another couple of seconds and then it repeats. And it keeps like that.
I tried disabling McAfee without any significant benefit.

There is no lag at all when running on battery.

Oh Yeah, I see why I confused you. Autocorrect changed a few words and I wrote it all in a hurry. Hope this post elaborates it better.

 

Got my Omen moments ago. First impressions, absolutely awesome computer. The packaging is really nice and the effort on that front is very appreciated. The screen is stunning! I put the brightness 5 clicks up from the lowest setting. Absolutely solid machine. It is very light and thin comparatively to my 2012 Pavilion dv6t. I am pleasantly surprised and satisfied thus far!

I plan on doing a minimized image recovery in a bit and install some games. Very impressive machine!

EDIT: Just confirming, the laptop does not come with an Ethernet to USB adaptor/ dongle, sadly.

 

(A) You state you have not even received the machine yet, but you are already thinking of returning it after you get it, thus making it a "used" machine.
(B) You could right now cancel.
And you don't consider that (A) is...disgraceful?

We all pay for these frivolous returns, cost to the manufacturer just gets added onto the price.

 

Following this thread with interest; mine arrives Christmas Eve.

I'm getting it as an actual business machine; I want a machine with a Nvidia GPU because I write CUDA code for a living (I'm a physics professor) and would like a way to test things locally without ssh'ing to the supercomputer. Of course it will get used to play games sometimes when I'm not at work...

I do hope that the rear LED's can be turned completely off; I do want something I can use in front of the students without being blingy.

I'm also curious about the battery life: what sort of battery life does Windows estimate (hovering over the battery icon) when you've got the brightness on 30% and not doing anything strenuous? HP claims 4:45, and I'm hoping that's accurate.

 

re: not sure about the hard corners.

Can you give more info. The "corners" are "hard"?
Is that good or bad. What is it of the corners are you "not sure" of?

I know the machine has very steep bevel, with sharp edges. Have the edges been an issue for anybody?

 

re: To soft reset the battery, do what I suggested once to see if there is any change. I'm not saying to do that always. It's recommended to do that once or twice a month on moderate usage anyway.

Please, would be helpful to repeat here what you "suggested once," vs having hapless readers including this one have to muck about in search of it. Thanks.
On other hand, if most of the machines have to be returned because of screen flickering, the mysterious battery suggestion becomes academic.

 

I have not experienced any screen flickering so far. The colors are crisp and accurate. I didn't dare say this, but this screen looks much better than the FHD matte IPS display on my 2012 Pavilion dv6t-7000, something I thought not possible. It would make more sense seeing how its glossy counterpart has been proven to be better. There is no light leak whatsoever comparatively and the colors don't wash out.

There is slight fan noise when in a totally silent room but nothing too bad as the fans in the Omen seem bigger than your average fan cooling system, and is as expected, which is a good thing as it will do better at cooling your laptop down.

The speakers are good, but not great. It is missing a subwoofer which takes away lows you would need for music. The speakers on my 2012 Pavilion dv6t-7000, which are also Beats Audio speakers, sound better.

Also, interestingly enough, I've found the wedged shaped edges are perfect for placing the laptop perfectly between your legs. If you place the laptop on your lap, you run the risk of blocking the fan vents on the bottom. Resting the edges of the Omen on your legs instead seem to work perfectly. I'm not sure if the design was intentional for this purpose or not, probably not, but it works!

Having the USB ports located on the back is going to get some getting used to. I'm usually plugging in and disconnecting flash drives and portable and backup drives as well as external audio interfaces which make it a bit inconvenient as just peering over the back doesn't work. The silver metal joint bezel between the body and the monitor sort of blocks the view of the ports if you simply want to peer over to the back.

 

I'm happy that you're glad with your new laptop.

Some more testing:
I used HWinfo to check my charging rate. I'm really lacking a multimeter to measure amps, but with HWinfo I got the following information. The laptop charges with
Voltage:16-17V
And charge rate: 27 watts

To be honest, the charge rate seems a little low? I tried running dota 2 and the first framerate drop I experienced was truly associated with a drop in charging rate (from 27 to 24 Watt) but after that initial charging rate drop it seemed to stabilise at 27 Watts and I was still experiencing frame rate drops.

What are your thoughts on this, isn't 27 watts too low?

I also tried throttlestop but that didn't help. I wasn't expecting it to either.


Edit: you should probably scratch that since hwinfo can only show us at which rate the battery is being charged and 27 watts are plenty. It would take it two hours to charge the batter to 100%. It seems like there's no other option than to acquire a multimeter if I want to measure amps.

 

new 25% coupon vip2014 (can be used only 600 time )

 

I had a chance to use a demo Omen 15 model last night. It was the preconfigured model with 8GB of RAM and 2GB of VRAM. It is a very solid laptop.

The keyboard and trackpad felt really good and are easily as nice to type on as my other HP and Dell notebooks. It is too bad they couldn't fit the HOME, END, PGUP, PGDN row that my Elitebook 850 G1 has, mirroring the Macro row on the other side of the keyboard.

Having the ports on the back definitely took me by surprise. It would be nice if V2 could have a USB port on each side, with a headset jack on the front in the center. This would keep with the design while letting both left and righty's easy connect a mouse and headphones on the go.

The screen was the same Samsung panel that everyone else has. While it did not flicker on either 60hz or 40hz refresh rates, I did notice something I haven't seen for probably 6-7 years. On solid colors, every other line was slightly lighter than the other, producing a odd scanlines sort of effect on the display. This may have been exaggerated by the touchscreen (they usually have a matrix overlay that can be seen if the light hits it just right) but it was pretty surprising to see this effect. Maybe there are just some bad eDP cables causing both this and the flickering issue. I still like the AUO B154HAN01.2 panel more, especially since I have one now that does not have any burn in issues.

 

It's really nice to keep all of the cables out of the way, which is great. It keeps my desk and workspace tidy. A minor gripe I have with this, too, is that the 90-degree power adapter plug can get in the way of the right cooling exhaust. Not sure how much that will or can affect my cable or ability to cool during intense activity such as gaming, but it's a bit of an annoyance. I'm sure it doesn't affect it much if at all, but that's something to think about. I just point it upward so it's out of the way of the vent as well as the USB ports. And on the plus side, the 90-degree plug is less likely to come out of the power jack.

I've been playing a few games, BF4, SC2, SimCity and it's been running awesomely! Love the Omen. I would highly recommend this laptop!

 

I don't suppose anyone knows how to turn off the sound normalization/equalization? Say I have the volume on 10, and I adjust the volume slider on a YouTube video, it does absolutely nothing! The same applies for game volumes and Skype, I want to adjust each software volume independently but I for the life of me can't figure out how. Any ideas?

 

The normalization and EQ settings are separate. Check the Beats Audio app to adjust the EQ. It's set on default as off or flat.

For setting volume independently by application, you would need to access the Volume Mixer. Right click the volume icon on your task bar, hit Volume Mixer, and from there you can adjust each application's volume. Keep in mind that other applications displaying sound cannot exceed the main system volume. You can decrease the volume of your applications outputting sound from that.

 

Here is a thought for those who want to turn off the the speaker backlighting in an office scenario. Try setting the color for each zone in the configuration utility to black. I didn't try it myself but I think it should work.

 

That does indeed work, I already tried that (but forgot to write it here) - that doesn't apply for the awesome back vent lights

I love my omen, trying planetside 2 tonight.

 

Ah! That's what I forgot to mention haha. Yes, setting the lights to black turns the lights off.

Any games you guys would recommend? I'm not a huge PC gamer. I recently got BF4 Premium Edition for $22. And I play SimCity and SC2 now and again. I'd like to try FIFA 15 but after I find myself a good game pad controller to play it with.

Absolutely loving my Omen so far, as well.

 

If there are any people with the flickering issue it sounds like this bios update may address it:

HP Notebook System BIOS Update (Intel Processors) - HP OMEN Notebook - 15-5010nr | HP® Support

Hopefully HP will release updated control software for the backlighting that can control the exhaust fan zones as well.

One thing that I forgot to check on last night was what the bios looked like and what options it had. Would anyone mind snapping a few photos of the bios pages with their phone? So far none of the reviews have shown anything like this.

 

I must say, the fans are not very quiet at idle. They are definitely audible. Is there a way to set their speeds? I tried SpeedFan and HWiNFO but to no avail. Thoughts?

 

Good find! I haven't experienced any screen flickering or issues so far, so I'll hold off on that update in case it introduces any new problems for my laptop.

I'd also be interested in customizing the LEDs in the fan vents. Although I've found them to be useful in lighting the back when needing to plug in the power or a USB device.

If you're curious about the BIOS, you can do a google image search for "Insyde H20 f.05" and should come up with what it looks like. I haven't gotten around to checking it out myself. And for those trying to access your BIOS on your Omen, in order to do so you would need to hit the ESC key first when restarting or right after powering on your laptop, and then press your F10 key. To quickly view your BIOS version number while your laptop is already started up, you can press FN + ESC to view that information.

 

THIS IS DRIVING ME NUTS!!!!!

Play ANY game on battery and there are no framedrops - everything works FLAWLESSLY.
Plug the damn computer in and the FPS starts dropping randomly. Games become unplayable due to the fps drops!

 

Sorry for the double accounts but I forgot the password of this one (but my phone saved it, so I can only write from my phone).

On planetside 2 the fps drops aren't as severe. It still occurs but not as frequently and that's OK for a start. Eliminating the issue would be better.
It still happens way too often WITH DOTA 2 regardless of graphics settings and currently I'm still suspecting my charger to be the culprit.

 

You can disable fans "always-on" (so that they only run when the computer heats up) in the bios.

 

Hello,

For the flickering issue please install the latest BIOS version from HP.com (F.08A or newer) as that should resolve issue.

The backlighting on the exhaust fans cannot be changed with the HP OMEN Control software and is a standard color.

 

Can the backlighting on the fans be disabled? (If not I may wind up opening mine up and disabling it mechanically...) Having a glowing laptop at work isn't really acceptable.

 

Great Question.

Did not find a way to disable the rear fan LEDs when testing myself so I inquired with others. Currently there is no method to disable them at this time.

 

Seems like I'm lagging on battery too. What could be the cause? I only installed Office 2010 and DOTA2 and Planetside 2 since I got the pc. And i uninstalled McAfee

 

If it were me troubleshooting it, I would first verify that all drivers are rolled back to the HP specified versions. Disable automatic driver updates via Windows Update, then remove anything that is not provided directly by HP. Next I would grab something like Furmark and a GPU/CPU monitoring program so you can duplicate the slowdown and get a little more info why it is lagging. You can also try giving HP a call and walk through support steps with them. You will need to do this anyway if you intend to get any onsite service done so you might as well get it out of the way. It sounds like there is something going on with the hardware as nobody else has reported an issue like this.

You could also try contacting Customer Service and setup a return or replacement instead. This would probably be easier on your part if you don't want to hassle with troubleshooting and can wait on a replacement. Don't forget that Steam can backup games locally so you can restore them later without having to download them again.

 

There is a method, but it involves a screwdriver and some wire cutters...

 

I disabled the 'fans always on' setting in BIOS but the CPU fan is STILL on, even when the CPU is at 45C and running at 800MGHz. It's annoying, to say the least. The fan is not on max, but it is nevertheless audible. My MBP, running at the same temp, is near silent.

Can we control the fan speeds in any way, aside from the 'max setting'? There are many ways to control fan speeds for MSI laptops and even HP laptops through HWiNFO (but not for the Omen). Ideas?




On another note, I called HP and was told there is no way of disabling the rear red vent lights. What you can do is take apart the laptop and remove the lighting modules for those vents. There is a disassembly instruction manual from HP and also a teardown guide.

 

I'm downloading stock HP nvidia gpu drivers and I'll try again. If it gets better, I'll only download drivers provided directly from hp. Thanks a lot.

 

Just started experiencing screen flickering after about a week. It's pretty bad. I really, really, REALLY wanted to like the Omen, but I think it's going back to Amazon.

 

Did you update the BIOS? I'm pretty sure I installed that last update before I sent mine back.

It didn't appear to fix the issue.

 

Ouch, that's horrible to hear :/

 

The bios you installed, bleclair, is not the one containing the fix. I installed a bios upgrade shortly after you did and there's a newer one avaliable right now.
I'm not upgrading, however. No need

 

Good to hear. Maybe the newest BIOS update fixes the flicker.