HP Omen Transcend 14 review

It used to be, if you wanted a gaming laptop, you should expect to lug around a 17-inch backbreaker to enjoy gameplay on the go. Fast-forward to more recent times, and several manufacturers are mercifully normalising smaller form factors for the popular performative niche. HP sent me an Omen Transcend 14 review sample to test whether this compact gaming laptop is more pocket rocket or closer to something that fails to launch.

As far as I can tell, there’s only one model of the HP Omen Transcend 14 in Australia, which retails for $3,699. Given that top-of-the-line gaming laptops can stretch as high as $8,000 these days, anything under $4,000 is reasonable. The thing is, HP sent me a higher-spec version of the Omen Transcend 14 than that solitary retail model, which has a faster CPU (Intel Core Ultra 9 vs 7), 32GB of RAM instead of 16GB, and a faster GPU (Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 vs 4060).

For $300 more than the lower-spec model, you can get the Asus ROG Zephyrus G16, which has closer specs to the Omen Transcend 14 that HP sent me to review. There’s even a similarly specced version of the G16 for $100 more that has a 240Hz OLED screen instead of the Transcend 14’s 120Hz OLED. The Dell G15 also hangs around this price, granted without the OLED screen but with an i9 instead of an i7 processor. Overall, it’s a decent price for the HP Omen Transcend 14 without being a steal.

The outside of the HP Omen Transcend 14 is a clean design with plenty of cooling underneath and on the back. It is, however, offered in that fingerprint-magnet dark finish, but those smudges are less disappointing than the ports on offer. While it’s great to see a dedicated HDMI 2.1 port, there isn’t an Ethernet port, there’s no SD card slot (nor a Micro alternative), and the USB options are limited: two USB-A ports that support up to 10Gbps and two USB-C ports.

I like that the Type-C port on the back keeps charging out of the way—and, yes, no bulky, proprietary charging port here—but it is also the faster one, supporting up to 40Gbps. The solitary other USB-C port maxes out at 10Gbps and sits alone on the left of the laptop next to a 3.5mm combo jack. Given the low battery life (more on that below), you’ll likely be plugged in more than not, which has the Transcend 14 effectively down to two USB-A ports and a single USB-C port. If you like to game wirelessly, that means you’re likely taking up all the ports with dongles for a gaming mouse, gaming laptop and/or gaming headset.

Things improve when you pop the lid, though, thanks in big part to the gorgeous OLED 2880x1800 HDR-capable screen, which sports a 120Hz refresh rate albeit without G-Sync or FreeSync. While not the best speakers around, I did appreciate the volume and overall balance from the HyperX-tuned speakers. I didn’t have any issues with the responsive keyboard and practically sized touchpad, either. In terms of heft, you’re looking at around 1.6kg, which is very manageable for moving around, too.

When you buy a gaming laptop, you have to accept certain concessions. Battery life is generally the first one of those, and on that front the HP Omen Transcend 14 isn’t great with default settings. During our usual YouTube 1080p battery playback test, the Transcend 14 fell short of expectations at three hours and 55 minutes. Admittedly, that’s not the worst, but it’s also close to an hour behind the four and three-quarter hours of the Alienware M16 R2.

Admittedly, if you fire up the Omen Gaming Hub and manually set the laptop to eco mode, you get better battery life. I measured six hours and 15 minutes in eco mode with the refresh rate set to automatically adjust. Still, recharging is also better on the M16 R2: 35 minutes to get from 0% to 99% compared to 88 minutes to get from flat to 95% on the Transcend 14. In fairness, the M16 R2 does use a traditional DC input vs the USB-C charging on the Transcend 14.

Speaking of the M16 R2, the Transcend 14 model HP sent me had almost identical critical specs. Both gaming laptops have an Intel Core Ultra 9 185H with a discrete Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070. They also sport 32GB of RAM, though Windows 11 said that the Transcend was faster: 7,467MT/s vs the 5,600MT/s. Because of this, I expected the Transcend 14 to have a slight advantage going into benchmarking.

In everyday tests, that started out as the case. The Transcend 14 ranked higher in the Geekbench single-core (8th vs 9th) and multi-core (6th vs 10th) tests That’s in comparison to the dozen-ish laptops we’ve tested in the past year or so. Confusingly, the Geekbench GPU scores were vastly different for the same base graphics card: the M16 R2 came in fourth overall, while the Transcend 14 lagged at eighth. More surprisingly, the Transcend had close to a 50% lower score on default performance settings.

The descent continued in Novabench, with the Transcend 14 lagging in ninth behind the M16 R2 in sixth. There was a brief redemption in Cinebench’s single-core test, with the Transcend 14 eking out a two-point score lead over the M16 R2, but it scored a noticeable 142 fewer points in the multi-core test. Given the i9-185H CPU, the Transcend 14 does come with an NPU for dedicated AI tasks, but there wasn’t an option to test that in Geekbench AI.

AI aside, I suspected there was something odd going on with the way the hardware has been tuned, more so given those wider-margin results with the M16 R2. That was highlighted even more when I put the HP Omen Transcend 14 through its paces for game benchmarks, leaving it on default settings as I did with the M16 R2 (instead of activating a performance mode). The benchmark tests below had DLSS set to Balanced with Nvidia Reflex enabled. Note that the first six games in the table have frame-gen enabled—a feature currently unique to 40-series Nvidia GPUs—which generally leads to better performance than just DLSS. All games were tested at 1080p and 1440p instead of the more demanding 16:10 resolutions, except for The Talos Principle 2, which would only let me choose those higher resolutions.

In isolation, those results are underwhelming. Compared to the similarly specced Alienware M16 R2, those scores are disappointing. Returnal is the only game that had an edge on the Transcend 14 at 1440p resolution, with a healthy 19% frame-rate edge over the M16 R2. It’s also one of the few games to get close to fully utilising the Transcend 14’s 120Hz refresh rate. Everything else is one-way traffic in the wrong direction.

Discounting The Talos Principle 2 because of the different testing resolutions, the closest gap was the 25% difference in 1080p results for Hitman 3. At the most extreme, the M16 R2 had a 58% frame-rate lead over the Transcend 14 at 1080p and a 56% win at 1440p. That’s huge, particularly considering you’re looking at a comparatively chuggy 39fps in Cyberpunk 2077 at 1440p on the Transcend 14 vs a very playable 89fps on the M16 R2. The more concerning result was the 25% and 27% difference in 1440p and 1080p scores for Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, even with a lower fidelity preset (High vs Ultra).

I spent some actual gameplay time with Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, the latest Crysis-like game that can push even the most high-end desktop PCs to their limits without maxing out settings. The game defaulted to a mix of low and medium settings at 1440p resolution, offering 40–50fps at native resolution but a more playable 70–90fps with DLSS set to Balanced in a hub test area. Fan noise never got to an annoying level, unlike the jet engine otherwise known as the Acer Predator Helios 3D, but there was noticeable heat on the keyboard. While that is relegated to the right half of the keys, that’s not so great for any southpaw gamer who uses those right keys.

After obsessing over the lower performance, I redid the benchmarking in performance mode with better results. The M16 R2 still performed better in every comparable test. At best, the Transcend 14 was 5% behind at 1080p in the Hitman 3 benchmark. But at worst, there was a 27% lead for the M16 R2 at 1440p resolution with the Dying Light 2 benchmark. It’s a better story when comparing the Transcend 14 default settings with its performance mode.

Returnal was the only anomaly with a bizarre 30% dip in performance at 1440p, while F1 23 only had a slim 7% edge at 1440p resolution. The most impressive gains were for Cyberpunk 2077, whose disappointing 56fps and 39fps 1080p/1440p results on default mode were a much more playable 100fps and 71fps, respectively. Avatar and Red Dead Redemption 2 notably shifted from sluggish frame rates to more playable alternatives, all of which without adding a lot of extra noticeable fan noise. Check out the full performance results below.

I feel like I would’ve been more impressed with the HP Omen Transcend 14 if I had been interested in it as a laptop rather than a gaming laptop. As a straightforward laptop, it’s got impressive innards, a gorgeous screen, and a compact design that’s not a pain to move around. But as a gaming laptop, it’s light on ports, unintuitively low on battery life with default settings, and even lighter on grunt when it comes to games unless you manually switch to performance mode. Consider grabbing the Transcend 14 if you want Enthusiast specs for more demanding everyday computing, with the option to play games albeit not necessarily at the highest fidelity or frame rates.