I’ve had my hands on the new Meteor Lake-powered HP Omen Transcend 14 for a few weeks now and I’m very impressed. I love a good 14-inch gaming laptop at the best of times, but the fact this machine is already impressively affordable—at least in the context of the mega-bucks Razer Blade 14—and comes with a stellar OLED screen makes it an instant favorite.
That is only compounded by the fact that it’s already on offer with a $300 discount and you can find the Transcend 14 for just $1,270 at HP right now. You will have to configure it a little as that link will just take you to the RTX 4050 version, which I wouldn’t recommend as the much more powerful RTX 4060 edition is just $70 more. Seriously, why wouldn’t you?
With the 65W version of Nvidia’s latest low-end mobile graphics card, you’re getting Intel’s latest mobile processor. The Intel Core Ultra 7 155H at the heart of this li’l laptop is a 16-core, 22-thread chip that is able to keep pace with the big bois of AMD’s mobile Ryzen processor division. It’s also got a decent integrated GPU on the chip, too, if you wanted to try and save some battery while gaming out and about.
Which you absolutely will do because if there’s one weakness in the Transcend 14 package it’s the battery life. At just 58 minutes measured in the PCMark 10 Gaming battery life test, it’s pretty poor stuff.
The screen, however, is absolutely one of its strengths. The bright 120 Hz OLED panel on this thing is gorgeous—bumped up to 200% scaling in Windows and the thing looks like a Mac retina display with an edge. The colors look great, it’s sharp, and the contrast, of course, is outstanding. Especially with this glossy coating.
The chassis is also rather lovely, too. It’s one of the lightest 14-inch gaming laptops around and one of the thinnest. It feels good in the hand, and mostly feels really well built. That mostly caveat is purely around a little give in the lid behind the OLED panel and a certain slightly crunchy noise if you pick up it up purely holding the corners.
If this were a $4,000 machine then maybe I’d have an issue with those minor points, but at this price it’s a gorgeous machine. The screen is lovely, it’s thin and light, and the performance is right up there, too. If only the battery life was a little stronger it would be one of the best 14-inch gaming laptops ever made.
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