Hands on with the HP Omen 16 Slim: Impressive power in a shockingly light chassis

Large, powerful gaming laptops are usually a bittersweet proposition for me. They have an irresistible draw like no other laptop thanks to their huge displays, powerful chips, and large, flashy RGB keyboards. But are they lifestyle-friendly for me? No, they tend to be just too heavy or cumbersome for my on-the-go lifestyle.

That was my perspective before attending HP’s launch of the Omen 16 Slim at the Amplify Conference in Nashville this week.

The Omen 16 Slim is just as its name implies; it’s a slim and lightweight 16-inch gaming laptop weighing just 5.3 pounds and measuring a very thin 0.89 inches at the front end (that’s 16 percent thinner than HP’s flagship Omen 16 gaming laptop, which it’s mostly a slimmed-down version of).

Apart from being a little thinner and lighter than the Omen 16, the 16 Slim has all the hallmarks of a large desktop-replacement style gaming laptop: a beautiful and large display framed up in a 16:10 aspect ratio, a chassis measuring a large 14.1 x 10.6 (WxD), and a generous 87 percent screen-to-body ratio, all of which make the laptop’s visual impact quite dramatic.

A gorgeous, full-sized backlit keyboard with four zones of RGB, including a numpad, which should prove useful for macros, looked sublime in the showroom, as you would expect such a keyboard to look.

HP had the 16 Slim displayed on a pillar like some kind of objet d’art, and it certainly looked a sight for sore eyes. Its sturdy frame, made from black recycled metal and plastic, reflected just enough light to look sophisticated and draw in passersby for a closer look.

“Go on, pick it up,” beckoned the HP representative as I stared at the richly colored, 100 percent DCI-P3 WQXGA (2560x1600p) IPS-grade panel (other display options will also be available). When I did, I found it was super easy to carry with just one hand.

That brought home to me how far we’ve come in the large gaming laptop space. Far removed from the chunky gaming laptops of old that weighed over 6.5 pounds, this is actually one I could imagine fitting into my lifestyle, whether that be taking it into the office, to a friend’s place, or just carrying it around my home, so it should have a lot of appeal for similar portability-conscious gamers.

While some other large laptops only achieve a thin and lightweight profile at the expense of performance, the 16 Slim oozes power and performance thanks to the addition of next-generation Intel Core Ultra H Series and Nvidia GeForce RTX 50 Series hardware.

For the CPU, it can be configured with processors from the lowest-tier Core Ultra 5 225H up to a top-tier Core Ultra 9 285H. The latter means the 16 Slim will harness clock speeds up to a maximum 5.2 GHz and also draw power to a maximum 105 Watts – that’s ample grunt for achieving exceptional performance in games well into the future.

The 16 Slim’s GPU is its main point of difference from the Omen 16. While the Omen 16 supports up to a Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090, the 16 Slim settles for a mid-range RTX GeForce 5070 GPU. I’d choose the latter any day because that portability is just too useful – I’d never want to forego that for a little extra graphics power. Besides, the RTX 5070 is a very powerful GPU in its own right.

Being one of Nvidia’s newest RTX 50 Blackwell GPUs, the RTX 5070 benefits from DLSS 4’s upscaling technologies like Frame Generation, so you can get a high FPS and smooth motion in games. The 16 Slim also utilizes the Omen AI feature, which automatically analyzes your system’s hardware, OS, and the game you’re playing. This results in a big FPS uptick (I saw leaps upwards of 50 FPS).

The RTX 5070 also just seems more practical in a lightweight portable device. I can’t say with certainty without testing it but since the RTX 5070 draws less power than the RTX 5090, I’d expect longer battery life from the 16 Slim’s 4-cell 70WHr lithium-ion pack.

The 16 Slim’s CPU feeds either 16GB, 24GB, or 32MBs DDR5 RAM running at 5600 MT/s, which is surely enough to service the most demanding games. You can select from a 512GB or 1TB PCIe Gen 4 SSD storage, which isn’t a lot of space these days but enough to keep a few must-play games loaded.

Like most gaming laptops, you’ll also find a large port selection. I would have given more praise here had there been a Thunderbolt 4 port. Sadly, it doesn’t have one, but it does have a 10Gbps USB-C port, three USB-A ports, a HDMI 2.1 port, an Ethernet port, and a 3.5mm combo audio jack. You also get a 1080p webcam with a privacy shutter for making video calls.

As for performance, videos and games appeared to run smoothly on the display at its native resolution thanks to a variable refresh rate (VRR) of 60-240Hz and the panel’s 3ms response time. In the glary showroom where light was beaming from multiple directions, the panel appeared to benefit from its anti-glare and 500nits of peak brightness.

I was impressed with the 16 Slim. HP managed to achieve a nice balance between portability and hardware. Of course, I’d like to back up my observations with performance benchmarks, so I’m waiting to get my hands on a review unit to do just that. No word on pricing or availability details just yet.

Note: PCWorld accepted travel and accommodation to the HP Amplify Conference in the United States in order to view and try out HP products that were being released and not physically available in the author’s location.