The HP HyperX Omen 15, which I first saw at CES, replaces the HP Victus 15, a longtime bestselling budget gaming laptop. The Victus cost just $800, or less when on sale, and was a good entry point to decent laptop gaming.

The Omen 15 has nice little upgrades over the Victus. Its RTX 5050 Laptop GPU can play 2026’s latest games, albeit on low-ish settings. But it’s also got a brighter 16:10 aspect ratio display with higher refresh rate, and a 1080p webcam to make it a little better for non-gaming stuff.

I’d call it a working-class gaming laptop, but thanks to RAMageddon, the Omen 15 starts at $1,200 — a far cry from the $800 that made its predecessor so appealing. But laptop prices are way up across the board, and if you want current-gen gaming hardware, this is about as cheap as you’re going to find it.

Our HyperX Omen 15 review unit is a $1,199 configuration sold through Walmart with an eight-core Intel Core 5 210H “Raptor Lake” chip, RTX 5050 discreet GPU, 16GB of DDR5 RAM, and 512GB SSD. There are pricier Omen 15 configs out there with RTX 5070 GPUs and OLED screens, but that’s like spending Acura money on a Honda Civic. On the lower end, HP still has a Victus 15 config with the RTX 5050 for $900, but it has 8GB of RAM — that’s not really tenable, especially for playing the latest games.

The good news is that the Omen 15 with an RTX 5050 is pretty serviceable for playing games at its 1920 x 1200 native resolution. Last-gen games like Control can get a smooth 70 to 80fps on High preset while using DLSS. Cyberpunk 2077 can run on the Ultra preset (no ray tracing) with DLSS set to Quality and get 60 to 70fps— sometimes dipping down to 40 while driving with lots of stuff onscreen. Standard frame generation boosts it to 95 to 105fps, and 70s to low 80s in a car. Multi Frame Gen, which you don’t get on last-gen GPUs, can push that ever further if you don’t mind more “fake frames.”

Newer games are a more Medium to Low affair. For example, Helldivers 2 runs comfortably at just above 60fps on its Medium preset with DLSS set to Quality — though it dips into the 40s when the bug guts hit the fan. But Battlefield 6 was lower, down in the 50fps range while running Medium preset with DLSS cranked to Performance. I also tested Halo: Campaign Evolved, which defaulted to its Very Low preset, where it looked like a potato. On Low settings, with DLSS set to Medium, it mustered between 50 to 60fps, but with frequent drops into the 40s with lots of enemies onscreen.

While playing all these games, the fans kicked up to a decent volume, but they weren’t obnoxiously loud, and the chassis stayed reasonably cool. The hottest point, a small spot under the chassis, rose to 113 degrees Fahrenheit / 45 Celsius. But the main areas that normally make contact with your hands or lap didn’t get too warm — pretty good thermals for a somewhat compact gaming laptop.

So the RTX 5050 GPU and its 8GB of VRAM can get by with the latest graphically intense games, so long as you’re not expecting a visual powerhouse. But what about living with the rest of the laptop?

Much of the Omen 15’s price has gone to its specs. That means there are some rough edges showing in the usual areas. The trackpad has a responsive mechanical click, but if you pick up the laptop by either of its front corners the chassis flexes and causes an accidental click. This is common in mostly plastic laptops, but still annoying.

The keyboard has decent enough tactility when typing. But even though I know gamers love a number pad, it makes this 15-inch laptop feel cramped. I don’t enjoy typing on it like I have other HP laptops. The speakers? A little muddy-sounding — especially for music. And the ports? It has HDMI 2.1 and gigabit ethernet, which is great, but only one USB-C to go with its two USB-A ports. And all of them are a modest 10Gbps — not particularly speedy compared to USB4 or Thunderbolt 4. Gaming laptops are supposed to have ports aplenty, but this is just ports apassable.

Aside from its gaming performance, the Omen 15’s other strength is its screen. The 1920 x 1200 IPS panel isn’t particularly special, but at 400 nits it’s decently bright and it has nice contrast and colors. It’s good for games, and fine for productivity work and light content creation. I did a bit of Lightroom Classic editing on the Omen 15, and my 50-megapixel RAW files were workable at a modest clip. (It helped that I was editing a batch of under 50 images, and not, like, 2,000.) The bigger problem with trying to do creative things was the Omen’s paltry 512GB of storage. It fills up quickly when games like Battlefield 6 take up 142GB. There’s a second M.2 slot for another drive, just as there’s a second RAM slot, which is great for future upgrades — but boy will that cost you right now. You can hold out for RAM and SSD prices to come back down to Earth, but if that takes as long as it’s expected to, the Omen 15 might feel pretty outdated by then.

The Omen was also fine for my everyday work: Chrome tabs, four virtual desktops, Signal, Slack, music streaming, etc. While the 1080p webcam is a little grainy and slightly low in saturation, it looks fine on video calls. The main barrier to getting work done on the Omen 15 is that its battery never lasted me more than five and a half hours. That’s far from the worst for gaming laptops, but keep that chunky power adapter with its barrel plug nearby.

The HyperX Omen 15 is a decent gaming laptop. It’s just not the value the Victus 15 used to be. But neither is anything else. Absent a really good sale, you’re going to pay over $1,000 for anything with the RTX 5050, and usually a lot more. But buying into even the bottom rung of the 50-series gets you all of Nvidia’s latest features, like Multi Frame Gen and whatever DLSS 5 eventually shapes up to be. Last-gen 40-series or AMD GPUs aren’t bad options, but Multi Frame Gen can help keep frame rates playable for longer.

It’s still worth looking for those sales, though. HP, Best Buy, and Walmart often have deals on most of HP’s product line. Even now, there’s an Omen 16 with an RTX 5060 GPU and slightly larger (but dimmer) screen for just $100 more than the Omen 15.

RAMageddon makes buying a new gaming laptop daunting. If you need to buy now and you don’t want to go open-box or secondhand, you just have to come to terms with the fact that you’re going to be paying higher prices than equivalent models from a year or two ago — even in the “entry level.” Considering the circumstances, the Omen 15 is an okay value at $1,200 for getting into laptop gaming.

Photography by Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge