HP Omen 15 vs Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 (AMD): Detailed Comparison

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This is the comparison of HP Omen 15 and Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 laptops. Both are gaming laptops of different sizes. We will see which one is better in the performance and gaming.

BUY NOW	BUY NOW
HP Omen 15 (AMD)	Asus ROG Zephyrus G14
PROS	PROS
More refined design. Performs well for gamers and content creators. Great display with accurate color.	Strong CPU and GPU performance. Impressive battery life. Thin, sleek, and portable.
CONS	CONS
The hinges seem unstable. Little heavier than other gaming laptops. No Thunderbolt 3.	No integrated webcam. Underwhelming SSD speeds.

SPECIFICATIONS

INTRODUCTION:

HP Omen 15 AMD

The HP Omen 15 has a 144 hertz full HD display that’s great for gaming. I like the fact that it has that Ryzen 7 4800H processor that’s an 8 core processor with 16 threads. I like the GPU on this which’s the GTX 1660Ti from NVIDIA.

Asus ROG Zephyrus G14

Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 running the new AMD Ryzen 4000 series laptop chips. They were supposed to be super powerful against the Intel chips. Let’s see is that true or not.

DESIGN:

HP Omen 15 AMD

The first thing you’ll notice about the Omen 15 is its rather understated look a little bit more refined than past models and that’s because they didn’t want to give it a gaming laptop look. A lot of people use these for multi-purposes, it needs to be able to look for both scenarios and I think they have accomplished that with this modern design. The 5.4 pounds or 2.45 kilograms is not the lightest but definitely portable and it’s 11% thinner than last year’s model.

For those wondering, you can open the lid with one finger. Once you open the lid, you’ll notice the keyboard layout. This is a fascinating layout; there’s no numeric keypad as this is a gaming laptop. As far as the tactile feedback and the key travel, it’s all working pretty well. It also has customizable RGB per-key four-zone backlit or single-zone backlit keyboard options. This gives you a lot of options when it comes to the colors and so forth, you can control all that within this laptop. You’re looking at 1.5 millimeters of key travel which is really good for typing for extended periods of time. So, if you’re going to do some work on this it’ll definitely get the job done when it comes to this keyboard. It has a precision touchpad working well and very responsive. Two-finger scrolling is buttery smooth, all the windows 10 gestures are working as advertised.

Asus ROG Zephyrus G14

The overall build is great. The magnesium alloy keeps it strong without adding too much weight. The chassis flux is mild. When you open and close this device, you see how the hinge forces the device to kind of prop up in the back. It’s a thermal design that Asus does it some of their devices but when you have this kind of ergo lift design, the hot air often gets expelled like on a normal laptop hot air comes out the back and the sides but because the hinge style is different, the hot air comes out and it just hits the screen.

I like these keyboards a lot. There is one thing I noticed that pertains specifically to the white model because the backlighting on these keys isn’t super bright. These kinds of silver reflective keys are hard to see with the backlighting on, it’s actually easier to see these keys even in the dark with the backlighting off. When you have dim lights, it doesn’t work that well. The keys themselves are spaced well, the layouts good, they’re responsive, I think most people will enjoy this keyboard. There’s also a fingerprint sensor on the top right of the power button, so you can press it to log in. The trackpad is pretty standard, there’s nothing weird about it. The drivers are good on it and there are also your hardware buttons for volume control as well as your ROG software, so you can press it to launch your ROG.

DISPLAY:

HP Omen 15 AMD

This is a 15.6-inch display. Our review unit has that 144-hertz refresh rate making a better gaming experience with that high refresh rate of course with a full HD resolution 1920×1080, looking at good deep blacks, good white points, good contrast. Delta e-score is very good, meaning the color accuracy is good and it also covers the color gamut very well, 96% sRGB, 72% adobe RGB, 73% of the p3 wide color gamut, and 67% NTSC making this a decent choice for that content creator that does lightroom, photoshop, and video editing. The 325 nits definitely bright enough for indoor and outdoor use, especially since this is a matte display, you don’t get any of the unnecessary glare or reflections you’d get with a glossy display. I like the fact that they went with a matte display, especially if you’re a gamer you’ll appreciate that as well.

The two sides and the top bezel are pretty thin as far as the bezels are concerned. The bottom bezel has a bit of a thick bezel as you will notice and I think they did a really good job with this display and if you’re a gamer go with that 144hz panel.

Asus ROG Zephyrus G14

In terms of display, the first one is running a 1440p 60 Hertz panel and another one is running a 1080p 120 Hertz panel. It’s really nice to see a 14-inch panel with high resolution but I think more people are going to be interested in the 1080p 120-hertz display. This is a relatively unique product because I think there are no other 14-inch or smaller displays that have a high refresh rate like this and it is technically a 120 Hertz panel but it doesn’t feel like that, something feels sluggish on the screen, maybe it’s the response time. It’s better than a 60 Hertz screen that has this kind of response time. The thing that can possibly wrong with it is the response time on the screen for perfect gaming.

FEATURES:

HP Omen 15 AMD

Pricing for the Omen 15 starts at $850 that gets you the Ryzen 5 processor, eight gigabytes of Ram, 256 GB of storage, and a full HD 15.6-inch display. Our review unit comes in at $1250 that gets you a Ryzen 7 4800H, it also gets you the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660Ti as far as the GPU is concerned, 16 gigabytes of ram, and 512 gigabytes of SSD storage, and you also get the 144-hertz display. In addition to the Ryzen version, there’s an Intel version that has the core i7 10750H 10th generation processor from intel that has six cores. It also comes with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 Super with Max-Q eight gigabytes of video ram and that also has 16 gigabytes of DDR4 Ram and it also has a 4K OLED option, something you can’t get with the Ryzen model.

HP makes it easy to get inside this laptop. There’s a lot of upgradeability here, two Ram slots to upgrade the Ram, two SSD slots for expanded storage, and this review unit has optional Wi-Fi 6, it’s something you might wanna upgrade when checking out. It’s a Bluetooth 5 combo and it works really well. While inside, you’ll notice that 70.9 watt-hour battery and also has dual fans for cooling.

As far as ports are concerned, on the left side, we get your power port, RJ45 Ethernet port, a USB-A port, an HDMI port for display out, a 3.5-millimeter audio jack, and a full-size SD card slot. On the right side, you get a USB-C port that does data charge and display out, you get a display port out, two USB-A ports to round out all the ports on this laptop, a nice port selection and there’s no Thunderbolt 3 port as this has an AMD Ryzen processor.

The front-facing camera is a 720p 30 frames per second webcam. It’s not a Windows Hello, so there’s no infrared camera on this and no face recognition as far as locking in with Windows Hello. For zoom, skype, any of your work from home needs, it probably will get the job done.

When it comes to the audio, the HP Omen 15 does have very good volume, so that’s good in that regard. It doesn’t have the best mids or bass for that matter, it’s adequate but a lot of you gonna use gaming headphones with this. So, it’s really not going to be much of an issue and gaming headsets are a lot better when it comes to the audio.

Asus ROG Zephyrus G14

To get inside, it’s just a few screws and once you’re in there, you see that red PCB. It’s a single SSD which’s PCIe, so you can’t put crazy fast drives but it’s sufficient. The Wi-Fi card is underneath that SSD and they give you an Intel Wi-Fi 6 card which is awesome. There’s only a single slot of user-serviceable RAM, so there’s onboard RAM that’s been started on by the manufacturer, and then you can replace one stick. So, because it’s an AMD chip, you want to make sure that you’re running two channels you always want something inside that Ram slot. It’s got lots of heat pipes and the heat sinks look like they’re easily removed. It’s got powerful fans as well as a 76-watt hour battery which is the same size as the 15-inch model from last year.

The port selection is fair. There’s two USB-A, two USB-C but there’s a Thunderbolt 3 port. The speakers are better this year. They’re not awesome, they’re just pretty good. There are two on top and two in the bottom and they sound pretty clean and they also get reasonably loud.

The ROG app is way too complex. There are all the charts and tabs in there to try to make it feel techy but I think most people that end up using that thing just find most of that information useless and it just feels cluttered. In terms of functionality, it’s great, it’s more just the visual appearance.

This laptop has an option for an AniMe Matrix screen which allows you to customize this back LED array to do a whole bunch of different things, you can have animated GIFs, a logo, you can do a bunch of stuff. It’s a personalization that you just never get to see it.

PERFORMANCE:

HP Omen 15 AMD

When it comes to performance, our review unit is running the AMD Ryzen 4800H which’s an 8 core processor with 16 threads, and I found it to be a solid performer for productivity workloads as well as gaming. Since this is a gaming laptop we did a test of games that how well it does in terms of gaming in high settings 1080p playable frame rates for Shadow of the Tomb Raider, GTA 5, Borderlands 3, Red Dead Redemption 2, pretty much playable frame. Overall, this is a very capable gaming laptop.

The HP Omen with its out-of-box settings can get a little bit toasty on the bottom, it can get a little bit warm at heavy load. Be sure to use it on a desk or table when gaming. HP claims that this laptop is the first laptop to implement an IR Thermopile Sensor to allow for steadier fan control to keep the device quiet and cool. Now, while gaming I measured that the center keyboard between the G and H keys would measure about 39 degrees celsius or about 102 degrees Fahrenheit. The touchpad was cooler at 30 degrees Celsius or 86 degrees celsius, not bad in terms of the cooling. The bottom of the laptop was the hottest point which reached 56 degrees Celsius or 133 degrees Fahrenheit which was quite warm.

Asus ROG Zephyrus G14

These things have excellent performance. With the eight-core, 16 threads, it has incredible performance for multi-core applications. It’s faster than Razer blade in Adobe Premiere. For gaming, these are running a GTX 1660Ti Max-Q with pretty good performance. There is another variation that runs a 2060 Max -Q which is obviously a little bit more expensive. I wish they’d put a more powerful GPU but then you have to take into consideration the size like this is so small with a fourteen-inch screen. I don’t think they could have put anything more powerful in here while being able to cool it properly. I think the reduction in size and weight on this thing is worth that GPU trade-off for people that are looking for a smaller and or lighter gaming laptop and it’s because the thermals on this are good.

My thermal testing was done in turbo mode which is kind of like the best performing automatic mode where the fan noise is loud but acceptable. There is a manual mode where you can just crank the fans and the fans just get way too loud which is actually annoying. The temperatures are lower but the clock speeds aren’t much faster. So, I don’t feel like most people will be using that particular setting.

BATTERY:

HP Omen 15 AMD

When it comes to battery life, we have a 70.9 watt-hour battery, not the biggest we’ve seen out of a gaming laptop and gaming laptops traditionally don’t have the best battery life. This did pretty decently for a gaming laptop coming in at 6 hours on continuous web surfing test over Wi-Fi at 150 nits. It is actually a pretty good result when it comes to battery life. If you do need to plug in, they do supply a 200-watt power adapter that uses a barrel pin connector which takes a little bit less than two hours for a full charge.

Asus ROG Zephyrus G14

It has a 76 watt-hour battery and with that, you’re getting an eight and a half hour battery life. The AC adapter plugs in on the side which can be kind of intrusive. The brick itself is actually a little bit smaller this year, it’s 180 watts. You can also charge it with USB-C, so you can plug up to a 65-watt adapter to this thing. You don’t get full power with that like normally with gaming laptops you need to have your AC adapter plugged in to be able to get full performance off the GPU and when you have a USB-C device connected to this thing even at 65 watts, you don’t you can’t use the GPU at its full potential but you do need the regular AC adapter.

WHICH TO BUY?

The HP Omen AMD laptop is a great mid-level gaming machine. I think they’ve hit a home run, a nice balance between performance and price. I like the more refined design this time around, solid gaming performance, a comfortable keyboard, all are user upgradable. It’s worth the money as a mid-range gaming laptop. Overall, I really like the Zephyrus G14. I wish that screen was a faster response time but I think they did such a good job on the G14. I am impressed with the AMD processor, I knew that it would be but it’s more than I thought. It really pushes Intel into the position where they got they got to bring it, this is clearly better than what Intel offered with their 9th gen stuff.

I think HP Omen 15 is better than the Asus ROG Zephyrus as the Asus has a response time and doesn’t perform great. The design, features, and performance are also good comparatively. If you want a compact gaming laptop then Asus G14 is a good option except for its less-performance in 120hz.

Expert reviews of HP Omen 15 (AMD):

By Pcmag
Premium quality, long battery life, and an expert pairing of AMD and Nvidia components make HP’s Omen 15 a formidable…

By Tomshardware
The HP Omen 15 offers solid performance for the price in a newly refined chassis, but it can get a bit hot under load, and you’ll spend time uninstalling bloatware.

By Techadvisor
The HP Omen 15 (2020) is affordable, with a brilliant CPU, a decent graphics card and good looks. The screen, battery and build quality and mediocre, though, and the keyboard could be better. It’s good, but there are plenty of decent rivals.

Expert reviews of Asus ROG Zephyrus G14:

By Legitreviews
The ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 14-in gaming laptop looks good, runs great and has an affordable price tag. The AMD Ryzen Mobile ‘Renoir’ 4000 Series is off to a great start!

By Theverge
The Ryzen-powered G14 weighs just a bit more than the Stealth GTX and it games better. I see no reason to buy the Stealth GTX or any pricier gaming ultraportable when this laptop…

By Engadget
The Zephyrus G14 has everything we’d want in an ultraportable gaming laptop: it’s lightweight, powerful and lasts nearly 13 hours on battery. It’s so good, you won’t mind that it doesn’t have a webcam.

Arya

Hello! I'm Surendar Arya, a passionate tech writer from Uttar Pradesh, India. I'm a freelance contributor to the tech blog - The World's Best And Worst. My enthusiasm for technology drives me to explore the latest trends and innovations in the field. I take immense pleasure in guiding individuals on how to leverage technology for their benefit, making their lives easier and more efficient.