I tend to treat gaming laptops a little differently to gaming PCs. With a PC, I want the absolute best performance for the lowest cost, and that's above and beyond the most important thing. With a laptop, though, I want something that's nice to hold, use, transport, and look at. There are few laptops that have impressed me as much on this front as the HP Omen Transcend 14.
The RTX 5070 version of the Transcend 14 is currently on sale for $1,550 at Best Buy. You'll certainly be able to pick up a faster laptop for less cash in these sales—check out our compendium of the best of 'em, if you're interested—but whether you'll get one this genuinely lovely is another question.
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I know, I know, 'genuinely lovely' is hardly an objective metric. But hey, that's what you come to reviewers for, right? The subjective stuff. I got my hands on a HP Omen Transcend 14 last year to review for a sister site and really enjoyed my time with it.
Primarily that's because it's an incredibly smart, stylish, portable laptop that feels great to use day-to-day. But it's also because it has an OLED screen. If you've never tried gaming on an OLED before, I can't understate how glorious it feels after spending so long using an IPS panel. It's just that vibrant, and yet still incredibly snappy.
It's also objectively the best form factor for a gaming laptop, and I challenge anyone to prove me otherwise. Okay, maybe not the best overall, but the best if you plan on travelling around with it a fair amount—even just between rooms in your home.
When I tried the laptop I wasn't too keen on the vertically stretched aspect ratio for competitive gaming, but I've come to see now that unless you're a pro or aspiring pro, it doesn't matter much at all. And that extra space helps for other non-gaming tasks where you can do with the real estate.
Of course, there have to be some downsides, and there are. The first and biggest one is that the GPUs in these Transcends tend to not have great TGPs. HP doesn't seem to list the TGP for the RTX 5070 mobile in this one anywhere, but I doubt it'll be anywhere near the max rating for the GPU. As I said, don't expect the absolute best performance from this—you sacrifice some on that front for the form factor and design.
Apart from the most likely somewhat nerfed GPU and the lovely 120 Hz OLED, with this one you're getting an Intel Core Ultra 9 285H, a 16-core affair with six P-Cores for those heavier workloads, including gaming. This CPU is a bit behind the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, but it shouldn't be much of a bottleneck here. You're also getting 32 GB of LPDDR5X RAM and a 1 TB SSD, which should be enough for most purposes.
You do, of course, also get all the latest that Nvidia has to offer in terms of upscaling and frame gen, even that fabled Multi Frame Gen (MFG). Though pure rasterization performance shouldn't be too shabby either, low TGP or otherwise.
It's not the best bang for your buck in terms of pure performance, but for a lovely subtle chassis and a gorgeous OLED in a dinky 14-inch form factor, I reckon it's worth the October Prime Day asking price.
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1. Best overall:
Razer Blade 16 (2025)
2. Best budget:
Lenovo LOQ 15 Gen 10
3. Best 14-inch:
Razer Blade 14 (2025)
4. Best mid-range:
MSI Vector 16 HX AI
5. Best high-performance:
Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 10
6. Best 17-inch:
Gigabyte Aorus 17X
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