HP’s AI-focused “OMEN 17” gaming laptop completely switches to AMD’s Hawk Point “Ryzen 8040” APUs, removing Intel from this model.
HP Decides To Go Completely With AMD With Its New OMEN 17 Gaming Laptop Lineup, Powered By Ryzen 8040 “Hawk Point” APUs
HP announced a “refresh” model of its highly popular OMEN 17 gaming laptops. The firm has centered it around AI, jumping into the “AI PC” bandwagon like other manufacturers. Interestingly, HP decided not to include any Intel (Core or Core Ultra) CPU in this specific variant, which marks the first time in years that Intel has been replaced with another CPU firm in the OMEN lineup. Well, more on that later on but for now, the lineup is powered by AMD’s Ryzen 8040 “Hawk Point” APUs.
Diving into HP’s OMEN 17 specifications, the laptop features AMD’s AMD 8040 series SKUs, such as the AMD Ryzen 5 8645HS, AMD Ryzen 7 8845HS, and AMD Ryzen 9 8945HS. HP decided to center the lineup around Hawk Point APUs.
We can’t argue with their choice either, as not only do the Ryzen 8040 chips offer optimal price-to-performance ratios, but with their dedicated Ryzen AI engines, the laptops are bound to offer decent edge AI performance, which is a reason why HP decided to opt for AMD here, due to their superiority in the AI processing department. Zen 4 is also known for its strong power efficiency & RDNA 3 iGPUs also provide a great graphics solution for when the discrete GPU is not primed for use.
Moving on, the HP OMEN 17 laptop comes with different options of NVIDIA’s Ada “GeForce RTX 40” laptop GPUs, starting with NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 4050, NVIDIA RTX 4060, and the NVIDIA RTX 4070 Laptop GPU. For memory, you can opt for either 16 GB or 32 GB configurations of DDR5-5600MHz RAM, and storage, the laptop offers two M.2 PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSDs, with the default option of having either 512 GB or 1 TB of storage onboard, which you can later expand yourself if needed.
The HP OMEN 17 laptop has a 17.3-inch screen with both QHD and FHD resolution options. The latter features a 144 Hz display and a 7 ms response time. Meanwhile, for the QHD route, users will get a 240 Hz refresh rate and a relatively much shorter 3 ms response time. HP has provided options for an average and a hardcore user. Hence, you can opt for respective specifications depending on your use case, but overall, the OMEN 17 is a solid pick for the future. HP does offer Intel Core Ultra and standard Core HX variants in other models but the 17″ variant isn’t utilizing any of those.
The HP OMEN 17 is expected to launch by April 24th, with a starting price of $1,350, which can certainly make it a great contender in the higher-end markets. However, I am a bit curious about how the selection of AMD’s Ryzen 8040 series will pan out here, especially in terms of consumer interest.
News Source: Windows Central