The HyperX OMEN 16 Valorant Edition laptop is a beast of a computer, offering users powerful specs targeted towards eSports players and core gamers alike that go beyond competitive titles.
I need to come clean: I probably have less than 10 hours of total play time when it comes to Valorant, but even then, I can admire HyperX’s partnership with the popular shooter, which has resulted in one sleek-looking laptop. The HyperX OMEN 16 Valorant edition is the perfect blend of HyperX’s tasteful two-tone design schema with a subtle Valorant twist, making it well-suited for both fans of the series and those just looking for a beefy gaming laptop.
The HyperX OMEN 16 Valorant edition features a 16” IPS display, with 32 GB of RAM, powered by the AMD Ryzen 9 9955HX3D featuring up to a 5.4 GHz overclock, equipped with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070, with 8 GB of VRAM. Taking a closer look at the screen, despite being an IPS display, HyperX has included one of the better LCDs I’ve used in recent memory, offering a vibrant picture and good viewing angles, even holding up moderately well to glare when used outside on a sunny day. Coupled with its 240Hz refresh rate and 3ms of response time, eSport players and competitive gamers will be hard-pressed to find anything better.
In terms of IO, the HyperX OMEN 16 Valorant edition laptop includes a single 10GBps USB-A port, in addition to two USB-A ports rated at 5Gbps. A USB-C 10GBps port, an HDMI 2.1 port, a headphone jack, a standard RJ-45 LAN port, and finally, a thin barrel-jack-style AC port for its included power supply wall charger. The USB-A ports and headphone jacks are aptly located on the sides of the laptop, while power, HDMI and Ethernet are on the back, making cable management clean.
To complete the Valorant theme of HyperX’s latest offering, the OMEN 16, after going through the initial Windows 11 setup screen, reveals a Valorant wallpaper that ties the laptop together. Oddly, despite the almost aggressive amount of Valorant-themed design choices, the HyperX OMEN 16 Valorant edition does not include the Riot Games launcher as one of its included apps within the Windows install. Users, instead, do get a suite of HP-related software, including a handy diagnostic and laptop health tool, which makes it easy to quickly check your laptop’s stats and update BIOS and firmware accordingly.
Of course, to kick things off, the first game I had to test was Valorant, which unsurprisingly ran flawlessly on high settings, hovering close to its max refresh rate of 240hz. In essence, if you’re a serious Valorant player and don’t mind the prospect of lugging around the nearly 2lb charger, the HyperX Omen 16 Valorant edition laptop provides high-level play quality. On the topic of the charger, like many modern laptops, performance can be heavily gimped when using the laptop’s external battery, made worse by a battery that lasts roughly 2-3 hours when gaming, making the HyperX OMEN 16 Valorant edition best reserved for when near a wall outlet.
Fortunately, thanks to the HyperX OMEN 16 Valorant edition coming in at around 6 lbs, the gaming-centric laptop is a solid on-the-go solution for lighter tasks, such as word processing, browsing the web and light video consumption, which can yield far better battery life that can last the day in a pinch, ultimately making it one of the lighter gaming focused laptops I’ve used, and something I wish I had back in university.
Moving on from Valorant, I wanted to put the HyperX OMEN 16 Valorant edition through its paces, testing a smattering of AAA releases to see how far an esports-focused laptop could go. Starting with Cyberpunk 2077, one of my favourite games to use for benchmarking, thanks to its robust set of modifiers and graphical tweaks. On the OMEN 16, I saw an average framerate of 180FPS on high settings with ray tracing enabled using DLSS X4. More impressively, running the game using the path tracing option netted me around 100FPS using DLSS at the same multiplier, leaving me with what may just be the best-looking render of the game I’ve seen thus far.
Shifting gears to a title that is more CPU-bound, I installed and fired up Dragon’s Dogma 2, a game that was notoriously poorly optimized when it launched, especially on the PC platform. On high settings, despite hitting the VRAM cap, I was able to hit 140FPS with DLSS enabled, making it a very smooth and visually pleasing experience. Geometry-dense environments and towns also fared pretty well, with the framerate never going below the 120 threshold.
“The HyperX OMEN 16 Valorant edition is the perfect blend of HyperX’s tasteful two-tone design schema with a subtle Valorant twist…”
Moving on to Doom: The Dark Ages, a very high-paced game, on ultra settings, I was able to net around 160fps, making for a silky smooth experience that feels right at home on the HyperX OMEN 16 Valorant edition laptop’s 240hz display. It should be noted that for all my testing, I did use DLSS, which may introduce input delay, but for casual gaming, I found it indispensable and a perfect means of getting high-fidelity performance without sacrificing image quality.
The one situation where DLSS was less than ideal is in relation to any game that uses pre-rendered cutscenes or videos, which can introduce some noticeable haloing or edge artifacts around the silhouette of characters and objects, in addition to garbled noise here and there, due to its video interpolation and video files often rendering at 24fps, something not suitable for frame gen. Thankfully, most modern games use in-game cinematics, with only two exceptions I found being Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth’s opening sequence and, more egregiously, every cinematic in Halo: Campaign Evolved.
In closing, outside of lacklustre performance on battery, the HyperX OMEN 16 Valorant edition laptop is an incredible piece of kit, offering desktop-class performance for most titles thrown at it, while coming in at a reasonable footprint that makes it versatile for productivity and everyday use.
