HP Omnibook 3 14 Quick Review

The best picture I could find on HP materials

I recently quickly tested a mainstream HP Omnibook 3 14" laptop based on the terribly bad Ryzen 5 40 chip.

This is a new laptop with excellent build quality. This model in particular has an IPS screen and a very good one at that:

• Anti-glare type but slightly gloss
• No dirty-grit like surface w/ excellent definition.
• Excellent color range, seems like a full 100% sRGB panel with great calibration.
• Response time seemed ok

The market is being flooded with IPS screens that can only do orange instead of pure red and which have a really poor color range for saturated colors. They are much worse than even most TN panels in that aspect.

So seeing this kind of screen at the $500 range is quite a welcome change that people who only do office work or watch video will very much appreciate.

All this without being some kind of super saturated OLED screen that is beyond being useful and will actually be very bad experience.

The build is also very solid, with a nice keyboard and color scheme. I will say it is not the thinnest but the keyboard was much better than what the HP Flip 16 has with it's low profile keyboard that is not suited to anything else than casual use (even that is hard...).

I think this is the same base laptop as the $800 version that has a Snapdragon X chip, which has a low end board and chip put in. Keep in mind they may end up switch for a lower end screen for the cheaper models - it would still be IPS.

The bad

So, the main issue with this is that it is a $500 laptop with a $200 CPU. It is really not up to par:

• Speedometer 2.0 run at ~205.00, boost tops at 3.50GHz (should be 4.30)
• ~240 on i5 8265U
• ~250 on i3-N305

So it is slower than what you got from Intel i5 in 2018. Not good, despite being marketed as upstream performance.

So while I would highly recommend this for office work or video at $350, I certainly hope HP discontinues this CPU and instead sells it only with Zen 3 chips or even "Phoenix 2" chips like the 4 core Ryzen 210 or the 6 core Ryzen 220.

Those are much faster, still budget, Zen 4 based chips that should be what is inside this machine. That plus 16GB of RAM would make this a very good laptop, certainly a close competitor to the Macbook Neo.