Living With an HP OmniBook Ultra 14 and Putting AMD's Strix Point to the Test

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HP’s OmniBook Ultra is the first laptop I’ve tried with AMD’s latest Ryzen AI 9 processor, known as Strix Point, and it’s a relatively high-end consumer machine with good processing power and excellent battery life, with the potential of becoming a real Copilot+ machine shortly.

From a design standpoint, the OmniBook feels like it belongs in the same family as HP’s , which I tested earlier this year, though without the 2-in-1 features of the higher-end Spectre. It shares the 14-inch screen, “meteor silver” color, and same basic shape, including diagonal angles on the back edges, the left one of which contains a USB-C port.

The big news is the processor. The machine I tested featured an AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX375, which is a 12-core/24-thread processor with a TDP of 28 watts; AMD's Radeon 890 graphics, which should be a step up; and an updated "AI engine" manufactured on TSMC’s 4nm process. AMD touts this AI engine – sometimes referred to as a neural processor – as being able to process 55 trillion AI operations per second (TOPS), supposedly faster than the competing Intel chips.

Measuring 12.41 by 8.96 by 0.65 inches and weighing 3.37 pounds (4.02 with the included 65-watt charger), the machine is a bit heavier than the Spectre X360, the Intel Meteor Lake-based  or the Qualcomm Snapdragon-based (both aimed more at enterprise customers). It's not heavy, but it's not as light as I might have expected, given that it's a standard laptop, not a 2-in-1.

The display is very nice, with a 14-inch 2.2K (2,240 by 1,400) IPS touch screen with 400 nits of brightness in the standard 16:10 ratio. It's not as high-end as the 2,880-by-1,800 OLED display in the Spectre 14, but still a step up from the standard 1,920-by-1,200 displays in most 14-inch machines.

The Omnibook Ultra 14 has a USB-A port and a 3.5mm audio jack on the left-hand side, and two USB-C/Thunderbolt 4 ports on the right (including one on the diagonal between the right side and the back of the machine.) This is becoming more typical of consumer machines, though I'd still like to see more ports (or at least an additional USB-C on the left, which would make plugging it in more convenient).

The keyboard seemed fine with the addition of a Copilot key, which are also becoming more standard on new laptops.

As with the Spectre, I remain impressed by the audio/video capabilities. It comes with a 9-megapixel webcam with IR and hardware-enabled low-light adjustment. The camera looked sharp and pretty good. As with all of the new "AI PCs," it includes Windows Studio Effects, which offers basic controls such as background blur (either standard or a more pronounced Portrait mode), eye tracking, and framing.

As with the EliteBook Ultra G1q, it also comes with HP's Poly Camera Pro, which runs on the NPU and gives you even more control of things like Background Blur, filtering, and framing. It does far more than what Windows Studio Effects can do, and also works with an external camera. To me, this is one of the features that best shows off what an NPU can do.

An HP Enhanced Lighting app shows a circle of various intensity and color that you can use similarly to how you'd use a ring light. And like the enterprise machines, it has a physical webcam switch that covers the camera.

For sound, it has two top-firing tweeters and two woofers, and it delivers excellent sound, although sometimes I could feel the vibrations through the keyboard.

The unit I tested came with 32GB of RAM and a 2TB SSD; performance was generally quite good. On basic benchmarks, it performed better than Qualcomm Snapdragon X PCs or 15- or 28-watt Intel Meteor Lake or Raptor Lake chips. This was particularly true with graphics-intensive applications like Cinebench or 3Dmark. (Some larger laptops come with 45-watt processors and/or discrete graphics, and these still are faster, but they are really in a different class.)

On my toughest tests, it took 54 minutes to transcode a video with Handbrake—better than the hour and 19 minutes on the Meteor-Lake based Elite x360 1040 or the hour and 24 minutes on the EliteBook Ultra G1.

It ran a portfolio simulation in MatLab in about 36 minutes, better than the Qualcomm machine but not as fast as the 32 or 33 minutes I saw with the Meteor Lake based Elite 1040 or Spectre X360.

It took 44 minutes to run a complex data table model in Excel; that's notably better than the Qualcomm-based machines and slightly faster than the Meteor Lake ones (which took 45 or 46 minutes) – but I got times as quick as 34 or 35 minutes with the earlier 13th Generation Intel Core (Raptor Lake) processor. Not surprisingly, in every test I ran, the OmniBook Ultra 14 with a Strix Point AMD Ryzen was faster than the machine I tested with the previous-generation Ryzen (code-named Phoenix), the .

On battery life, the OmniBook Ultra 14 has a 68 watt-hour battery that supports fast charging, allowing it to get about half full in 45 minutes. On PC Mark 10's Modern Office battery test, it lasted 20 hours and 33 minutes with the screen set to 40 nits, and 16 hours and 13 minutes with it set to 100 nits—excellent times.

HP is including some unique software in its latest AI PCs. Like the Qualcomm-based , it includes Poly Camera Pro, which I find quite helpful. And there's also a version of  the myHP control application, which includes various system and video control features, and can tell you when you are too close to the screen or spending too much time on the screen; or let you use various hand gestures to do things like scroll photos or pause and resume playback.

The most unusual program is the HP AI companion app, which is based on OpenAI's GPT-4o model. This app bases its replies on data stored on your machine. It is still listed as Beta software, and it works a little differently than Microsoft Copilot (which, of course, also comes with the machine).

AI Companion has four options—Ask, Analyze, Discover, and Perform. Ask is what most people expect from AI assistants, where you can ask questions. Analyze lets you create libraries of documents and can summarize documents, including comparing them and even turning them into blog posts. This was interesting, although somewhat limited as it can only handle five libraries of up to 100MB of documents. Discover suggests other AI solutions you can use, while Perform is meant to keep your PC running optimally, including suggesting BIOS, firmware, and driver updates.

In general, AI Companion has plusses and minuses depending on the data you feed it (in Analyze) and the prompts you choose. It’s an interesting alternative to Copilot or online tools such as native ChatGPT, Perplexity, and NotebookLM.

Note that AI companion only works when you are online and logged into an HP account.

While HP is marketing the OmniBook Ultra as a ",” some of the specific Microsoft features for that are not available yet on platforms other than the Qualcomm Snapdragon. (Note that the Qualcomm units have gotten a lot better in working with more applications, but AMD and Intel machines still offer more compatibility with games and legacy Windows applications.)

So, Windows Paint doesn't have the "Cocreator" feature, although it does have "image creator." The Live Captions application seems to be installed, but doesn't work yet. And of course, the much-touted Windows Recall feature . Microsoft has said that .

That said, the OmniBook Ultra 14 is still a great performer, with a nice display and terrific battery life. It's a bit heavier than some of the 14-inch notebooks I've tested, but that's a tradeoff many people will gladly take.

As I write this, the OmniBook Ultra 14 with specs close to my test unit—a Ryzen 9 HX375, Radeon 890 graphics, 32GB of RAM, and a 2TB SSD—is selling for $1,680 on HP's website. A model with a slightly lower-end Ryzen AI 9 365 – with 10 cores/20 threads and Radeon 880M graphics, 16GB, and a 1TB SSD is selling for $980, a very good price for this kind of power.