As much as I love our editor-favorite Lenovo Legion 5 test laptop, and as much as I love the performance of the MSI Titan 18HX, I don’t appreciate its looks. The design is mostly terrible. The exhausts at the back look like a detail from Transformer, while the switches are decorated with letters in Terminator 2 font, that’s about it. And for me, as an almost 100-year-old gamer with what I think is a certain design awareness and penchant for style, it’s downright embarrassing to take these computers out in public. This is where HP comes in again. After cleaning up their design department with the launch of the stunning 45L model, they have now taken the next big step forward in designing their own gaming laptops. Transcend is a new line of computers that goes above and beyond everything you’ve done before in terms of clean, uncluttered, and successful simplicity. It’s simply the most beautiful gaming laptop in the world, in every category.
The inspiration is the Mac Book Pro, for obvious reasons. The design of the famous Cupertino-based Apple’s Jony Ive stands out as the best in the entire sector, and it is these lines, shapes, proportions and even details that HP’s design department tried to emulate. The Transcend 14 is ultra-slim and tidy with rounded edges and perfect dimensions. The aluminum body is elegantly anodized in a metallic dark gray and the bezel surrounding the display itself is thin.
Inside the computer we’ve been testing over the past five weeks is an Intel Core 9 Ultra 185H processor, 32GB of RAM, a 2TB SSD, and an RTX4070 card. The 14-inch widescreen display is OLED with a 120Hz (2880 x 1800) panel, which responds in 0.2ms. In other words, very fast. The battery lasts about four hours per charge (HP claims eight hours and 33 minutes, but that’s probably for less demanding games or text editing) according to our five rounds of different games from 100% to 1%, and the screen itself is Imax Ready thanks to the aspect ratio To height 16:10. HyperX (now owned by HP) is responsible for the audio delivered in DTS X Ultra or Hyper X Ultra via dual stereo speakers. The computer weighs 1.63kg, making it extremely lightweight, and is only 1.69cm long when folded. It’s incredibly thin, but stays cool during tough gaming sessions.
In terms of performance, it is also good. It’s beaten by the Razer Blade 14 and others in some games, but it also falls behind in others, putting it on par in terms of the number of frames drawn to the screen per second. For example, in Cyberpunk 2077, at 1080p, the Transcend 14 managed 40-42 fps, while the Razer Blade 14 ran at 34-38 fps at best. The same thing happened with Call of Duty: Warzone 3.0, where Omen defeated Razer, while the situation was reversed in Shadow of the Tomb Raider. Overall, the Transcend 14 performs very well in all the games we tested and remains relatively cool and, above all, quiet even when fully loaded too.
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The keyboard is another very good aspect of this computer. I like the feel of the keys, and like I said, I also like that it doesn’t look like an RGB font with the “hard” Terminator lines and all the other objects. The best thing about the Transcend 14 is the display. I’ve never seen such a gorgeous OLED display on a laptop, and especially when it comes to HDR stuff, it manages to convince very well. There’s no doubt that HP has had a huge success with the first computer in its new product line and I’d love to keep that thin, sturdy, beautiful box and hypnotize HP’s press department into forgetting we have it here, forever.
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