While I love our editor’s favorite, our test laptop Lenovo Legion 5, and while I like the performance of the MSI Titan 18HX, I don’t appreciate how they look. The design is mostly hideous. The exhaust pipes on the back look like details from a Transformer, while the keys are adorned with letters in the Terminator 2 font. Horrible, it is what it is. And for me, as a nearly 100-year-old gamer with what I believe to be some design awareness and taste for the stylish, it’s downright embarrassing to take these computers out in public. This is where HP comes into the picture again. After cleaning up their design department with the launch of the stunning 45L, they have now taken the next big step forward in the design thinking of their gaming laptops. Transcend is a brand new line of computers that exceeds and surpasses everything they’ve done before in terms of clean, uncluttered and successful minimalism. It’s simply the best-looking gaming laptop in the world, in every category.
The inspiration is the Mac Book Pro, for obvious reasons. Cupertino-based Apple’s iconic Jony Ive design stands out as the best in the entire segment, and it’s these lines, shapes, proportions and even details that HP’s design department has tried to emulate. Transcend 14 is super thin, tidy with stylishly rounded edges and perfect proportions. The aluminum housing is stylishly finished in dark gray metallic, and the frame around the screen itself is razor thin.
Inside the computer we’ve been testing for the past five weeks sits an Intel Core Ultra 9 185H processor, 32 GB of RAM, 2 TB of SSD and an RTX4070. The 14-inch screen is OLED with a 120 Hz panel (2880 x 1800), which reacts in 0.2 milliseconds. Lightning fast, in other words. The battery lasts about four hours per charge (HP claims eight hours and 33 minutes, but that’s probably only for less demanding gaming or text editing) according to our five rounds of running various games from 100% to 1%, and the screen itself is an Imax Ready screen thanks to the 16:10 aspect ratio. HyperX (which HP now owns) is responsible for the sound, which is delivered in either DTS X Ultra or Hyper X Ultra via dual stereo speakers. The computer weighs 1.63 kilograms, which makes it super light, and it measures only 1.69 centimeters in height when folded. It’s incredibly thin, but still stays cool during tough gaming sessions.
In terms of performance, it is also good. It gets beat by the Razer Blade 14 and others in some games, but also gives back in others in our experience, making them equal in terms of how many frames per second are painted on the screen. In Cyberpunk 2077, in 1080p, for example, the Transcend 14 managed 40-42 frames per second, while the Razer Blade 14 stayed at 34-38 frames per second at best. The same was true for Call of Duty: Warzone 3.0, where Omen beat Razer, while the situation was reversed in Shadow of the Tomb Raider. All in all, the Transcend 14 performs very well in all the games we tested, and it stays relatively cool and, above all, quiet even under maximum load.
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The keyboard is another aspect that is very good on this computer. I love the feel of the keys, and as I said, I also like that it doesn’t look like an RGB font with “tough” Terminator fonts and all the other gormand. The best thing about the Transcend 14, however, is the screen. I have never seen such a phenomenal OLED screen in a laptop before, and especially when it comes to HDR material, it manages to convince really well. I have no doubt that HP has succeeded very well with the first computer in its new product line, and I would like to keep this thin, powerful and beautiful box and hypnotize HP’s press department into forgetting that we have it here, forever.
