Gaming Notebooks

If you've been having issues with the new Omen 15 where the fan noise is noticeably loud at idle and any kind of CPU stress test will cause your temperatures to jump to 100 degrees and throttle, then this may be a solution for you. Additionally, this solution comes with no loss in performance (unlike some other solutions I've seen that suggest disable Intel Turbo-Boost).

Firstly, in order to identify whether you've had the same issue as me, download HWINFO64, hit run, click on sensors, and take a look at the current values under Core #0 Clock to Core #5 Clock whist the computer is idling. If they are around 3.9 GHz then you are suffering from the same issue.

What is happening is that the default Windows power profile that HP set is causing the CPU to almost permanently turbo boost to its maximum clock speed of 3.9 GHz, even whilst the PC is idling. This generates a large amount of excess heat, causing the fans to spin up, and the moment any kind of stress test is applied the temperatures will jump up to unsafe levels and the CPU will throttle.

The good news is that I believe I have found the solution, and now when I run the AIDA64 CPU stress test my temperatures never exceed 80 degrees at the default CPU power profile in BIOS. All you need to do is the following:

1. At the desktop, right click on the battery icon in the system tray and select power options, and then create power plan
2. If the option for Power saver is there, skip to step number 6. Otherwise, go to the next step
3. Head to this url and download PowerConfigurationPatch.exe. This is a fix released by Lenovo for the same issue and appeared to work on my laptop
4. Install the patch you just downloaded and restart your computer, just to be safe
5. Now right click on the battery icon in the system tray and select power options, and then create power plan as before. Now there should be the option for the Power saver profile
6. Select the Power saver profile, enter whatever name you want for the profile, and hit next and then create
7. The profile should have automatically applied, but if not you can select it again under power options
8. Finally, go back to HWINFO64 --> sensors and check your idle clock speeds. With any luck, they should be boosting as normal and idling at around the 0.9 GHz value. Your laptop should now be fine!

What annoys me the most is that this is such a rookie mistake by HP, and I'm amazed that no-one internally has already picked up on and rectified this issue. For a laptop that cost me well over £1000, silly little fixes like this are just completely unacceptable. At the very least, I hope this post has helped someone out there who is in the same position as me. Or even better yet, this finds its way to  HP engineers who quite frankly should be embarassed at themselves.