What's cooler than being cool? HP's Omen Max 16 featuring an omnidirectional fan that thwarts dust buildup and keeps this gaming laptop a little closer to ice cold

When it comes to gaming performance, the build-up of dust can be a not-so-silent-killer. Enter HP's Omen Max 16 gaming laptop, which not only promises a number of snazzy performance-enhancing features but also includes an omnidirectional fan purpose-built to shrug off the accumulation of dust.

Here's a short horror story for you: you're minding your own business, living your best PC Gamer life, when a thought full of foreboding strikes you: "Uh, have the fans always made that noise?" Maybe you, apparently made of sterner stuff than I, even take a wee peek at your GPU temp only to notice it's markedly higher than the last time you checked, many moons ago. There's nothing for it, this requires further investigation.

Maybe you grab your screwdriver and pop that sucker open, or you simply turn your desktop tower around, and that's when you see it. "Oh my good gourd," you may cry, "What is that?" You've uncovered less a snuggled huddle of dust bunnies, and more a killer rabbit that's taken up residence among your fan blades.

To avoid similar situations in the future, HP has collaborated with Intel to co-engineer their Fan Cleaner technology. In the simplest of terms, this means that, rather than the Omen Max 16's fans only spinning one way forever, every four hours the fans change direction. HP argues this makes it harder for dust to settle, and therefore delays the throttling effects a more typical buildup of dirt would have on your airflow.

Usually fans only exhaust one way for good reason; making a fan omnidirectional adds another layer of hardware complexity, and potentially introduces fresh points of failure. HP haven't yet shared how they've navigated these challenges, or indeed much of what makes this fan tick.

This is far from the only upgrade to Omen Max 16's thermal architecture though, with HP also introducing a hybrid material cryo compound. Applied to both the Omen Max 16's CPU and GPU, this combination of liquid metal and grease should not only dissipate heat but also prevent it from leaking out and causing damage over time.

Perhaps that will mean a slightly less overly toasty lap in theory, but we'll have to wait and see how much of a difference it actually makes in practice.

Still, those aforementioned hardware updates are pretty cool, though they're far from the only reason HP referred to the Omen Max 16 as a 'beast' during its CES 2025 pre-brief presentation.

Speaking of that all-important CPU, the Omen Max 16 will offer a choice between two AMD chips—the Ryzen AI 9 HX 375 or Ryzen AI 7 350 (which has already impressed us in the Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 gaming laptop)—and two Intel chips—either the Core Ultra 9 275HX or Core Ultra 7 255HX.

The GPU remains slightly harder to pin down, with the official spec sheet giving little away beyond holding space to the tune of, "Nvidia GeForce Next-Gen Laptop GPU." That said, we likely won't have to wait too long for more details on this point; as Andy wrote, it would be more surprising if Nvidia doesn't unveil its RTX 50-series of graphics cards at CES 2025.

It remains to be seen how hot Nvidia's next generation of graphics cards will run, and just how much of HP's focus on thermal architecture is due to a power-hungry card at the heart of what it's billing as its most powerful gaming laptop yet. Whatever the case, the future is unlikely to end up feeling as crisp as a winter morn'.