HP has officially revealed the Omen gaming laptop - the first high-end portable aimed at gamers since the company purchased VoodooPC over ten years ago. Rahther than compete with heavy desktop replacements from the likes of Alienware, the Omen instead takes more than a little inspiration from Razer's thin and light Blade laptop; it's a 15in notebook that's only 19mm thick and weighs just 2.1kg.

Built from black anodised aluminium, the Omen has a custom chrome hinge which is supposed to elevate the laptop body and display out of the way of the exhaust fans, to help expel hot air more effectively when gaming. HP has even added blue tips to the chrome, to "echo the racing look of titanium exhaust pipes". HP's Envy range already looks pretty tasty, but the Omen is on a whole other level in terms of design.

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All the ports have been moved to the back of the laptop too, to make room for a mouse or external keyboard at the sides when gaming. Power, a full-size HDMI port, mini DisplayPort and four USB3 ports should be enough for most desktop setups.

The 15in, touchscreen-enabled display has a 1080p, Full HD resolution, which should be an ideal match for the Nvidia GeForce GTX 860m dedicated graphics card - we've seen other gaming laptops with much higher resolution screens, but it's pretty pointless when you have to dial down the pixels to get a playable frame rate. The system is powered by a 2.5GHz quad-core Intel Core i7-4710HQ and 8GB of DDR3 memory. It ships with a 128GB as standard, but HP will let customers swap that for a 256GB or 512GB SSD if they prefer, as well as doubling the RAM or increasing the video memory from 2GB to 4GB.

The HP Omen should be going on sale in the UK from late November onwards directly from HP, with prices started from £1,299 and going up as you add extra memory, storage or a better GPU. We're hoping to give one an in-depth review a little closer to launch.