HP Omen 35L (2024)

The Omen series has been HP's gaming division for a number of years now, which has led to a number of different designs, some more innovative than others, but a quick look around the local electronics mecca reveals that the market for pre-built computers is large and probably quite lucrative.

One of the latest additions to the line is HP's 35L, which, as the name suggests, comes in what we can only assume is a 35-litre enclosure. It's quite nice, with what looks like decent cooling, but more importantly, it's virtually silent when it's just running - thank you for that. The price is somewhere around £1,400, and for that you get a nice mid-tower case that has obviously been through the hands of an industrial designer, and they've added ARGB fans too. And then there's extra points for creating a design that actually avoids tools.

The initial marketing for it promised "industry-standard components" and "a premium gaming desktop that can be customised without sacrificing performance" - this seemed a little odd as it can indeed have up to RTX 4090, but the CPU choice is either AMD's 8700G or an Intel i7 14700F. In other words, a budget CPU with low power consumption and a mid-range CPU that cannot be overclocked.

There's some inbuilt discrepancy in that hardware composition that I simply can't see the logic in. It should have been a 7800X3D and an i9 14900K. Instead, both are outdated, despite the fact that the machines have only just come onto the market. They also advertise AI support, which AMD's G-series is notorious for not actually supporting. On the other hand, the CPU choice means that the one 280mm AIO it comes which is more than enough, so it doesn't matter that the power supply can be set to a maximum of 1000 watts.

The motherboard looks like a normal micro ATX standard with an older B650 chipset, but in Omen's own branding, just like everything else. The graphics card is the same, and held in place by a hefty locking mechanism. This is fine as it means you can replace a faulty motherboard yourself, but it's not super impressive with only one 10Gbps USB-C port, two USB-A 3.2 and four USB-A running 2.0. There is no HDMI port, so it's a bit of a waste to have installed a CPU that has a small graphics card built in, and if your graphics card dies, you're completely screwed. There is of course the pre-installed annoying software, in this case Omen Gaming Hub.

Our edition came with a Ryzen 7 8700G, RTX 4070 Super, 1 TB NVMe - but PCIe 4.0 and 16 GB DDR5 RAM, Kingston Fury 6000 MHz.

The choice of AMD Ryzen 7 8700G is, well... unusual. There's no need for the built-in GPU, its cache isn't impressive, it's a low-power CPU rated at a paltry 65 watts, and the only positive must be the price, because it makes no sense at all to throw an 8-core CPU into a gaming computer that needs to be semi-high-end, unless it's a 7800X3D or similar. In addition, there is no PCIe 5 support and PCIe 4.0 support is only 16x ports as there aren't many PCIe lanes. This is a CPU you'd use for a budget build or something where cooling is limited, not for something where you throw in an RTX 4070 Super. It's a significant bottleneck, even more so if you buy the RTX 4080 Super or RTX 4090 version. The GPU hit 60 degrees in testing and the CPU 70 degrees with everything set to max. So the cooling is satisfactory and the noise was 42 dB, a little more than I expected.

In general, it doesn't do well in 4K. There is a performance hit here, if you compare with the figures we have from testing Nvidia's RTX 4070 Super reference card, which is otherwise not bad with 12 GB RAM. In general, 4K is off the table for the simple reason that a 40% performance reduction is not abnormal, and it was not possible to keep 60 FPS right. 1440p is far better. Here we saw 101 FPS in Red Dead Redemption, 115 FPS in Cyberpunk 2077, and 123 FPS in Assassin's Creed Valhalla. In round numbers, the choice of a Ryzen 7 8700G means that the expected performance of the graphics card is about 15% below the reference.

I'm not quite sure what to think. If you buy the components yourself, you can get them for around significantly less, and a Windows licence is not that expensive either. So, thumbs up for using 100% standard parts, for a nice design and a silent computer, but minus marks for a CPU that's completely off the mark, which actually holds back the overall performance, and a price that needs to be shaved off by 20%.