"Without fear for my own safety, I kissed my children goodbye then removed the side panel"

While we try to slow down a deafening HP Omen gaming PC, we hear from a staunch Yorkshireman who won't be buying a new laptop. Ever

- By LEE GRANT

At the risk of causing PC Pro's advertising executives some headaches, I feel I should confess that when a HP Omen gaming PC arrives in the shop for troubleshooting, a rough ride is likely.

Why? Well, Omen is HP's premium gaming brand and allegedly named after a curious incident when the prototype machine was fired up during the branding brainstorm, which immediately caused two executives to clamp their hands over their ears screaming, “Omen God! why have we made it so noisy!”

If the tech landscape is dominated by near-silent and fanless devices, then HP Omen sticks out like Brian Blessed stubbing his toe in a nunnery. There is a reason many gamers wear headphones, but HP Omen users would probably benefit from industrial ear defenders. These machines are packed with topnotch hardware and some genuinely innovative air-cooling solutions, but gaming gear generates a lot of heat for a long duration. Keeping this type of machine cool using only fans is more awkward than discovering your kid's teacher on OnlyFans.

The owner mentioned the machine had always been noisy, but since they'd installed the F1 24 game, shutdowns were now common. What also become clear was that every man and his YouTube channel had been inside this machine to tweak the thermals and had inadvertently made things much worse. The finality of failure meant that the machine was brought to me.