HP Omen 45L

A gorgeously built gaming PC with an innovative cooling system that helps its Turbo mode make a real difference

- TIM DANTON

PRICE £2,499 (£2,999 inc VAT) from currys.co.uk

Of all the big multinational companies, HP makes the best gaming PCs. Controversial? Perhaps, but where its rivals lean towards alien-like creations with complicated internal layouts, HP takes the route of a stylish yet understated case and easy-to upgrade components.

The Omen 45L marks a slight departure from the norm by including a Cryo Chamber. This isn’t somewhere to store your brain when your body goes south, but a separate section at the top of the PC where the liquid from the CPU cooling system circulates. The idea is to suck in colder air from the room to cool the liquid, rather than rely on already warm air that circulates within a PC case.

This extra chamber means that the Omen 45L towers over most desktop PCs, including the Box Cube on p54, but it isn’t necessarily a monster when it comes to noise. Slip it into Quiet mode using the Omen Gaming Hub app and it barely makes a whisper, but if you want top performance then you’ll need to put up with the whirr of its numerous fans in Turbo mode. If you ever want to simulate what life is like next to a tumble dryer, take manual control and whack all fans up to the max.

Cool but fierce

The big question, then, is how much difference does the Cryo Chamber make?The answer is... a bit. I’m basing that on the Omen 45L’s results compared to those of the 5900X inside the test rig used in this month’s review of the 5800X3D (see p58) and the one system we’ve previously reviewed with the expensive 5900X chip inside, namely the Scan 3XS GWP-ME A1-24 workstation (