HP Omen 35L review

When Goldilocks wasn't breaking local wildlife laws and putting her life in peril by trying to sleep with dangerous creatures (interestingly, in an early version of the story, all the bears were male), she was probably a PC gamer. A streamer, in fact, given her choice of ostentatious outerwear. I have no evidence to back this up, but it's a necessary confection because I want to start this review by saying this: the HP Omen 35L is juuuuuuust right.

It's a tower PC you can put under your arm and carry easily. It looks great, with its internal components in white (matching the case) against a black motherboard, and the graphics card enclosed in a cage that makes it look like a bridge that's fallen out of a Halo game. There are extra heat sinks arranged around the AIO CPU cooler's pump block, two RGB front fans that sit behind a perforated grating so you can see the glow diffused into hundreds of pointillist dots. Even the Omen branding is largely unobtrusive, restrained to a logo on the CPU cooler and a wordmark on the front and non-transparent sides.

HP's choice of case is a good one. There are easily accessible USB ports on the top and right at the front, including a 10 Gbps Type-C. There's only one Thunderbolt 4 to be found, at the back, which might trouble those using it for non-gaming purposes who want to hook up some fast external SSDs, but otherwise the Omen 35L is well specced in terms of inputs, and it's nice to see Wi-Fi 7 in a desktop PC.

The components used to make the PC are less restrained than its exterior. The GeForce RTX 4080 Super we're all familiar with, one of the best graphics cards for gaming and one that should retain its usefulness long after the RTX 50-series cards take all the top spots in the rankings. Less common is the new Intel Core Ultra 7 265K, an Arrow Lake CPU with 20 cores, eight of them full-fat P cores. It's the same arrangement as many Core i9 CPUs of the 13th and 14th generations, which has now trickled down to the 7 level, only with a maximum turbo frequency of 5.5 GHz and the K designation that means it's unlocked for overclocking.

And the new Core Ultra proves to be a very performant piece of kit. In the demanding Cinebench 2024 benchmark it powers past the 24-core Core i9 13900K and the 32-core Threadripper 2990WX. It passes the 20-core Apple M1 Ultra, and the 24-core Xeon W-3265M. Most surprisingly, it produces a better multi-core score than the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D, the current king of gaming CPUs. Single-core performance is important in gaming, and in this test the 265K beats the i9 13900K and draws level with the 9800X3D.

In other testing, the SSD—a Western Digital Black PCIe 4.0 model according to 3D Mark—produces speeds that are distinctly PCIe 3.0. It's unclear if this is by design, whether there's something improperly configured somewhere, or maybe a pin isn't connecting properly, but it's a disappointing showing. It transferred at 300 MB/s when other drives in other PCs regularly top the 500 mark.

Despite this, the PC does very well in gaming, its GPU beating other RTX 4080 Super boards and getting close to RTX 4090 levels in 3D Mark's Time Spy Extreme. That synthetic benchmark isn't the real world, however, but the card also does well in actual games, able to provide an average of 52 fps in Cyberpunk 2077 at 4K and in Ray-tracing Overdrive mode. Fiddle with the DLSS settings and you could easily get that over 60.

In other games, we get the kind of results that are becoming typical of the RTX 4080 Super in a desktop machine. You won't struggle to get 60 fps from this card, no matter what game you're playing, and the news that DLSS 4 may be coming to RTX 40-series cards after all makes it even more likely you'll be able to use this card for years.

The Baldur's Gate 3 result might seem like a bit of an outlier, but that's there to show what difference a good CPU can make. The game scales impressively with different processors, and you can see where the Ryzen 7 9800X3D pulls ahead thanks to its 3D V-Cache-enabled processing power.

But while all this gaming stuff is going on, the Omen 35L makes little more than a hum. While compressing a Steam game for backup onto an external drive the CPU fans (there's a 240 mm array on the AIO) span up but remained relatively unobtrusive, and the GPU fans followed suit while rendering complex scenes. It's remarkably cool-running too, with the CPU barely nosing its way up to 74 °C while video encoding.

Intel's investments into processor efficiency led to somewhat disappointing first generation of Core Ultra chips over in laptopland, which were pushed further down by the arrival of a new challenger in the form of Qualcomm's Snapdragon chips, but this second generation of desktop CPUs seems to have hit the bullseye in terms of performance and efficiency.

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And at least until AMD hits back and Snapdragon arrives on the desktop, both of which are bound to happen. Arrow Lake is not going to give you a silent running PC—the noise is there, but it's not going to bring relatives rushing up the stairs to see what the fuss is all about.

And not making a fuss is perhaps what the Omen 35L is best at. It's not a big or heavy machine, but it is quietly notable. The white case, cooler and component cages give it a sleek look, the build quality is excellent, and the results in games (and a PC like this has uses way beyond gaming) speak for themselves. While it may be a bit of a reach to drop nearly $3,000 on a pre-built gaming PC, if they were all like this the decision to do so would be so much easier. Goldilocks would happily sit down to this desktop gaming PC, while wiping the porridge away from around her mouth, for a few rounds of Diablo 4. She plays as a druid, naturally.