HP Omen 45L review: all-powerful gaming PC grinds every creative task into dust

HP’s Omen range is aimed at gamers, but a specced-out gaming PC also has everything you’ll need for serious creative work, so it’s worth looking at if you’re in the market for a Windows PC that can take on a heavy processing load. The 13th-gen Intel chip at the heart of the Omen 45L may not be the absolute latest for 2024, but it has enough cores, RAM and fast storage potential to blast through rendering and video work (and making it a fantastic high-end option for one of the best computers for graphic design). You can even play games on it too.

HP Omen 45L review: Key specifications

HP Omen 45L review: Design and build

There's something about the diamond-shaped Omen logo that reminds us of Doctor Yueh from Dune, with the black diamond tattooed on his forehead to mark his imperial conditioning. HP’s comes in a number of colours, but the one on the front of the case can be any colour you like. The case lighting is controlled via HP’s Omen Gaming Hub software. There are lit-up spinning fans on the front, a lightbar at the top of the case, and a square of lights on top of the water block pump that sits on top of the CPU for you to fiddle with, plus (oddly) lights on the RAM and GPU that you can’t control. It’s an afternoon well-spent to tune them to your preference, but the RAM lights are extremely bright and, if your preference is to turn them all off, you’ll be designing a blackout blind for the case window as soon as you have your preferred software up and running.

The case itself is a black monolith with a glass side and a gap between the roof of the component chamber and the cooling system above. This gives it a futuristic look, as well as providing somewhere to hook your fingers if you want to pick it up. The 45L is a heavyweight piece of equipment, weighing about the same as the average seven-year-old, so hopefully you won’t be moving it around too much once it’s in position, and some Apple-style wheels might be a good idea if you need to shift it.

HP Omen 45L review: Features

As you’d expect from such a towering desktop PC, there are plenty of USB ports to connect peripherals, but they top out at USB 3’s highest speed: 10Gbps. There's no USB 4 or Thunderbolt here, which may dismay those who like to use the fastest external storage. There are at least some 5Gbps ports on the front, along with audio connections, so you can plug in flash drives or connect a wired headset easily. 

The ‘cryo-chamber’ cooling solution that rises above the roof of the PC is an interesting and striking piece of design. It’s essentially a 360mm AIO liquid cooler that’s been integrated into the case and does a good job of keeping core temperatures down, with the CPU idling at around 25°. The AIO only cools the CPU - the GPU has its own cooling system while three intakes at the front of the case and an exhaust at the back take care of dumping heat out. The cooling system is generally very quiet, not making much noise at all beyond a background hum when you’re just using a web browser, and spinning up to a deep, gritty roar (but still a quiet one) when you put it under load.

Happily, everything on our review model seems to be very nicely put together, although the cable routing could be neater, with bundles of black-coated wires spilling out next to the RAM sticks that could, perhaps, have been accommodated around the back of the motherboard. The GPU sits high, in the top PCIE x16 slot, so the video connectors on the back of the machine are conveniently high up too, making it easier to plug in a screen, and with four ports on the back, there's scope to attach an impressive array of monitors.

The USB 2 ports, which are generally used for connecting a wired keyboard and mouse having fallen from the top of the connectivity hierarchy some time ago, are right next to the Ethernet socket, meaning that if you have a network cable attached its release clip can cover one of the USB sockets - having them a bit further away would fix this, but you’ll need to choose your cable carefully if you want to use both.

HP Omen 45L review: Benchmark scores

HP Omen 45L review: Performance

As you’d expect from a desktop PC with these kind of specs, performance is about as high as you’re going to get without speccing up some sort of monstrous PC workstation or Mac Pro. 

Inside the Omen 45L is the top chip from Intel’s 13th generation of processors, the i9-13900K. This 24-core beast features eight performance cores capable of boosting to 5.8GHz (though there's overclocking available in the Omen software that could increase that) and 16 efficient cores that can run as high as 4.3GHz. Between them, they’re capable of processing 32 threads concurrently, though they can suck as much as 253W of power while they’re doing it. 

The GPU is a monster too, physically as well as in terms of pixel-pushing capabilities. The RTX 4090 is at the top of Nvidia’s range (though rumours persist of a 4090 Super or even Titan card that could knock it off its perch) and comes with 24GB of dedicated RAM. It’s also enormous, taking almost the full depth of the 45L’s case and requiring a support bolted to the chassis to prevent it from sagging away from the PCIe slot. 

All this is backed by a generous 64GB of DDR5 RAM running at up to 5200 MT/s, a 1TB WD Black SSD, and for some reason a 2TB spinning hard drive, which seems like an odd bit of cost-cutting for such a high-performance machine. There are spare M.2 slots for you to add your own storage too, if you need to.

In benchmarks, with NVIDIA's Studio driver installed, the Omen 45L absolutely flies. As you’d expect from a high-power desktop chip, it doubles and even triples the benchmark scores of many laptops, even our new favourite laptop, the ASUS ZenBook Duo, whose Ultra 9 CPU is a generation newer (though the enormous GPU in the Omen definitely helps here). It beats the king of Macs - the M2 Ultra-equipped Mac Studio - in multi-core processing tests, and lesser computers are absolutely smoked. This thing is fast, but then it should be as you’re paying a large sum for it.

HP Omen 45L review: Price

The list price for the HP Omen 45L is a sweat-inducing £3,998.88. Nearly four thousand pounds is a lot of money to be paying for a desktop computer, and you can get an M2 Ultra Mac Studio with 24 cores and 64GB of RAM for about the same price, though Apple’s machine doesn’t have the huge Nvidia GPU or 2TB hard drive. The decision when buying a PC like this often comes down to whether you need the brute rendering force that the components inside can provide, and can absorb the extra costs of buying one (or more) of the best monitors, plus a mouse and keyboard, or whether something a little lighter on the specs but smaller, more portable, and complete would do just as well.

Should I buy the HP Omen 45L?

The HP Omen 45L is a games machine through and through, which means it will eat most creative software for breakfast too, including high-end applications like Cinema 4D or 3ds Max. Whether it’s video editing, 3D rendering or generating smart previews of medium-format images in Lightroom, you’ll zip through it with this machine much more quickly than you would with something with lesser specs. And that’s what you pay for. If rendering times are important to you, then a PC like this will be a must-buy. Likewise, if you want high framerates in the latest Elden Ring DLC at 4K after work. It’s an extreme machine, and for most people - even those for whom Photoshop and InDesign are a way of life - it’s probably too much.