HP Omen 45L

HP's biggest desktop PC offers mighty gaming potential

- IAN EVENDEN

HP’S CURRENT RANGE of Omen desktop cases are imposing black monoliths that genuinely do look like something out of a science fiction movie. We’re referring to the type that’s about unknowable alien technology indistinguishable from magic, rather than the affable uncle who makes an airship out of old gears and his wife’s underwear, but sci-fi nonetheless. That it wears its CPU cooling system, known as a ‘cryo chamber’—but actually just the usual radiator and fans—as a hat only enhances this feeling.

Luckily, the innards of the Omen 45L aren’t fictional; they’re functional. And with a 13th-gen i9, an RTX 4090 and 64GB of RAM, this one’s very functional indeed. There may be newer chips emerging onto the market, but the i9-13900K is not to be argued with, and matched with the RTX 4090, it becomes a dominant combination for 4K gaming or the creative arts—highres video editing or Lightroom’s AI noise reduction are no bother with this kind of processing power on board.