HP Omen 25L
The most refined system here, but don’t be fooled: it packs a powerful punch for the price
SCORE PRICE As reviewed, £917 (£1,100 inc VAT) from hp.com/uk
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P may not be the first name you think of when it comes to gaming PCs, but at some point in the past couple of years it’s become rather good at designing them. And we use the “d” word quite deliberately, for this is a designer PC in a way that only a multinational company with a huge R&D budget can create. From the clearly labelled ports to a magic button that releases the near bezel-less glass side, it exudes quality.
That extends to the case design, with a stylish brushed metal effect at the front (although it’s actually plastic) and an unobstructed view of what’s inside courtesy of that glass side. Out of the box, HP defaults to a demure white colour theme, but it only takes a moment to change this to your favourite RGB mix in HP’s intuitive software.
You can also use this app to monitor the temperature of the CPU and GPU, as well as to pick your performance profile. To bring out the most of the highly respectable mix in our review system’s case, we switched to Turbo for all our tests. Despite this, the Omen 25L was never obnoxiously loud: in general use it emits a low hum and even at its worst it’s more of a fifth gear on the motorway than third gear up a hill.
That means the Core i5-11400F chip in this £1,100 version of the Omen 25L could stay consistently at around 4GHz, so not far off its 4.4GHz peak, which in turn pushed it to 270 in the PC Pro benchmarks. Not the fastest here by any means, but that’s enough power for years to come.
HP sells an AMD Ryzen 5 5600G version of the Omen 25L for the same price, but they each have six cores and 12 threads with similar levels of performance per core. Intel’s 11th generation should have a slight advantage for gaming, which brings us to this machine’s star component: a GeForce RTX 3060. Clearly, this isn’t the top of Nvidia’s range, but it supports ray tracing and will cope with recent, challenging releases at 1080p and 1440p.
Notably, the Chillblast Fusion Cruiser – which also includes an RTX 3060 but matches it with a far quicker Ryzen 7 5800X processor – is a good chunk faster overall in our 1080p gaming tests ( see p92), where the
HP’s CPU becomes a limitation. The difference is more marginal at 1440p, where we saw smooth frame rates from the Omen: 89fps in Shadow of
the Tomb Raider, 220fps in F1 2020, 63fps in Metro Exodus and 112fps in
Wolfenstein: Youngblood (all with DLSS and ray tracing if available).
It will be easy to upgrade to a faster card in the future, with a 500W power supply in place. Even allowing for inefficiencies of PSUs, there’s a big gap between its current peak power demand of 347W so we don’t see this being an issue. This is especially true because there isn’t much room either in the case or on the motherboard for powerhungry extras.
The most noteworthy absence is of a second M.2 SSD slot, despite what the official HP manual might say. That means you will have to replace the supplied 256GB drive or use the supplied 2TB hard disk for data storage.
There’s a second 3.5in bay available for another disk, and HP ensures that it’s all toolless by supplying a caddy. Upgrading the memory from its current 16GB is similarly straightforward, with two sockets lying empty.
With all this in mind, it’s a shame that HP doesn’t offer a 512GB version of the Omen 25L – and it’s one reason why this PC misses out on our top award this month. While it’s perfectly possible to move space-hogging games from the SSD to the hard disk, it’s also a pain.
If you want 512GB, and a higherspec graphics card, then you will need to choose the HP Omen 30L instead. This is wider and taller than the Omen 25L, and comes with a 750W power supply to give it that extra headroom.
So, the Omen 25L isn’t perfect – and it isn’t the best choice for keen upgraders. Instead, it’s targeted at people who want something stylish and convenient. It achieves that aim with great skill, and as long as y ou buy it whilst being aware of its limitations you’ll be extremely happy with your purchase.