- I wasn't expecting a major innovation
in case design this year,
and I certainly wasn't expecting it from HP,
but here it is the omen 45L.
Possibly the biggest game changer in case cooling,
since the Antec P183
introduced the concept of isolated cooling zones.
HP has dabbled in custom cases in the past,
but this scientifically cooled, metaphysically fire design,
whatever that means,
is their first that there's just no other way to put.
Looks absolutely, freaking amazing.
They even got a patent for what they call
their Cryo Chamber Cooling, a solution that,
at least on paper makes the Omen 45L
one of the best cooled pre-builts on the market.
So what happened here?
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The Omen 45L boosts a top of the line spec sheet,
but none of that is what makes it unique.
What's special is all in the attic up here.
The top contains a liquid cooling radiator
and 120 millimeter cooling fans.
Then there's this void with an angled airflow deflector
that makes it a completely independent cooling zone.
So cold air goes in, hot air comes out.
Zero compromise cooling.
'Cause the thing is, in a traditional case layout,
you end up sacrificing cooling performance in some way,
no matter how you slice it.
Either you mount the radiator in the front
where it's gonna preheat the air
that ultimately gets sucked into your GPU
or you mount the radiator to the top
giving fresh air to your GPU,
which spits it out into your CPU cooler.
The bad news is that HP's patent
means that nobody else can do this.
But the good news is that at least you can buy the case
separately if you like what you see.
So why don't we take a closer look?
There's definitely some OEM PC flare.
You've got a nice tempered glass side panel,
but then you've got these little weird, unpainted bits here.
I mean it's not a huge deal.
One really nice thing is check this out,
cable management grommets,
totally standard ATX mounting,
this pass through for the radiator tubes,
that's kind of a little weird,
but there's plenty of room in there.
You can definitely put a thicker ones,
and if you really wanted to.
Hold on a second, there's a release.
Oh, look at this. This is cool.
Quick release front panel,
just got these little buttons right here.
Easy to clean front filters. Is that magnetic?
I think it's magnetic.
Yep. All the RGB intake fans.
More OEM PC weirdness.
This bottom fan is screwed in from the front
because the basement kind of limits access to it.
And then the top fans are screwed in from the inside.
Solid front IO on the case though, if you buy the pre-built,
I'm not sure that it entirely makes up
for the kind of flacid rear IO
on this particular motherboard.
And in a shocker from HP, the cooling for the motherboard,
and actually look at that, even the SSD for that matters.
Pretty freaking awesome.
Easy to remove top panel.
Mm, that's a missed opportunity.
Dual 240 mil rad instead of a 360.
We're gonna see if that hurts us later.
Curiously, even though PC Gamer reports
that you can buy the case stand alone,
maybe it's coming later
'cause I don't see it on the 45L page
or under Omen accessories on the U.S. site.
Coming back then to the pre-built,
which you actually can buy them.
HP claims that they've beefed up
their motherboard VRM cooling
and are using more off the shelf style parts
this time around which it seems that they are.
And that's great in theory.
We already saw that they're at least using
standard form factor, motherboard, case, and power supply,
which should make future upgrades relatively painless.
But I just can't shake that feeling
that something's rotten in the state of Denmark here,
'cause here's the thing,
HP has a long history of kneecapping high-end components
to the point where it almost feels like
they intentionally limit their products performance.
So we need to deal with that.
But first, we wanna know if the Cryo Chamber
is actually working as intended.
So we rigged up our Omen 45L with four thermal probes.
One at the intake,
one at the exhaust for each of the two thermal chambers.
So the bottom and the top here.
And a final one measuring the ambient temperature
in our room.
We then loaded up the system in three different ways.
First, we hit all 16 of our CPU course
with prime 95, small FFT.
Allowed our coolant temperatures
to equalize in our radiator,
and found that there was a whopping 12 degree difference
between the temperature of the air at our work bench
and the radiator exhaust.
So in real world terms,
that means that if you were pulling hot radiator air
into your gaming rig, it could easily
drive up your GPU temps by 10 degrees or more.
But what if we went the other way around,
feeding fresh air to the GPU first
and then hoping that it can still cool our CPU afterward?
Yikes.
Running FurMark, we measured a 20-degree difference
between our front air intake and our rear exhaust.
Now this is a bit of a worst case scenario for that
since most cases would feed at least,
some non pre-heated air.
You know, maybe from the top here into the radiator.
And there's only a single one, 20-millimeter exhaust,
but both of these scenarios demonstrate
how you could easily end up cooling
one of your components optimally
at the cost of thermal throttling the other.
As for the Cryo Chamber, does it work? Yes.
Our final test, a combined CPU and GPU load showed us
that while the corner of my office
where we were running the tests
did heat up by a couple of degrees.
The way that HP routes the CPU heated air
off to the side and then the GPU heated air out the back
means that the entire system
is getting ample access to fresh air.
It's freaking fantastic. Go buy one now.
Uh, not so fast.
Our performance woes with HP desktops
have never actually been caused by poor thermals.
So we need to know, is it fast or is it just fast for an HP?
To find out, we gathered up a test bench with the same specs
using off-the-shelf gaming parts,
nuked HP's pre-installed software bloat
because that's the first thing you should do
when you buy an HP anyway,
and took our rigs to the drag strip.
And well, this is a good omen. Get it.
Out of the gate, the 45L measurably outperformed
our control bench in both F1 2021 and Flight Simulator 2020.
CS GO is a little less clear cut
with our control bench managing better averages.
But given that the Omen posted better 99%
minimum frame times, I'm inclined to call this one a draw.
Unfortunately, the same can't be said of Cinemabench R23.
What the heck is going on here?
How is it that you can come out ahead in gaming
and then with exactly the same specs
fall behind by nearly 5% in rendering?
Like this,
it looks like whatever fuss HP has made
about their beefed up VRMs and Keeping Mother Cool,
whatever that means.
The Omen 45L's poor 12900K
is so power limited under sustained load
that even manually overclocking the course to 5.2 gigahertz
results in basically exactly the same score.
It's a solid 32 watts below Intel's rated turbo power
for this chip.
Well, that's a simple fix you might think.
Fire up the UEFI bios,
set all of Intel's various boosts to their maximum,
call it a day, right?
Wrong.
I have seen thin and light Notebooks
that have more available tuning parameters than this thing,
but I'm a gamer, not a professional 3D modeler
you might think.
Who cares as long as it's gaming performance is good?
You do, and here's why.
As I was puzzling about the performance advantage
over our reference system, I came across something odd.
HP went out of their way to equip this machine
with XMP capable HyperX 3733 mega transfer per second
at CL21 memory.
But they are running it at both lower speeds
and higher latencies than it is rated at
with absolutely no way to activate the XMP profile
and run it at its full potential.
What the Sams honest hill is going on here, HP?
Now we've got another question to answer.
Is our control system getting beat fair and square
or is it only getting beat because we're forcing it to play
in the same week sandbox as the Omen 45L?
What if we did what any sensible enthusiast
who just spent over a $1,000 on a GPU would do
and spend another 20 bucks on a Ram?
Holy bananas. It's a blood bath, folks.
Curiously, our Cinemabench scores did go down a little bit,
but in gaming we have unlocked so much more performance
that our control is beating the Omen 45L
by anywhere from a couple of percent to nearly 15%
in Flight Sim 2020.
So yeah, while our initial numbers
have HP as the big winner,
it turns out that's only because they stacked the deck
in their favor.
The silver lining though, is that all of this is fixable
either by HP seeing the light
and fixing their power delivery limitations.
Please, HP I'm rooting for you here
'cause otherwise I really liked this thing.
Or by just obtaining the case somehow and building your own.
While you're at it, I've got a couple of suggested tweaks.
Spend the extra 10 bucks and get a triple
rather than a dual 120 millimeter radiator for the top.
Upgrade that 850 watt power supply to 1,000 watt.
Just to be sure.
And maybe go for a full-sized ATX motherboard.
Oh, and leave out the McAfee and Dropbox installs
while you're at it.
You will end up with the same great Omen 45L design,
just with less Hp-enis chotting it up.
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Thanks for watching guys. You know what?
Since you're done now,
why don't you go and watch our second secret shopper series
where HP pulled this exact same move
and ended up with lower performance than the competition
as a result.
Oh, I guess that's kind of a spoiler,
except not really because you already know
that they would do this to their highest end gaming rig, so.
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