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 p180 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 it 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
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Linus
so
the omen 45l boasts 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
compromise cooling because 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
going to pre-heat the air that ultimately gets sucked into your GPU or
you mount the radiator in 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
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 could
definitely put thicker ones in 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 uh buttons right
here easy to clean front filter 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 i o on the case though if you buy the pre-built i'm not sure that
it entirely makes up for the kind of flaccid rear i o 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 remove top panel that's a missed opportunity
dual 240mm rad instead of a 360. i'm 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 because i don't see it on the 45l page or under omen
accessories on the us site coming back then to the pre-built which you actually
can buy then 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 because 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 want to 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 cores
with prime95 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 workbench 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-preheated air you know maybe from the top here into the radiator and
there's only a single 120 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 crowd 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 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
cinebench 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 five percent 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 and 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 sam's 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 weak sandbox as the omen 45l
what if we did what any sensible enthusiast who just spent over a
thousand dollars on a GPU would do and
spend another 20 bucks on our RAM
holy bananas it's a bloodbath folks
curiously our cinebench 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 percent 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 because otherwise i really like
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 a
thousand watt just to be sure and maybe go for a full-size 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 hpness choding 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 right