HP Omen 35L review

pcgamer.com:

When Goldilocks wasn't breaking local wildlife laws and putting her life in peril by trying to sleep with dangerous creatures (interestingly, in an early version of the story, all the bears were male), she was probably a PC gamer. A streamer, in fact, given her choice of ostentatious outerwear. I have no evidence to back this up, but it's a necessary confection because I want to start this review by saying this: the HP Omen 35L is juuuuuuust right.

It's a tower PC you can put under your arm and carry easily. It looks great, with its internal components in white (matching the case) against a black motherboard, and the graphics card enclosed in a cage that makes it look like a bridge that's fallen out of a Halo game. There are extra heat sinks arranged around the AIO CPU cooler's pump block, two RGB front fans that sit behind a perforated grating so you can see the glow diffused into hundreds of pointillist dots. Even the Omen branding is largely unobtrusive, restrained to a logo on the CPU cooler and a wordmark on the front and non-transparent sides.

HP's choice of case is a good one. There are easily accessible USB ports on the top and right at the front, including a 10 Gbps Type-C. There's only one Thunderbolt 4 to be found, at the back, which might trouble those using it for non-gaming purposes who want to hook up some fast external SSDs, but otherwise the Omen 35L is well specced in terms of inputs, and it's nice to see Wi-Fi 7 in a desktop PC.

The components used to make the PC are less restrained than its exterior. The GeForce RTX 4080 Super we're all familiar with, one of the best graphics cards for gaming and one that should retain its usefulness long after the RTX 50-series cards take all the top spots in the rankings. Less common is the new Intel Core Ultra 7 265K, an Arrow Lake CPU with 20 cores, eight of them full-fat P cores. It's the same arrangement as many Core i9 CPUs of the 13th and 14th generations, which has now trickled down to the 7 level, only