New HP Omen gaming desktop is a radical departure

After a brief stint among the best gaming desktops, HP’s Omen brand hasn’t stepped up to the plate on the desktop front. The recent Omen 40L was a lukewarm PC, and the company has settled into the same design in slightly different sizes over the past few years. That’s changing with the new HP Omen 35L.

It’s what the company calls its first customizable desktop ever. Omen desktops have offered upgrade paths for years now, unlike something like the Alienware Aurora R16, but the Omen 35L pushes that idea further. The ground-up design now supports up to four sticks of memory, two M.2 NVMe SSD slots, and a 3.5mm storage bay. It also comes with a standard micro ATX motherboard and ATX power supply, as well as three slots for a GPU, allowing you to completely gut and replace the internals down the line.

The desktop is less interesting than what’s inside, however. HP is introducing its first Omen components inside the Omen 35L. It created a set of fans, two different power supplies, and two liquid coolers that will be available on their own. The Omen fans only come in a 120mm size, but HP is offering them either in a single pack with a traditional 4-pin connector, or in a three-pack with daisy chain connections and support for up to 14 fans through a hub.

For the power supplies, HP is offering 850-watt or 1000W, both of which are fully modular and come with an 80 Plus Gold certification — despite the fact that 80 Plus is slowly aging out of relevance. HP also says these power supplies support ATX 3.1, meaning you’ll get a 16-pin connector for RTX 40-series GPUs, as well as a zero RPM fan mode.

Out of all of the components, the all-in-one (AIO) liquid cooler is the most interesting. HP is offering it in a 240mm or 360mm size, and both come with an Asetek 7th-gen pump and support for both Intel and AMD — HP hasn’t specified which sockets specifically, however. The more interesting note is the cap. By default, these coolers come with an ARGB cap adorning the Omen logo, but you can upgrade it to an LCD screen.

It’s not a massive IPS display like we saw on the Hyte Thicc Q60, but the LCD cap allows you to show a video, GIF, system information, clock, or audio visualization on top of your cooler. The screen itself has a resolution of 480 x 480 and is capable of 250 nits of brightness.

These components will be available separately or as part of the Omen 35L. Outside of HP’s offerings, you can pack up to a Ryzen 7 8700G or Core i7-14700F into the machine, along with up to an RTX 4090 and 64GB of memory. HP hasn’t shared pricing details on the Omen 35L or its Omen components yet, nor when they’ll be available.