HP Omen 30L review: "A 1440p gaming powerhouse"

HP’s Omen 30L range is the gaming PC for those who don’t want to build their own gaming PC. Assembling your own system can be a daunting prospect (and it’s easier to buy depleted uranium than a new graphics card right now), but luckily HP has you covered, offering a gaming machine personally tailored for you with a variety of possible specs.

Naturally, that means that the Omen 30L—whatever configuration you might buy—works just like any expertly-assembled homemade gaming PC. Want to upgrade later on with new components? It’s a breeze. Installing custom software? No trouble. We’ll get down to the nitty-gritty of the specs in a bit, but all of the Omen 30L models are serious gaming machines, sharing the same slick chassis of metal and tempered glass.

It’s a statement that HP is taking their pre-built machines seriously, and a lot of work has clearly gone into making the 30L a best gaming PC contender. But does it actually measure up to the competition, and is it really worth the hefty asking price? Let’s find out.

Design & Features

Straight out of the box, the Omen 30L is a gorgeous piece of hardware. It’s fairly middle-of-the-road in terms of size, far from compact but nowhere near as big as some gaming-oriented cases. One side panel is clear glass, showcasing the internal components, while the other is solid aluminum.

At the front, we’ve got another glass panel, although this one is tinted to mute the brightness of the RGB intake fan mounted near the base. Above it lies the ‘OMEN’ typeface and the brand’s iconic diamond logo, also illuminated in matching RGB. It’s unexpectedly subtle compared to many other pre-built PCs; the rest of the RGB lighting is limited to a single LED strip at the top of the case, a bright square on the CPU cooler block, and RGB HyperX Fury RAM (an optional extra).

It’s an excellent case; where many pre-build sellers use cases from other manufacturers, HP has committed to their own style, and it was a good choice. The 30L chassis also offers superb ventilation; large perforated metal panels run up either side of the front, and the fixed top panel is similarly ventilated. There are dust filters tucked away underneath, although accessing these for cleaning could be a chore.

Fortunately, reaching the guts of this build won’t be an issue. A big user-friendly button on the rear of the case pops open the glass window, allowing you to freely access the majority of components for upgrades or maintenance. At the front and back of the case, we’ve got a variety of I/O ports for physical connectivity (a front USB-C port would’ve been a good inclusion, but it’s not a dealbreaker as there are two to be found at the back).

Inside, we’ve got a highly customizable selection of parts. Our review unit packs an RTX 2080 Super GPU and an Intel Core i7-10700K CPU; both previous-generation parts now, but given the difficulty of knowing where to buy RTX 3080 or where to buy RTX 3070 stock, for example, it’s a pretty fair deal at the price point. With 2.5TB of storage in total and 16GB of high-speed memory, this Omen 30L is guaranteed to still pack a punch. Models with RTX 3000-series GPUs and a variety of other components are also available, should you wish to spend more for better performance.

If we had one key criticism of the 30L’s design, it wouldn’t come down to the aesthetic choices or the selection of available components. The RGB light strip hidden behind the windowed panel throws the internal assembly into sharp relief and sadly reveals a few places where the cabling work could’ve been neater. We also wish there was some kind of PSU shroud here; the exposed non-modular power brick from Cooler Master isn’t pretty to look at, with a bunch of information labels printed on the top.

It’s not disastrous by any means—this reviewer has put together some far messier systems in the past—but buying a pre-built PC comes with a certain assurance that the cabling work will be as tidy as possible, and that isn’t quite the case here. A few cables have been squeezed awkwardly into innocuous corners, and a crumpled piece of black fabric tape secures one audio cable at the top of the case for no obvious reason.

In terms of pre-installed software, the Omen 30L comes with either Windows 10 or 11 Home, and mercifully only has a small amount of bloatware already on the drive. Some of this is worth keeping (such as the existing RGB control software and the GeForce Experience app) but the rest thankfully isn’t too onerous to remove.

Performance

Appearance aside, how does this Omen 30L perform? Well, we’re pleased to report that despite now being more than two years old, the 2080 Super can still get it done. This GPU is a monster for gaming at 1440p and can handle its own at 4K in the majority of games. Demanding triple-A titles may struggle to keep above 60fps at 4K ultra, but esports games run fantastically. Dropping graphical settings down a little will allow 60+ frames per second at 4K resolution in the vast majority of games.

The only real downside to the 2080 Super in comparison to the newer 3080 is in real-time ray-tracing performance. Activating ray-tracing in supported games with a 3000-series card results in a minor hit to framerates, but doing so on a 2080 Super batters your fps down by as much as 50%. We saw this both in Metro Exodus and 3DMark’s Port Royal RTX benchmark test. As the great philosopher, Thanos, once said, ‘this ray extracts a heavy toll’. At least, we’re pretty sure he said ‘ray’.

As mentioned earlier, the Omen 30L case is impressively well-ventilated with a smart fan layout, ensuring good airflow. Despite the small rear fan, exhaust airflow at the back of the case feels strong. We didn’t see any troubling component temperatures throughout our entire testing process, although we did note a bit of fan whine during heavy processor load testing, which unsurprisingly seemed to come from the AIO CPU radiator fan. Some BIOS adjustments to the fan curves might rectify this, though.

Fan noise aside, the Core i7 CPU actually performs admirably, keeping framerates up in CPU-dependent games like the strategy title Total War: Three Kingdoms and powering through core-intensive workloads like the Cinebench R15 benchmark.

Less impressive was our SSD speed; this 512GB M.2 drive wasn’t able to break 2GB/s in transfer speeds, and while the results we got are still incredibly fast (to the point where load times in most games are trivially quick), it’s still slow compared to the 5+GB/s drives that are readily available right now. In practical terms, this won’t make much of a difference for gaming, and it’s still leagues faster than the 2TB hard drive packed in here for secondary storage, so make sure your games are installed on the SSD.

There’s plenty of upgrade potential here, of course, and that doesn’t necessarily mean removing the existing components. There’s an empty drive bay for expansion, and a spare heat shield covering a slot for a second M.2 SSD, should you desire more high-speed storage. You could potentially buy two more 8GB sticks of HyperX RAM to fill the two empty DIMMs, but you might struggle with this due to Kingston’s recent acquisition and subsequent separation of the Fury memory brand!

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Overall - should you buy it?

The HP Omen 30L is beautiful on the outside and a little bit ugly on the inside, but it gets the job done and then some. A 1440p gaming powerhouse with the ability to stretch up to 4K gaming in a pinch, all for $1,999, is a reasonable proposition in today’s computer market. A quick trip to eBay shows that a brand-new RTX 2080 Super will currently cost you upwards of a thousand dollars, which makes the Omen 30L an attractive option right now. And while it won't have the power and premium nature that an RTX 3070 PC, RTX 3080 PC, or an RTX 3090 PC will have, it's not a bad choice right now.

Of course, if you’re able to buy a new GPU at the actual market price, building your own PC will likely be a bit cheaper overall. You won’t be able to get the custom Omen case, though, which is one of our favourite parts of this machine. The internals might be a tad unrefined in places, but it’s hard to deny that this is an exceptional pre-built gaming system. Keep up the good work, HP; just leave the tape in the toolbox next time.

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