HP Omen 40L desktop review: missing what counts the most

I looked at a modest configuration, something that feels like an ideal balance between value and performance for those looking to get their first gaming PC. You can see the specs for the review unit below, with the machine packing an AMD Ryzen 7 7700 and an RTX 4060 Ti graphics card.

At retailers like Best Buy, HP asks $1,480 for this configuration, but it often goes on sale. At the time of this writing, the configuration is available for $1,330, and I’ve seen it go under $1,100 before. Surprising as it sounds, HP is offering a lot of value here for that price.

Even choosing the cheapest components possible, which I’m sure HP has done here to a certain degree, you’d spend around $1,100 to build your own version of this PC. A few hundred dollars for warranty, support, and the build itself isn’t unreasonable. And if you can find a stellar sale on the Omen 40L, it’s a downright deal.

It’s a decent price compared to the competition, too. The Dell XPS Desktop with a similar configuration comes in at $1,450, for example. As is always the case, you’ll get better bang for your buck by building your own PC, but the Omen 40L is a compelling midrange option for PC gamers who don’t want to get their hands dirty.

Build quality and design

It’s not just the exterior design, either. Going inside the Omen 40L, it feels like a custom-built PC, and sometimes even better. For starters, getting into the case is completely tool-less. Buttons on the top of the case pop off the side panels, and you can snap off the front and top panels with ease. HP includes markings  on the case itself, so you don’t have to fish out the manual to see how to remove the dust filter correctly.

Speaking of which, there’s a removable dust filter at the front of the case, which is key for keeping the internals clean. A second magnetic dust filter covers the power supply fan on the bottom of the case. There’s als room for additional fans. There’s a spare slot for a 120mm fan upfront, as well as two at the top of the case. Even better, the fan hub HP uses has spare connections available, so you can reasonably make these upgrades.

Around the back, you also have four slots for additional drives, and HP includes additional SATA power connectors if you want to expand your storage in the future. The power supply isn’t modular, but at least you can make some small upgrades like storage without reconfiguring the entire machine.

Cable management inside the case isn’t the best. I don’t care much about how things look behind the motherboard tray, but the Omen 40L is a bit messy in the main chamber. Like a lot of prebuilt PCs, the Omen 40L doesn’t have great cable routing options, leaving dangling cables in the main chamber where you can see them. One particularly bad example is the exhaust fan, which has a cable stretched across the top of the motherboard.

Upon unboxing the PC, you’ll find that HP doesn’t include a ton of protection. The foam is fine, but there’s nothing inside the case outside of a plastic GPU bracket to protect the components. My review sample arrived without issues, but make sure to give your PC a through physical inspection before powering it on to see if anything was damaged in transit.

Heating and cooling

As we saw with the Omen 30L a few years ago, HP has a better grip on cooling than other mainstream brands. Even with it’s unassuming air cooler, the Omen 40L is cool and mostly quiet under a full load.

Two 120mm intake fans at the front of the PC feed the CPU cooler, providing it fresh, cool air. Large intakes at the front provide clear airflow into the PC, and a removable dust filter keeps the inside of your PC clean. Everything flows out of a 120mm exhaust fan at the back, though there are additional fan mounts at the top of the case for optional liquid cooling.

Temperatures were good in my testing. At idle, the Ryzen 7 7700 sat between 40 and 45 degrees Celsius, which is right where I’d expect a smaller air cooler to fall. Under a full Cinebench R24 load, the CPU peaked at 70 degrees Celsius, which leaves plenty of breathing room. The chip can operate up to 95 degrees before it starts throttling.

Noise is a different beast. For the most part, the Omen 40L is quiet — shockingly so, in fact. Then, suddenly, it isn’t. After the heat reaches a certain point, the fans ramp up to maximum speed and slowly drop back down as everything cools down.

HP has a very aggressive curve on the fans, so either you’ll hear the Omen 40L at full blast, or barely hear it at all. A more gradual curve would’ve been far better, and unfortunately, you can’t tweak the curve in the Omen Gaming Hub.

Bloatware and configuration

One of the downsides of going with a large PC brand like HP is bloatware, and the Omen 40L certainly isn’t above that problem. You get a slew of HP utilities — HP Smart, HP Support Assist, HP Hardware Diagnostics, ans on and on — along with the Omen Gaming Hub. You’ll probably never see the other HP utilities, as only the Omen Gaming Hub is pinned to the taskbar.

The Omen Gaming Hub isn’t great. It’s cluttered and stuffed with ads for other HP products and games. There are some configuration options, such as AMD’s Precision Boost Overdrive (PBO), but HP buries the options under many other irrelevant menus. I wouldn’t be surprised if you opened the Omen Gaming Hub once and cut it off before ever seeing the options available.

Some of those options are very relevant, too. Out of the box, HP doesn’t have the overclocking profile enabled on the memory, for example. You can turn this on in the Omen Gaming Hub, but it reallyshould be enabled out of the box when HP is advertising the overclocked speed on its product page.

The scourge of all prebuilts is antivirus software, and the Omen 40L is no different. It comes with McAfee preinstalled, and it was the first thing that popped up when I booted the PC. It’s even pinned to the taskbar, with constant annoyances to install McAfee’s browser extensions. This is typical of most mainstream gaming PCs, but it’s frustrating how in your face McAfee is while so many other critical tools are buried.

Out of the box, you’re not really set up to get critical updates like graphics drivers and access critical settings like your memory profile. None of this is hard to do if you