The HP Omen 35L for 2026 may be gaming-focused, but it delivers for creatives too

The last time Creative Bloq reviewed an HP Omen 35L, it came in white and had an Intel processor. Not only is this year’s machine black, but there's an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D chip purring away inside, but it’s still the same liquid-cooled, reasonably compact tower gaming PC on the outside.

AMD’s X3D processors add extra cache memory underneath the compute die (older revisions stacked it on top) which cuts down on memory latency by allowing the CPU to store more information locally instead of having to reach out to the system RAM. This has benefits for gaming, but also boosts repetitive operations in photo editing and compilation speeds when coding. The 9800X3D is one of AMD’s best chips from its current generation, so let’s see how it stacks up.

Key specifications

Design, build and display

• Well ventilated case
• Liquid cooling

The new black case is slightly different to last year’s white one. The two case fans at the front are now visible as they spin, their colour-changing lights shifting through the rainbow if you don’t fire up HP’s software to turn them off. It’s a nicely put together case, with a window at the side so you can see the CPU cooling pump, RAM sticks, and further case fans light up as well. The biggest thing inside the case is the GPU, which only uses white lights and sits inside a support housing. The cable routing is neat, with shields used to cover the sections where plugs enter the motherboard - a strangely prudish decision.

This isn’t a particularly high tower case, and is ideal for keeping on the floor beneath your desk. Do this, and the top-mounted power switch and USB ports come easily into reach - two Type-As and a Type-C are ready for flash drive and other peripherals, while a 3.5mm headphone socket means you won’t need to reach around the back of the casing every time you want to plug in.

Design score: 4/5

Features

• USB 3.2 at best
• One spare SSD slot

While the Omen 35L has enough connectivity to get by, there's nothing faster than 10Gbps here. Where most desktop motherboards sport two USB2 ports for a mouse and keyboard, this one has four, and while there are both Type-A and Type-C USB 3.2 ports on the backplate, there's also a lot of smooth plastic where you’d expect some more to be. One of the USBs is an always-on charging port, but there's no hint as to which one it is. At least you get a decent network connection, with Wi-Fi 7 and a 2.5Gb Ethernet port.

Inside, the CPU is liquid-cooled, with a 240mm radiator and two fans exhausting out of the top of the case. This keeps it nice and quiet, with a noticeable change in the fan noise when it starts working hard, but nothing particularly offensive. It does mean that, if you’re in the habit of stacking books, papers or a cat on top of your PC, you’d better change your ways unless you want thermal throttling or even shutdowns.

And while the AM5 platform should be good for Zen 6 and even 7 processors if you fancy dropping in a CPU upgrade in a few years, there are only two RAM slots, meaning you’ll have to purchase a complete upgrade kit if you want to boost it up to 64GB of memory (or the system max of 128GB) rather than getting 32GB more (hopefully once RAM prices have settled down a bit). At 6,000MT/s, however, the two 16GB sticks currently filling the slots are in the sweet spot for the 9800X3D, so they’re not adding extra latency, and using four memory slots can make the motherboard’s memory controller to drop to a lower speed, so it’s actually a sensible choice. There's a spare M.2 slot too, if you want to drop in an extra SSD, though you’ll have to remove the graphics card to do it. Finally, there's an unpopulated PCIe slot at the bottom of the motherboard, but it’s so close to the GPU shroud that it’s basically useless, with no space for a card to sit in it.

Feature score: 3/5

Benchmark scores

We test every one of our laptops using the same benchmarking software suite to give you a thorough overview of its suitability for creatives of all disciplines and levels. This includes:

• Geekbench: Tests the CPU for single-core and multi-core power, and the GPU for the system's potential for gaming, image processing, or video editing. Geekbench AI tests the CPU and GPU on a variety of AI-powered and AI-boosted tasks.
• Cinebench: Tests the CPU and GPU's ability to run Cinema 4D and Redshift.
• UL Procyon: Uses UL Solutions' Procyon software suite to test the system's ability for AI image generation in Stable Diffusion, its Microsoft Office performance and its battery life in a looping video test.
• Topaz Video AI: We use Topaz Video AI to test the system's ability to upscale video and convert video to slow-motion.
• PugetBench for Creators: We use the PugetBench for Creators benchmarking suite to test the system's ability to run several key tasks in Photoshop and Adobe Premiere Pro, as well as its performance when encoding/transcoding video.
• ON1 Resize AI: Tests the system's ability to resize 5 photos to 200% in a batch process. We take the total time taken to resize the images and divide by 5.

Performance

• Easily beats laptops in benchmarks
• Excellent for video work

So does the X3D cache memory make a difference for creative applications? It’s hard to tell without testing the Ryzen 7 9700X - essentially the same eight-core chip without the extra cache - alongside the 35L. Luckily, there are loads of Blender benchmarks that we can compare it to, and in Junkshop the 9700X scores 87, while the 35L’s 9800X3D manages 101. There's a similar pattern in Cinebench 2024, where the 9700X’s score of 1,119 in multi-core mode is bettered by the 9800X3D’s 1,283. These are not enormous differences, being in the region of 14%, but it’s clear the X3D chip is doing slightly more work. In the UK, and at the time of writing, the 9700X is 26% cheaper than the 9800X3D if you buy it as a standalone part, so the cost/benefit equation is going to depend on how much CPU rendering and/or gaming you’re going to be doing.

But this is a pre-built PC from a major manufacturer, and so there are many other parts that can affect its performance. Chief among these is the GPU, which comes with 16GB of GDDR7 and makes up almost a third of the overall cost of the system. It’s a superb card for 1440p or 4K gaming, and does well in creative apps too, with Topaz Video AI producing the highest score we’ve ever seen, beating even the RTX 5090 Laptop GPU in the Razer Blade 18 (despite having the same names, laptop versions of Nvidia cards are less powerful).

It doesn’t quite beat the Blade 18 in Cinebench 2026, coming in 3.5% behind in the GPU rendering test, which is still impressive considering that the laptop is almost twice the price. It also thumps the M5 Max version of the Mac Studio in Geekbench 6’s GPU workout - the only one that runs on both systems - by a whopping 49%, and that laptop costs even more than the Blade.

That’s the price of having a portable PC with this kind of power, and while you’re not going to be using the Omen 35L on the train - there's no space to move a mouse around in, for one thing - a desktop PC like this can be a better choice for a budget-savvy studio if you add a reasonably priced monitor.

Performance score: 4/5

Price

At £2599.99 or $3,199.99 the 35L as specced here is still quite a lot of money, and you have to factor in the cost of a monitor, mouse, keyboard, headset, flight stick, VR headset and sim-racing setup on top, but the 35L is probably a better buy than a Blade 18 or an M5 Max MacBook Pro if you’re not going to be taking it anywhere.

Value score: 3/5

Who is it for?

• Pixel junkies

While it might not be the most powerful desktop PC ever made, the HP Omen 35L is certainly extremely capable, and will appeal to renderers, gamers, video editors and anyone who wants a lot of PC without needing it to be portable.

Buy it if...

• You don’t want a laptop
• You don’t mind shelling out for a monitor
• You have the space

Don't buy it if...

• You’d rather have an all-in-one system
• Thunderbolt is a necessity
• As is portability

Also consider