 I wasn't expecting a major innovation in case design this year, and I certainly wasn't expecting it from HP. But here it is, the Omen 45L, possibly the biggest game changer in case cooling since the Antec P180 introduced the concept of isolated cooling zones. HP has dabbled in custom cases in the past, but this scientifically cooled, metaphysically fire design, whatever that means, is their first that there's just no other way to put it. Looks absolutely freaking amazing. They even got a patent for what they call their cryo chamber cooling, a solution that, at least on paper, makes the Omen 45L one of the best cooled pre-builds on the market. So... What happened here? Our sponsor knows, but they won't let me tell you until I say, Thanks SmartDeploy for sponsoring today's video. With zero touch, zero headache PC management for IT, SmartDeploy lets you deploy Windows, apps, and drivers from the cloud, no VPN required. Get your free subscription worth over $600 at smartdeploy.com The Omen 45L boasts a top-of-the-line spec sheet, but none of that is what makes it unique. What's special is is all in the attic up here. The top contains a liquid cooling radiator and 120 millimeter cooling fans. Then there's this void with an angled airflow deflector that makes it a completely independent cooling zone. So cold air goes in, hot air comes out. Zero compromised cooling. Because the thing is, in a traditional case layout, you end up sacrificing cooling performance in some way, no matter how you slice it. Either you mount the radiator in the front where it's gonna preheat the air that ultimately gets sucked into your GPU, or you mount the radiator in the top giving fresh air to your GPU, which spits it out into your CPU cooler. The bad news is that HP's patent means that nobody else can do this. But the good news is that at least you can buy the case separately if you like what you see. So why don't we take a closer look? There's definitely some OEM PC flair. You got a nice tempered glass side panel, but then you've got these little weird unpainted bits here. I mean, it's not a huge deal. One really nice thing is check this out. Cable management grommets. Totally standard ATX mounting. This pass-through for the radiator tubes. That's kind of a little weird, but there's plenty of room in there. You could definitely put thicker ones in if you really wanted to. Hold on a second. There's a release. Oh, look at this. This is cool. Quick release front panel. Just got these little buttons right here. Easy to clean front filter. Is that magnetic? I think it's magnetic. Yep. All the RGB intake fans. More OEM PC weirdness. This bottom fan is screwed in from the front because the basement kind of limits access to it, and then the top fans are screwed in from the inside. Solid front I.O. on the case, though if you buy the pre-built, I'm not sure that it entirely makes up for the kind of flaccid rear I.O. on this particular motherboard. And in a shocker from HP, the cooling for the motherboard, and actually look at that, even the SSD for that matters. Pretty freaking awesome. Easy remove top panel. Hmm, that's a missed opportunity. Dual 240 mil rad instead of a 360. I'm gonna see if that hurts us later. Curiously, even though PC Gamer reports that you can buy the case standalone, maybe it's coming later because I don't see it on the 45L page or under Omen accessories on the US site. Coming back then to the pre-built, which you actually can buy then. HP claims that they've beefed up their motherboard VRM cooling and are using more off-the-shelf style parts this time around, which it seems that they are, and that's great in theory. We already saw that they're at least using standard form factor, motherboard, case, and power supply, which should make future upgrades relatively painless. But I just can't shake that feeling that something's rotten in the state of Denmark here, because here's the thing. HP has a long history of kneecapping high-end components to the point where it almost feels like they intentionally limit their product's performance. So we need to deal with that, but first we want to know if the cryo chamber is actually working as intended. So we rigged up our Omen 45L with four thermal probes. One at the intake, one at the exhaust for each of the two thermal chambers, so the bottom and the top here, and a final one measuring the ambient temperature in our room. We then loaded up the system in three different ways. First, we hit all 16 of our CPU cores with Prime95's small FFT, allowed our coolant temperatures to equalize in our radiator, and found that there was a whopping 12 degree difference between the temperature, the air at our workbench, and the radiator exhaust. So in real-world terms, that means that if you were pulling hot radiator air into your gaming rig, it could easily drive up your GPU temps by 10 degrees or more. But what if we went the other way around, feeding fresh air to the GPU first, and then hoping that it can still cool our CPU afterward? Yikes! Running Furmark, we measured a 20 degree difference between our front air intake and our rear exhaust. Now, this is a bit of a worst-case scenario for that, since most cases would feed at least some non-preheated air, you know, maybe from the top here into the radiator, and there's only a single 120 millimeter exhaust. But both of these scenarios demonstrate how you could easily end up cooling one of your components optimally at the cost of thermal throttling the other. As for the crowd chamber, does it work? Yes! Our final test, a combined CPU and GPU load showed us that while the corner of my office, where we were running the tests, did heat up by a couple of degrees, the way that HP routes the CPU heated air off to the side, and then the GPU heated air out the back, means that the entire system is getting ample access to fresh air. It's freaking fantastic! Go buy one now! Uh, not so fast. Our performance woes with HP desktops have never actually been caused by poor thermals. So we need to know, is it fast, or is it just fast for an HP? To find out, we gathered up a test bench with the same specs using off-the-shelf gaming parts, nuked HP's pre-installed software bloat, because that's the first thing you should do when you buy an HP anyway, and took our rigs to the drag strip. And, well this is a good omen. Get it? Out of the gate, the 45L measurably outperformed our control bench in both F1 2021 and Flight Simulator 2020. CSGO is a little less clear cut with our control bench managing better averages, but given that the omen posted better 99% minimum frame times, I'm inclined to call this one a draw. Unfortunately, the same can't be said of Cinebench R23. What the heck is going on here? How is it that you can come out ahead in gaming, and then with exactly the same specs, fall behind by nearly 5% in rendering? Like this. It looks like whatever fuss HP has made about their beefed up VRMs and keeping mother cool, whatever that means, the Omen 45L's poor 12900K is so power limited under sustained load that even manually overclocking the cores to 5.2 GHz results in basically exactly the same score. It's a solid 32 watts below Intel's rated turbo power for this chip. Well, that's a simple fix you might think. Fire up the UEFI BIOS, set all of Intel's various boosts to their maximum and call it a day, right? Wrong. I have seen thin and light notebooks that have more available tuning parameters than this thing. But I'm a gamer, not a professional 3D modeler, you might think. Who cares as long as its gaming performance is good? You do, and here's why. As I was puzzling about the performance advantage over our reference system, I came across something odd. HP went out of their way to equip this machine with XMP capable HyperX 3733 megatransfer per second CL21 memory. But they are running it at both lower speeds and higher latencies than it is rated at with absolutely no way to activate the XMP profile and run it at its full potential. The Sam's Honest Hill is going on here, HP. Now we've got another question to answer. Is our control system getting beat fair and square, or is it only getting beat because we're forcing it to play in the same weak sandbox as the Omen 45L? What if we did what any sensible enthusiast who just spent over a thousand dollars on a GPU would do and spend another 20 bucks on our RAM? Holy bananas. It's a bloodbath, folks. Curiously, our Cinebench scores did go down a little bit, but in gaming we have unlocked so much more performance that our control is beating the Omen 45L by anywhere from a couple of percent to nearly 15% in Flight Sim 2020. So yeah, while our initial numbers have HP as the big winner, it turns out that's only because they stacked the deck in their favor. The silver lining, though, is that all of this is fixable, either by HP seeing the light and fixing their power delivery limitations. Please, HP, I'm rooting for you here because otherwise I really like this thing. Or by just obtaining the case somehow and building your own. While you're at it, I've got a couple of suggested tweaks. Spend the extra 10 bucks and get a triple rather than a dual 120 millimeter radiator for the top. Upgrade that 850 watt power supply to a thousand watt, just to be sure. And maybe go for a full sized ATX motherboard. Oh, and leave out the McAfee and Dropbox installs while you're at it. You will end up with the same great Omen 45L design, just with less HPness choding it up. I need a sponsor to cleanse my palate. Thanks to FreshBooks for sponsoring today's video. FreshBooks is easy to use accounting software that helps you do your business. You can impress your clients with professional looking invoices that detail the work you've done, use automated payment reminders if invoices get past due, easily track expenses and use their time tracker to log every minute of billable hours so you don't have to think about it later, and keep everyone on the same page with their projects feature, which makes it easy for clients, your team and your contractors to collaborate, share files and comment. Choose a plan that's right for you and start your free trial of FreshBooks for 30 days today. No credit card required at freshbooks.com slash Linus. Thanks for watching guys. You know what? Since you're done now, why don't you go and watch our second secret shopper series where HP pulled this exact same move and ended up with lower performance than the competition as a result. Oh, I guess that's kind of a spoiler, except not really because you already know that they would do this to their highest end gaming rig.