Let’s face it; there are plenty of options out there for gamers. From laptops to desktops to consoles, there’s something for everyone. Speaking of options, HP just sent us a complete OMEN gaming setup featuring their latest gaming gear to test out for the next few weeks. I’ve only had it for a couple of days, but there’s already so much to love about it. I’ll have individual reviews coming over the next few weeks, but in the interim, I thought it was worthy of a short post as well.
So what did HP send over? Pretty much everything but the kitchen sink:
- OMEN 30L Gaming Desktop
- OMEN 27i Gaming Monitor
- OMEN Sequencer Gaming Keyboard
- OMEN Photon Wireless Gaming Mouse
- OMEN Outpost Wired Gaming Mousepad
- OMEN Mindframe Prime Gaming Headset
Depending on your budget, oftentimes, you’ll be piecemealing your gaming setup together. A desktop here, monitor there, peripherals as you can afford them. Sometimes you have to make concessions, and while your gaming setup works well enough, it may end up a bit mismatched. I don’t know about you, but sometimes I can be OCD about things, especially how they look together.
I’ll admit, I’ve never had a “matching” gaming setup, much less one where every component had RGB lighting. After setting everything up and turning everything on, there’s a definite wow factor to a nice clean, cohesive setup with matching lights. The OMEN 30L gaming desktop is easily the centerpiece with its tempered glass side panel and tempered glass front. Yes, it has a tempered glass front that looks outstanding with the RGB OMEN diamond and front LED fan ring.
Looks aside, the system is a beast. Of course, our review unit is pretty maxed out. In a nutshell, it’s running an Intel Core i9-10900K processor, NVIDIA RTX3080 graphics card, 32GB RAM of HyperX Fury RAM, and has a 1TB SSD with a secondary 2TB HDD drive. As you can imagine, it’s chewed up and spit out every game I’ve run through it so far, but you’ll have to wait for the full review to find out more.
What I like most about the setup is the cohesiveness of all the parts together. HP has obviously put a lot of thought into the setup, not just the tower and monitor but also each peripheral. Everything just… goes together. Both the OMEN Sequencer gaming keyboard and OMEN Outpost gaming mousepad have a USB-A port in them as well. While the keyboard takes up two USB-A ports on the tower (no big deal as there are six on the back), the mousepad only takes up a single USB Type-C port (also on the back of the tower). The great part about that is you can then plug your headset into your keyboard of greater flexibility and the wireless OMEN Photon gaming mouse into the mousepad. Oh, did I mention there’s a Qi wireless charging spot on the mousepad for the mouse? As I said, a lot of thought has gone into the system’s cohesiveness from top to bottom. The mouse mat even features a flippable mouse pad: softer on one side and hard on the other to suit your preference. Each feature might seem small and relatively insignificant by itself but when you bring the ecosystem together, many of the features enhance the total experience.
The RGB lighting really brings it all together. The tower has three adjustable lighting zones, plus the HyperX Fury memory sticks. The mouse, mouse pad, and monitor have two zones each, while the keyboard has per-key RGB lighting. The sky really is the limit with the colours and animations you can apply to each item. Shortly, there will be an update to the OMEN Command Center software that will allow you to sync the lighting, including animations, across all your HP OMEN devices as they appear in place on your desktop.
All said and done, the HP OMEN gaming setup sent over retails for around US$4000, so it’s not cheap. But it’s powerful, coordinated, works well together, and looks damn sexy while playing your favourite PC game. Granted other companies offer the entire line of desktop, monitors, and peripherals as well — this isn’t something unique to HP. We just haven’t had the opportunity to test out a complete setup before.
Be sure to check back as I’ll update this with links to the reviews as I finish them!
What do you think about the HP OMEN gaming line-up? Let us know in the comments below or on Twitter, Facebook, or MeWe.
Last Updated on February 3, 2021.
