We here at PCGamesN do like to shout about our gaming PCs, a lot, and we’d love for you to be able to do the same. That’s why today we’re taking a look at the forthrightly named Omen Desktop PC, another gaming delight currently discounted over in the HP Store’s Back to School sale.
Within the unconventional tower of the Omen Desktop PC lies some of the finest silicon money can buy. That includes an Intel Core i7 8700, a six-core, 12-thread CPU capable of making easy work of any game you throw at it, and you’ll find it’s pretty darn great at content creation tasks as well. There’s also potential to upgrade this chip to another of your choosing, but, unless you plan on overclocking your rig, the default option should tide you over nicely.
Honoured with the vital task of shifting millions of pixels around your screen is an Nvidia GTX 1660 Ti. This mainstream champion may not feature any of the AI or ray tracing smarts that its bigger siblings, the RTX 20-series, proudly brandish, but it’s more than fast enough for high-fidelity gaming at 1080p. It’s not afraid of pushing the resolution a little further, either.
Other specs include 8GB of HyperX DDR4 rated to 2,666MHz, 1TB of HDD storage, and a 500W PSU. These will keep things ticking over for the time being, although one of the wonderful things about PC gaming is you can mix-and-match components however you like. It’s easy, almost like adult lego.
We’d recommend bumping the RAM up to 16GB first of all, and if you can afford an extra $75 to do so off the bat then go for it. You’ll also receive 10% off the added cost when it comes to checkout, too. That 8GB will get you by in most games, but any multitasking or particularly massive titles love a little more room to manoeuvre.
Similarly, whenever you’ve got the funds to hand, be that today or two years down the line, we recommend fitting your PC with a solid state drives to supercharge responsiveness and reduce load times. SSDs are dropping in price fast, and setting one up as your boot drive is simple and effective.
That’s the beauty of buying a pre-built if you’re not completely comfortable building your own rig from scratch. Most of the changes that you’ll potentially want to make one day to your rig are far from intricate operations, usually it’s simply plugging in a couple cables, or slotting a single DIMM of RAM into your motherboard, and calling it a day.
If that sounds agreeable to you then go check out the Omen Desktop PC in the HP Back to School sale. The model described above will set you back $1,045 with the coupon code BTSSTACK5 applied at checkout.
And if not, there’s plenty more to choose from in our roundup of best picks from the sale in our HP Back to School deals guide, or head to the HP Store directly to browse all the top deals for yourself.
