HP OmniDesk Ultra 5-225

The OmniDesk Ultra 5-225 scores great on ports and business grunt, but the integrated GPU and modest storage drag it down. If you spot it for $690, it's a decent office box—anything above $800 and you're being taken for a ride.

HP's OmniDesk Ultra 5-225 is a small-form-factor desktop aimed squarely at the desk jockey, not the gamer. Inside that tidy chassis you get a 10-core Intel Core Ultra 5 225, 16GB of DDR5, and integrated graphics, all wrapped in a quiet, port-stuffed package. It ships with Windows 11 Home and a no-frills USB keyboard and mouse.

We tested it as a workhorse for business and home office, and in our database it earned an 83.9 for business tasks—plenty snappy for spreadsheets, email, and photo editing. But the minute you ask it to game or push heavy graphics, the system falls flat with a gaming score of 16.1. It's a one-trick pony, and that trick is getting through the workday.

The Core Ultra 5 225 hums along at 2.7GHz base and boosts to 4.9GHz, making multitasking and photo edits feel responsive. In our benchmarks, it landed in the top third for CPU muscle, which translates to smooth Office 365 sessions and fast file compression. The integrated Intel graphics, however, sit in the bottom half of the database—fine for YouTube but a slug with any modern game or GPU-accelerated rendering. Boot and load times are quick thanks to the NVMe SSD, though the 512GB capacity is meager for a machine in 2025, especially when you start piling up project files and media. Day-to-day office work? Solid. Anything creative beyond a Lightroom preset? Not so much.

This is where it gets weird. The OmniDesk Ultra 5-225 shows up across retailers with a price spread from $690 all the way to an absurd $171,509. Clearly some resellers are inflating the sticker, while others are selling it at a reasonable cost. At $690, it's a fair deal for a capable SFF office PC. Pay a penny over $800 and you're overpaying for the spec. If you're shopping, hunt down the lowest-price listing and ignore the rest—those high figures aren't based on reality.

Stacked against rivals, the OmniDesk is a straight office tool with no gaming pretense. The Lenovo Legion Tower 5i Gen 10 and ASUS ROG G700 both pack dedicated GPUs and utterly destroy it in any graphical workload, while the MSI Aegis RS2 AI offers a similar AI angle but with more CPU oomph. The Apple Mac mini M4 remains the compact powerhouse to beat, offering far stronger integrated performance, deeper software integration, and none of the Windows bloat. If you're locked into Windows and need a simple, well-connected SFF for work, the OmniDesk is fine—but the Dell XPS EBT2250 is likely a cleaner, less bloaty alternative in the same price bracket.

Skip this machine if you ever plan to game, edit video, or run GPU-heavy software—its integrated graphics will choke. Also look past it if you hate bloatware with a passion; the out-of-box experience is a chore, and a Mac mini M4 or a Dell XPS with a cleaner Windows image will save you the headache.

Buy the OmniDesk Ultra 5-225 if your world is spreadsheets, web apps, and maybe a bit of photo retouching, and you really hate dongles. It's a reliable, well-connected office PC that will serve a small business or home office desk without drama, provided you spend 30 minutes cleaning off the bloatware. Anyone looking to game or stream creatively should look elsewhere, and anyone staring at a price above $800 should run.