HP Pavilion Elite e9120f
HP takes the word “elite” seriously with even the lower range of its Pavilion Elite desktop line. Though priced well under $1,000, the HP Pavilion Elite e9120f ($819.99 list) is a well-equipped multimedia machine, albeit not a gamer’s delight. As with its Elite sibling, the HP Pavilion Elite e9160f ($999.99 at Staples), you’ll have to budget separately for a monitor and speakers.
Design
The e9120f shares the same glossy black minitower case with the e9160f, with a top-mounted power button and four-slot, 15-format flash-card reader, Pocket Media Drive and Personal Media Drive bays for HP’s house-brand USB hard drives, and an HP Easy Backup button that helps steer users through the job of backing up to removable media.
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With only one PCI Express x16 slot (no hope for an Nvidia SLI or ATI CrossFire multi-card setup) and only a 300-watt power supply, the e9120f can’t be upgraded into a fire-breathing gaming rig, nor is it intended to be. Indeed, under-the-hood expansion is pretty much limited to a vacant internal hard drive bay—as if the standard 1TB, 5,400-rpm Western Digital Caviar Green hard drive wasn’t ample enough for most users—and a pair of vacant PCI Express x1 slots (an Atheros 802.11a/b/g/draft-n Wi-Fi card occupies a third). Happily, despite the presence of several sizable cooling fans, the Pavilion is almost silent in operation.
Features
Camcorder owners will be pleased to find that the e9120f has the FireWire port that was missing from the e9160f—actually two, one front and one rear, along with three front and four rear USB ports and front-mounted microphone and headphone jacks. The back panel also provides Ethernet, S/PDIF digital audio, and six analog audio ports, plus a trifecta of video ports—VGA, DVI, and HDMI—on the graphics card. Both the mouse and keyboard are USB-based, as there are no PS/2 ports provided. External storage shoppers will have to stick with USB rather than eSATA.
Both the front bay labeled “Multimedia Optical Drive” and the one labeled “Expansion Bay” contain multimedia optical drives—a BD-ROM and DVD+/-RW drive, respectively, so you can enjoy both Blu-ray and conventional DVD movies and burn CDs and DVDs (with LightScribe label etching on compatible media), though you can’t record your own Blu-ray discs.
If you choose to snub Windows Media Center, HP provides its own MediaSmart suite of DVD, music, photo, and video perusing and playback software—simple but handsome applications for enjoying your multimedia collections. Other preinstalled software ranges from the predictable (the 60-day trial versions of Norton Internet Security 2009 and Microsoft Office Home & Student 2007) to the paltry (HP’s Snapfish calendar/coffee mug/tchotchke photo-printing service; NetZero and Juno dial-up access).
Performance
While the e9160f has an Intel Core 2 Quad CPU and Nvidia graphics card, the e9120f features an AMD Phenom II X4 910—a 2.6GHz quad-core processor with 512K of Level 2 cache per core and 6MB of Level 3 cache shared among the four—and an ATI Radeon HD 4350 graphics card. A full 8GB of DDR3 memory gives the 64-bit version of Windows Vista Home Premium room to maneuver.
The processor performs admirably, helping the less expensive Elite edge its costlier sibling’s PCMark Vantage and Cinebench R10 benchmark scores, though it can’t compete with the potent Core i7 CPU in our Editors’ Choice Dell Studio XPS 435. But the 512MB Radeon card is no match for the 1.5GB Nvidia GeForce GT230 card in the Elite e9160f: The system’s 3DMark Vantage score trailed by 13,056 to 5,116, and it fell short of playability even with modest resolution and detail settings in our Crysis and World in Conflict game tests.
Though it falls south of the line between a good image- and video-editing and a good gaming system, the Pavilion Elite e9120f is a solid value for both working and relaxing with Blu-ray and other multimedia content.
Dell Inspiron 545
Product summary
The good: Large 1TB hard drive; HDMI video output; strong online technical support.
The bad: Outperformed by a Gateway that costs $200 less, and an Asus that costs only $30 more; overly spare connectivity.
The bottom line: Dell seems to have missed a beat in this year’s round of back-to-school retail desktops, and the Inspiron 545 is no exception. Its competition has too much to offer in the way of performance and features, leaving Dell with little but its established online support resources to give it an advantage.
Specifications: Processor: Intel Core 2 Quad Q8200 (2.33 GHz) ; RAM installed: 8 GB DDR II SDRAM ; Hard drive: 1 TB Standard ; See full specs at the end..
Price range: $719.99 check prices
- Reviewed on: 07/29/2009
- Released on: 06/28/2009
Editors’ note: This review is part of our 2009 Retail Laptop and Desktop Back-to-School roundup, covering specific fixed configurations of popular systems that can be found in retail stores.
The Dell Inspiron 545 straddles the line between budget and midrange PC because of its $720 price and a few above-baseline features. The problem is that we can find several desktops both more and less expensive that make this Dell look overpriced. We don’t want to pile on, but this system is the third Dell back-to-school retail desktop that has failed to impress us. We’ve certainly liked Dell’s retail offerings in the past, so we know it’s at least capable of competing on the shelf. Whether it’s the sour economy, a misreading of its competition, or a combination of factors coming through in these PC’s we’re not sure, but we’re surprised to find that we can’t recommend any of Dell’s sub-$1,000 retail desktops for the back-to-school season.
On the outside, the Inspiron 545 has no obvious issues. Its glossy black plastic front has the same unobtrusive appeal as other recent midtower desktops. You get no top side accessories like a CD tray or a rubberized surface for placing handheld devices, but we can always take or leave those features. A media card reader is hidden behind a front panel door, making the face of the system completely innocuous.
| Dell Inspiron 545 | Asus Essentio CM5570-AP006 | |
| Price | $720 | $630 |
| CPU | 2.3GHz Intel Core 2 Quad Q8200 | 2.3GHz Intel Core 2 Quad Q8200 |
| Memory | 8GB 800MHz DDR2 SDRAM | 6GB 800MHz DDR2 SDRAM |
| Graphics | 256MB ATI Radeon HD 3450 | 512MB Nvidia GeForce G100 |
| Hard drives | 1TB 7,200rpm | 750GB 7,200rpm |
| Networking | Gigabit Ethernet | Gigabit Ethernet; 802.11b/g/n wireless |
| Optical drive | dual-layer DVD burner | dual-layer DVD burner |
| Operating system | Windows Vista Home Premium SP1 (64-bit) | Windows Vista Home Premium SP1 (64-bit) |
As we mentioned, the Inspiron 545 has a value problem. We could pick one of several different PCs to compare directly with this Dell. The Asus Essentio CM5570-AP006 makes a good fit because the Dell’s only major advantage is its service and its 1TB hard drive, which gives it a 250GB storage edge. The Asus has wireless networking, though, and while not a crucial feature in a midtower, it can still be useful for those who want to minimize cable clutter. The Dell has more RAM than the Asus, but as you’ll see on our benchmarks, the extra memory doesn’t do much to set the Inspiron 545 apart on performance.
Before we delve into performance, a few other PCs bear mentioning next to this Dell as well. If we look even further into the selection of retail budget desktops the Gateway SX2800-01 fares very well next to the Inspiron 545. That $510 Gateway outperforms the Dell on every benchmark, and while it lacks a discrete graphics card and has only a 640GB hard drive, there’s very little this Dell can do that the Gateway system can’t. Similarly, if you spend just $30 more, the Asus Essentio CG5270-BP003 will come through with consistently better application performance and a 3D card that, unlike the Radeon HD 3450 in the Dell, offers noticeably better graphics performance, turning in 67 frames per second on our lower resolution Unreal Tournament 3 test, where the Dell managed just 15fps.
(Shorter bars indicate better performance)
(Shorter bars indicate better performance)
(Shorter bars indicate better performance)
(Longer bars indicate better performance)
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Rendering multi-CPU |
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Rendering single CPU |
On most of our application tests, the Dell isn’t wildly out of whack for its configuration, and stays in the same relative ballpark as the Asus CM5570 and the Gateway that share the same Core 2 Quad Q8200 CPU. But even if we don’t count our iTunes test, which confounds the Dell for some reason, we’d still like to see the Dell outperform its less expensive competition. The Dell’s extra RAM and its video card will likely provide a better experience editing video than on the Gateway, but we don’t imagine most of the likely buyers of these PCs have video editing in mind. And for the tasks they probably will perform, such as consumer-level photo editing, media file conversions, Web browsing, and light duty multitasking, the Dell doesn’t provide a significant advantage for its higher price.
We do give Dell credit for selecting a card with multiple video outputs, including HDMI out. That will let you connect this system to a television, or, more likely, a modern LCD that comes HDMI-equipped. We wish Dell had had such foresight with the rest of this PC’s outputs. The back panel gives you analog audio output, four USB 2.0 ports, an Ethernet jack, and a modem. eSATA, digital audio, and even FireWire are completely absent. Even a year ago we might not have expected those features in a desktop in this price range, but Gateway and other vendors have offered them in systems from $500 on up for the last nine months. The HDMI output on the video card was a smart choice, but the rest of the platform badly needs updating to stay competitive.
Inside the Inspiron 545, Dell offers a reasonable amount of upgrade room. You get two PCI slots (one taken by the modem), a PCI Express graphics card slot, and a 1X PCI Express slot. The 30- watt power supply will limit you to midrange 3D cards and lower, but you could still turn this into a respectable budget gaming PC if you had the inclination. Even after a faster 3D card, you would still have room for a TV tuner, a wireless networking card, or other expansion upgrades. All four memory slots are occupied, but the 8GB of RAM should last you for a while. You can also add a second hard drive if you like, and Dell’s panel-mounted hard drive bays make installation no more complicated than sliding a drive up against the free slot, connecting the power and data cables, and screwing the four screws into the bottom of the drive to attach it to the panel.
 Juice box |
|||
| Dell Inspiron 545 | Average watts per hour | ||
| Off | 1.3 | ||
| Sleep | 2.26 | ||
| Idle | 64.39 | ||
| Load | 103.64 | ||
| Raw (annual kWh) | 250.06734 | ||
| Energy Star compliant | Yes | ||
| Annual energy cost | $28.38 | ||
You can see a noticeable difference between the energy consumption cost of the Inspiron 545 and both the Gateway and the Inspiron 545s. We suspect that’s mostly because the Inspiron 545 has a discrete 3D card. The other systems have only an integrated chip. We don’t have enough data to say whether a $7 or $8 jump is disproportionate once you factor in a graphics card, but we can at least say that the Inspiron 545 remains within the power consumption threshold that Energy Star deems reasonable for a system with these specs.
Dell’s service and support is perhaps the one aspect of this system that Asus can’t compete with. Dell has a much more comprehensive array of services online, including system- and configuration-specific information via Dell’s code-based registration process. Asus online offerings are basically nonexistent next to those from Dell. You also get the obligatory yearlong parts and labor warranty with the Inspiron 545, as well as 24-7 toll-free phone support.
Find out more about how we test desktop systems.
System configurations:
Asus Essentio CM5570-AP006
Windows Vista Home Premium SP1 (64-bit); 2.3GHz Intel Core 2 Quad Q8200; 6GB 800MHz DDR2 SDRAM; 512MB Nvidia GeForce G100; 750GB 7,200rpm Seagate hard drive.
Dell Inspiron 545-006B
Windows Vista Home Premium SP1 (64-bit); 2.3GHz Intel Core 2 Quad Q8200; 8GB 800MHz DDR2 SDRAM; 256MB ATI Radeon HD 3450 graphics card; 1TB Seagate 7,200rpm hard drive.
Dell Inspiron 545s-004B
Windows Vista Home Premium SP1 (64-bit); 2.8GHz Intel Core 2 Duo E7400; 6GB 800MHz DDR2 SDRAM; 128MB (shared) Intel GMA X3100 integrated graphics chip; 750GB 7,200rpm Seagate hard drive.
Gateway SX2800-01
Windows Vista Home Premium SP1 (64-bit); 2.3GHz Intel Core 2 Quad Q8200; 4GB 800MHz DDR2 SDRAM; 32MB (shared) Intel GMA X4500 integrated graphics chip; 640GB 7,200rpm Hitachi hard drive. Asus Essentio CG5270-BP003
Windows Vista Home Premium SP1 (64-bit); 2.5GHz Intel Core 2 Quad Q8300; 8GB 800MHz DDR2 SDRAM; 1GB Nvidia GeForce GT 220 graphics card; 750GB 7,200 rpm Seagate hard drive.
- Manufacturer: Dell, Inc.
- Part Number:I545-006B
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General
- Built-in Devices Keyboard , LED panel
- Width 6.9 in
- Depth 17.4 in
- Height 14.8 in
- Weight 17.4 lbs
Processor
- Type Intel Core 2 Quad Q8200 / 2.33 GHz
Cache Memory
- Type L2 cache
- Installed Size 4 MB
Mainboard
- Data bus speed 1333 MHz
RAM
- Installed Size 8 GB
- Technology DDR II SDRAM
Storage
- Hard Drive 1 TB – Standard – Serial ATA
Optical Storage
- Type DVD+/-RW / CD-RW
Storage Removable
- Type None
Graphics Controller
- Graphics Processor / Vendor ATI Mobility RADEON HD 3450
- Installed Size 256 MB
Audio Output
- Type Sound card – Integrated
- Sound card name Realtek ALC888
- Speaker(s) Dell AX210
Telecom
- Modem Fax / modem
- Max transfer rate 56 Kbps
Networking
- Networking Network adapter
Expansion / Connectivity
- Expansion Bays Total (Free) 1 ( 1 ) x External – 3.5 in , Internal – 5.25 in , 3.5 in
- Expansion Slots Total (Free) Memory , Memory card reader , PCI , PCI Express x1 , PCI Express x16
- Interfaces 6 x USB 2.0 – USB 2.0 , Modem – RJ-11 , Ethernet – RJ-45
Operating System / Software
- OS Provided Microsoft Windows Vista , Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium SP1
- Software Drivers & Utilities , Microsoft Works , Roxio Creator 10 Dell
Sustainability
- Greenpeace policy rating (Jul 2009) 3.9
- Greenpeace policy rating explained The Greenpeace Guide to Greener Electronics (greenpeace.org/electronics) ranks leading mobile and PC manufacturers on a scale from 1 to 10, with 10 being the best. The scoring is based on the companies’ global policies; on their practice of eliminating harmful chemicals; and on how they take responsibility for their products once discarded by consumers.
Where to buy
Dell Inspiron 545: $719.99
| store | price | in stock? | rating |
|---|---|---|---|
 |
$719.99 | Yes |  |
MSI Wind Top AE1900 review
MSI’s Wind Top sports a 16:9 touchscreen, making ideal for watching movies and stroking your favourite star…
The mighty Atom. Having conquered the very same netbook market that it helped to create, we’re now finding the processor seeping into other computers – non-portable ones.
And, as demonstrated above, it’s even got the processor oomph to power an all-in-one touchscreen device, such as MSI’s latest Wind Top AE1900.
MSI has always been slightly ahead of the game as well, whether that’s with its neat little Atom-based Wind netbooks, or the introduction of its rather lovely motherboards.
MSI’s latest, the Wind Top AE1900, has the dual-core iteration of the sprightly little fella at its core, and it’s by far the sleekest all-in-one PC we’ve looked at so far.
The display is vital in any touchscreen computer, and the Wind Top AE1900 is exceptional in this respect. The first thing you notice is how wide it is, discarding the conventional 16:10 format in favour of more cinematic 16:9 ratio. This makes it ideal for watching films, and something of a workout to merely drag the cursor from one side of the screen to the other.
The display’s performance is stunning, with good colours and a sharp, bright picture. The 720p video we tested on it stalled a tad when played with VLC, but using the Combined Community Codec Pack (CCCP) ensured slick, smooth playback.
It’s a shame that Atom-based systems are pretty much incapable of gaming, as this would be a wonderful system for blowing up badduns. We’d love to see a similar system based around Nvidia’s Ion, which would give it that little bit more power for gaming and hi-def video playback.
The Wind Top does include a few touchscreen-specific apps on top of its Windows XP Home installation. There are also a couple of genuinely odd webcam-based games, such as MSI Space Game and MSI Chicken Game, in which you use your head movements to control a spaceship and, um, a chicken. Project Natal it ain’t, but it’s still quite good fun.
A genuinely useful app is SoftStylus, which does away with the need for a physical keyboard in favour of an onscreen iPhone-esque one. But unfortunately the handwriting recognition option leaves a lot to be desired.
MSI has also missed a couple of tricks, in that there’s a glaring lack of wall-mounting fixtures and it’s failed to chuck a remote into the bundle.
It’s not exactly cheap, but the Wind Top is an eye-catching, head-turning PC, and if you install Windows 7 you’ll have quite possibly the best PC in the world. Unless you want to play games.
Acer AspireRevo review
Take one netbook CPU, sprinkle on a little Nvidia magic and then sit back and relax…
Amid the excitement and hype surrounding Nvidia’s Ion, it’s easy to lose sight of what’s actually on offer from the green team’s latest silicon. Is it a processor, a system-on-a-chip, or something entirely new and uncategorised?
Nope, nothing so far fetched: it’s just an integrated graphics chipset. Admittedly it’s quite a clever chipset and one that fills in some of the Atom’s shortfalls to produce a brilliantly focused platform, but it’s just a chipset all the same.
This is a chipset pitched against Intel’s own 945GC offering – the one that’s found itself working alongside the Atom in all those netbooks, as well as a few nettops. It’s the weakest link in the Atom specification and therefore an easy target for Nvidia to go for.
Even so, Nvidia may be guilty of believing some of its own hype and tripping itself up by promising something it can’t deliver on – gaming.
Before we get on to what Ion can’t do, it’s worth focusing on what it can; indeed, it’s the Acer Aspire Revo’s reason for existing. If you’re looking for a low-powered but capable media centre, then you can stop searching – here’s the hardware of your dreams.
This wonderfully styled system will take your 1080p content, throw it out to the screen of your choice and barely make a noise as it does so. It’ll happily handle 7.1 audio, 1080p content and even make you a cup of tea while you enjoy the film. Okay, we lied about the tea, but you get the idea.
You’re looking at less than 20 per cent CPU usage for the film bit, so you could theoretically do something more productive with the spare cycles.
Ion isn’t just about video playback either, thanks to the modern wonder that is GP-GPU, this tiny box can turn its hand to other tricks too. Nvidia’s been tub-thumping about CUDA for a long time, but it actually makes sense when it transforms a fairly lowly graphics engine into one that’s capable of cleaning up your old videos, re-encoding them on the fly and, of course, decoding them to your screen as well. It’s the best media player in the world then? Not quite…
There are a few things that hold Ion – and this rendition in particular – back from being leader of the pack, not all of which can be laid at Nvidia’s door. One of the more annoying points is the inclusion of Windows Vista Premium.
This choice of OS forces the 2GB of RAM to its knees, calling on the system swapfile (on a slow 5,400rpm hard drive) far more than anyone would be comfortable with. It takes a good two minutes and 34 seconds just to get into Windows too – hardly a positive consumer experience. This has left us eyeing up the Linux rendition of the machine (even with its paltry 8GB SSD) with far more interest – it’s only £150 for that model at the moment as well.
The Atom seems mismatched with the power on offer too – especially this single-core rendition. A dual-core chip would offer better system response, while a Core 2 Duo would shift things forward (albeit it at the expense of power consumption). Dropping to XP would be wise too, although this would mean Nvidia would be unable to show off the DX10 prowess of the Ion’s graphics core – not that it’s anything to crow about.
The biggest strike against Ion isn’t so much the capabilities of the platform itself, but the direction it’s being pushed in by the overzealous marketing. Apparently the Ion “makes games possible.” It bloody doesn’t, you know. This is the kind of bile-inducing nonsense that we’ve come to expect from the likes
of Intel and VIA, but not from one of the biggest graphics card manufacturers in the world.
Don’t try and pull a fast one here – listing games that are out of date and calling them mainstream fools no one. This isn’t a machine we’d want anyone to use for gaming – especially not on a screen capable of 1,080p movies.
Yes you can trick CoD4 into playing at the lowest settings at 800 x 600, but really would you want to? We certainly wouldn’t. In fact, every game we tried on this machine looked awful and ran at postcard frame rates. It simply isn’t a games machine.
Inconsoleable
This leads to a more worrying problem for the future of this platform – it’s encroaching on territory that’s already been claimed by the consoles. The PS3 rolls in at just under £300, has no problem playing games, manages HD media with aplomb and packs a Blu-ray drive into the bargain. The Xbox 360 is cheaper still and will happily run as a media extender to your main system.
Should you consider the Revo at all then? We’d say it’s worth adding it to your shortlist (if you’re the kind to make lists). The problem is that, beyond a few PC specific codecs and the ability to surf in an environment you’re used to, can you really put forward a compelling reason to spend this much when you could nab a console for about the same price?
We can’t, although maybe we could have our arms twisted for the £150 Linux spin. Watch this space.
GMC ‘EBONY’ desktop case with HTPC functions
I am sure media geeks are going to love this PC case. GMC Korea’s latest case comes with loads of media buttons, so that people like you who just can’t live without multimedia can easily operate different media programs. Also, it is extremely stylish, meaning you can easily make your friends envy you. The case features a small LCD panel to display system information. The case provides remote control, volume control and mute functions, 9-in-1 media card reader, hot keys and movies/music play control buttons. The EBONY offers two cooling fans (one in front and one in rear), screwless 3.5″ and 5.25″ drivebays, and 4x usb 2.0 ports. It is now available for $238.
GMC ‘EBONY’ desktop case with HTPC functions
I am sure media geeks are going to love this PC case. GMC Korea’s latest case comes with loads of media buttons, so that people like you who just can’t live without multimedia can easily operate different media programs. Also, it is extremely stylish, meaning you can easily make your friends envy you. The case features a small LCD panel to display system information. The case provides remote control, volume control and mute functions, 9-in-1 media card reader, hot keys and movies/music play control buttons. The EBONY offers two cooling fans (one in front and one in rear), screwless 3.5″ and 5.25″ drivebays, and 4x usb 2.0 ports. It is now available for $238.
Dell Studio Hybrid is Eco-friendly and Green
Dell Studio Hybrid is Eco-friendly and Green
Tsukumo launches two gaming rigs in Japan
Tsukumo launches two gaming rigs in Japan
Gadget Reviews 
