HP Pavilion p7-1010 Desktop PC

HP Pavilion p7-1010 Desktop PC

The HP Pavilion p7-1010 offers a few nice surprises desktop PC, including a quad-core CPU and a 1TB hard drive. this budget desktop is best suited to basic home productivity tasks like email, Web browsing, and light photo editing. It has room inside for future expansion, but you'll need to upgrade the power supply depending on what components you plan to add.

Design and Features
Most budget desktops are decidedly plain looking, and the p7-1010 is no exception. The black mid-tower case has a glossy black front panel with a four-slot card reader at the top that supports 15 different formats. Below that are two optical drive bays, one of which is occupied by a DVD multi-drive with Lightscribe etching capabilities (the other is vacant). Behind a sliding panel are headphone and microphone jacks and two USB 2.0 ports. A chrome HP badge adorns the lower left corner of the front panel.
You'll need a screwdriver to gain access to the interior via the removable side panel. Inside, there's a hard drive cage occupied by a single 1TB drive that spins at 7,200rpm. It'll take you a while to fill it up, but if you do, there's room for another hard drive as well as a 3.5-inch drive (you'll need tools for these components). Two of the four memory slots are vacant (it can handle up to 16GB of system memory) and there are three PCIe x1 slots and one PCIe x16 slot available. If you do plan to add a graphics card or more drives you'll likely have to upgrade the power supply first as the p7-1010 comes with a low power 250-watt power supply.
On the back of the system are DVI and VGA video outputs, four USB 2.0 ports, an Ethernet port, six audio jacks that support 7.1 channel surround sound, and a digital audio output. Wireless networking comes by way of an integrated 802.11n Wi-Fi radio, a nice feature for a machine in this price range. The p7-1010 comes with a full sized USB keyboard and a USB optical scroll mouse, both of which are very basic but comfortable enough

Performance
The p7-1010 is configured with an AMD Athlon II X4 645 processor, a budget-class quad-core chip that runs at 3.10GHz. It also has 6GB of DDR3 RAM and uses an AMD Radeon HD 4200 to handle the graphics workload. Performance was typical of a low-cost processor. On the flip side, the p7-1010 needed a lengthy 5 minutes 44 seconds to complete our PhotoShop CS5 test, Don't be fooled into thinking that the embedded AMD Radeon HD 4200 will deliver game-worthy graphics; it doesn't. In fact, when it comes to frame rates, its performance is similar to Intel's integrated graphics solution. The p7-1010 managed only 8.5 frames per second (fps) on our medium quality Crysis gaming test. If you're looking for an entry-level desktop that'll serve as a second PC for school projects and other light-duty computing tasks, the HP Pavilion p7-1010 will fit the bill. Its huge hard drive provides plenty of storage for all of your digital content, and since it's Wi-Fi-enabled you can surf the Web wirelessly.