HPGB – Quarterly Buying Guide – Edition 1

When I consider the niche that this blog serves, there’s one question which I believe must be answered.

“What HP PC should I buy for my PC gaming needs?”

So, beginning now, approximately every three months, I will attempt to produce a guide which recommends an HP desktop PC in three price brackets; < US$1000, $1000 – $2000 and $2000 – $3500. Above $3500 you should just go over to VoodooPC and pick up the biggest, most expensive PC they sell. This guide is going to be known as the Quarterly Buying Guide (QBG).

So, what am I judging these PC’s on? Well, at the moment, I’m not getting my hands on any of these machines, so my picks will be somewhat subjective and based on the hp.com availability and prices. I’ll be scoring the machines in four categories; Processing Power, Storage Space, Graphics Grunt and Screen Size.

The score will be out of five.

So you should expect only the $2k -$3.5 category to score at twenty or near to it. However, if HP are bundling a ‘five’ lcd in a sub $1k PC, then that’ll stand out like a sore thumb.

Also, these models are the US models. If you’re interested in HP models available in the UK or elsewhere, comment on this post and if I have sufficient demand, I’ll look at including other countries in the future. Until then, take a look at the specifications of these models and try to match them with models available in your country.

Results

Less Than $1000

Well, it’s only the first edition of this guide and already HP is failing. I couldn’t configure a desktop PC to a level that I could recommend (and keep my conscience clear) for under $1000, but I got close.

I picked the AMD based a6150e.

The a6150e is one of HP’s ‘entertainment and multimedia’ focussed PC’s. The reason it ended up being the winner of this category is effectively flexibility. If I’d had complete flexibility in component selection then I’m pretty confident HP could have provided me with perfect candidates in each of the three categories.

The limiting factor to my selections in this category was the graphics card. Various Directx 10 video cards were available, but only the top card, the 512MB 8500GT was acceptable. Be warned, if you get anything lower than this, you’ll definitely regret it in the long term and may regret it imediately.

For the processor I chose the cheapest (AMD Athlon(TM) 64 X2 4000+ dual-core @ 2.1GHz ). It’s my opinion that unless you upgrade other components, the processor is unlikely to be the bottleneck.

It also features 2GB of DDR2 memory, integrated 7.1 sound and a 19″ lcd monitor. The other area I had to cut to get close to the $1000 budget was the hardrive, which is just 160GB.

Scores

Processing Power – 2
Storage Space – 2
Graphics Grunt – 3
Screen Size – 2

Total – 9

Conclusion

Ultimately, this is a machine I would recommend to a friend. This says a lot. The fact that I couldn’t configure a machine under $1k that I was happy with shows that HP are missing something.

It’s obvious that if you have a bigger budget you can improve your experience, but unless you want more hard disk space or screen size, then you should stick with this model all the way up to about $2200 where you can get a cut-down version of our category 3 winner.

$1000 – $2000

Again, the PC I’d want is just out of this bracket, but we’ll come to that later. This is the sweetspot for HP PC’s and you can tell. There were plenty of options, but ultimately, lack of flexibility in the choices of some of the other models left me choosing the Pavilion d4990y.

This is the most suitable model for a gamer, and I ended up configuring three different version for different price levels.

The winner of this category came in at $1974.99. Also worth mentioning is the m8100y, a media centre PC which I was able to configure to a slight lower level for $1964.98. The reason I mention it is that it has a more powerful processor than the d4990y.

Again, the graphics of this machine is the 8500GT. What I really would have liked is the option of an 8600GT, but this wasn’t available.

The processor is the Intel(R) Core(TM) 2 Duo processor E6700 (2.66GHz), we have 2GB of memory and a 19″ LCD. The real reason this was the winner of this category though is that I was able to include two hard drives, giving 800GB in RAID. This would mean that you would get excellent performance in applications which make many requests to the hard drive (loading levels in games or video editing for instance) and is a must in my own next PC.

Scores

Processing Power – 3.5
Storage Space – 5
Graphics Grunt – 3
Screen Size – 2

Total -13.5

Conclusion

If I was going to buy an HP desktop, this is pretty close to the machine I would buy. If you shell out your money on this one, then you should be happy. Eventually you may want to upgrade your graphics card though.

$2000 – $3500

Having looked at quite a few models, there wasn’t really a lot jumping out in this category. So I took my d4990y and added the item I most wanted and had to leave out from the previous category, the 8800 GTS graphics card. This took it well into the $2000’s but I still had plenty of budget to spend, so I upped the screen size and storage space.

I still had money to spend, so this is obviously another area that HP is missing. I even went over to VoodooPC to see if I could get anything down to the $3500 level, no luck. It certainly seems that it wouldn’t be a bad idea for HP to ‘Invent’ a new brand in this segment.

So our high end machine cost $2989.99 and featured a 8800 GTS, Intel(R) Core(TM) 2 Duo processor E6700 (2.66GHz), 2GB of 800mhz memory, 1TB Raid hard drive setup and an HP 22″ LCD monitor.

Scores

Processing Power – 4
Storage Space – 5
Graphics Grunt – 4.5
Screen Size – 4

Total -17.5

Conclusion

This is a nice PC, but you’re spending a lot of money so you would expect that. This machine is very much future proof. You’ve got a very good graphics card, as bigger LCD monitor as some people say is practical and an amount of RAID hard drive space that is pretty amazing to me.

But if I was spending $3000 I would want the 8800GTX and this was not an option, which is somewhat surprising.

All in all, if you want an HP PC to use for gaming, then you can certainly get one, but HP has a lot of work to do if they really want to align their offerings with the tastes and preferences of PC gamers.