HP Pavilion Elite Six-Core Desktop with Blu-ray

Holy moley! That’s one heck of a PC! Great price!

The PSU is only 300w… so you would have to upgrade that before you could upgrade the videocard. :frowning:

And that videocard is in desperate need of replacing

Not bad but should have been under $500 for a referb

I will never get why these companies cheap out on power supplies. Would putting in (at least) a 500w cost that much more?

The X6 Phenom II 1045STprocessor in this scores right in the middle of Passmark’s High End CPU Chart with a score of 5105. Its a VERY capable processor.

The Radeon HD 5570 ranks a 762 on passmark’s chart. More serious gamers will want to swap it out for a faster card, along with a more powerful power supply if needed (read the graphics card specs before replacing the power supply, most but not all of them will need more).

The July '11 issue of Consumer Reports (that’s right, from the future) gave the HPE-410Y their second highest rating among desktop computers. This is an HPE-410F - I’m not exactly sure what the differences are, the specs I have look the same.

Word of warning. I bought this same desktop from Best Buy (refurbished by HP) about 6 months ago. It’s spent more time on the repair bench at HP than it has on my computer desk. HP has been diligently trying to screw me over time and again after I bought it. I’ve had to send it back THREE TIMES for repair for defects that should have been fixed before I bought it. I finally got it back earlier this month and it seems to be running good. Though I’m furious that it was originally listed (as I bought it) at $750 and now it’s down to $550. Do yourselves a favor, if you do buy this PC then get the SquareTrade extended warranty. HP WILL NOT HELP YOU IF IT IS DEFECTIVE!

Maybe for a quad core… but a six core? This is a pretty decent deal.

Unfortunately no gigabit NIC.

nice specs for price. solid reviews. thinking about taking the plunge

Some of you may have seen me mention this before, but I avoid HP, especially their refurbs, like the plague. I bought an HP Factory Refurbished desktop and it came full of dust! They apparently have no quality control on refurbished machines. If a regular customer would have bought this they would have no reason to open it up and notice the heatsink was totally clogged!

http://www.theguruguys.com/images/11t.jpg

You could get a 500W for about $40. It’s still a great deal. I priced putting this computer together on Amazon and the total (including paying $100 for an OS) came to about $900.

If I was in the market for a new PC, I’d jump on this deal.

Keep in mind that this is a only a BluRay reader. It cannot write onto BluRay discs. It’s great for playing BluRays, but you won’t be able to use it for backing up. Ultimately, it’s not as useful as one might think since standalone players cost less than $100 these days. You can, however, use the reader to rip BlueRays into video files.

Can any1 tell me what is the difference between six quad dual core processor if I only run 1-2 programs most time?which one is faster?for game only.

I agree 100%. Ask me about my $350 doorstop and all the owners I’ve had to inform that their laptops were dead thanks to a defective graphics chip. Now ask me how many of those owners, including myself, got ANY satisfaction from HP/Compaq and I will tell you none…

We got one of these (exact same specs and model) on a shipment at my part-time job as a bench tester at an eBay liquidator. I convinced the manager not to have me list it on eBay, but rather keep it for internal use, hoping he would get the hint and let me start using it at my test bench. He said “Sure, we can keep it.” Two weeks later it’s his new computer and I get his hand-me-down Dell Vostro. Them’s the breaks.

So anyway, I did get to test it before reluctantly turning it over to the boss, and it screams. A word of warning: HP seems to use substandard case and CPU fans, because both had failed on our system which was the reason we ended up with it (we often bid on and get “warranty returns” from other companies; they have a simple issue that I will fix, we then resell as used on eBay).

About turning this into a great gaming computer vs. building your own gaming pc

Some of the newer higher end graphics cards require A LOT of room to be installed and many of these stock computers do not come with cases that will fit them. When they do fit air circulation can become an issue. Furthermore, the larger graphics card can make the stock cables going to devices no longer reach as well as it making it very difficult to work in the case.

To turn this into a good gaming machine you will have to get a better powerful power supply ($100) to use a graphics card like the Radeon 6950 ($220).

So you are looking $555 for the computer, $100 for the Power Supply, $220 for the graphics card (if it fits) and since its an HP I’d almost have to buy the $90 Squaretrade warranty.

That’s a total of $965, and that’s IF the graphics card will fit in the case and has decent ventilation afterwards. You can build a MUCH better gaming system for around that price:

Case: Cooler Master 922 $100
Power Supply: Corasir TX750 $100
Mainboard: $220 Asus Sabertooh P67 Rev 3.0
CPU: i5 2500K $179
Graphics: Ati Radeon 6950 $220
HD: Samsung 1TB Spinpoint ($65)
Blu-Ray: LG 12x Writer $90
Keyboard/Mouse: $30
OS: Windows 7 Home Premuim 64-bit OEM $90
RAM: 8GB Patriot Signature 8GB $78

Total: $1177 (probably a few hundred cheaper as I didn’t price search, mostly just used newegg’s prices). In this build you get a MUCH better mainboard (USB3.0 etc), faster processor with nice overclocking capabilities, support Dual Graphics Card’s/SLI, better case and fans, Blu-Ray Writer not just reader and more. You could drop $100 from the price and get a cheaper mainboard if you don’t want future SLI capabilities.

One the other hand, if you are just doing Photoshop, video editing, casual gaming and those types of things the specs on this system are perfect for you without any upgrades at all, and the price isn’t too bad.

I built nearly this exact PC, only better, for about the same price. Convenient buy though I guess.