HP Pavilion Quad-Core Desktop w/2TB HD Price: $329.99 Shipping Options:: $5 Standard Shipping Estimates: Ships in 3-5 business days (Wednesday, Feb 25 to Monday, Mar 02) + transit Condition: Factory Reconditioned
This is a decent desktop machine. Things I’ve learned about it just for edification.
1.) Four memory slots, up to 32G DDR3(1866 Fastest). Comes with one 8G stick, not sure on the timings.
2.) Only one 3.5" internal drive bay and that’s taken by the 2TB HDD. I just “velcrod” my EVO 850 to the case to keep it from rattling. 6 6Gb SATA on board.
3.) Radeon R7 using system RAM, if you get another Radeon based video card (I got an R7 250 1G GDDR5) you can run in kind of a hybrid CrossfireX configuration that works pretty well on DX10 and up games.
So, the caveats that I know about are only one stick of RAM by default and with video using it … not optimal but not terrible. And, only one 3.5" drive bay inside. Just a couple of things to be aware of and to the best of my knowledge, I may be mistaken but I don’t think so.
I got 1 similar to this awhile back… One of the first things I did, was replace Win 8!! I hate it, then I added a better graphics card, since I waste a lot of time playing wow. Mine has beats audio, and a few extra usb ports. So far so good, for 350.00 plus the card, I came in less than 500.00… Can add ram…
After installing Classic Shell (start menu) and turning off UAC in the registry, I’ve been perfectly happy with 8, and that’s after using XP for twelve years.
This article ( AMD A8-7600 Kaveri APU and R7 250 Dual Graphics Testing - Pacing is Fixed! - PC Perspective ) says way more about the graphics performance and games than I can. They did pretty much exactly what I did and added an R7 250 (except mine is 1G GDDR5) and tested both with and without. Well, it’s a different test system; it’s not the HP but results should be somewhat indicative since it’s the same CPU/GPU/APU … whatever PU.
Edit: Just to be clear, this is not a great high end gaming system; for me it’s a good “bang for the buck” work desktop with the ability to play a few casual games like WoW or Skyrim on moderate settings.
I’m having a hard time getting definitive info on the max supported resolution of the graphics card, but everything I’ve found so far suggests that the DVI port is single-link, which limits you to 1920x1200.
I’ve got a 3840x2400 monitor, so this won’t cut it.
This all assumes that it works for more than a few weeks. I’ve purchased two refurbished HP systems in the past 18 months, and both have failed within a month.
I am almost to one year with mine (2tbs & beats audio HP sandy bridge(?) machine). I couldn’t be happier. Does everything I need it for. Can run games (the few I waste my time on) at medium settings. It’s so cheap and anything I’ve gotten from woot refurbished has appeared to be new. I like Windows 8. But I like my Zune too.
Win 8 + Classic Shell = Win 7. If you haven’t figured that out by now, you deserve Metro.
I used to have an HP Media Center. It was fine for 2 years, then died without warning. When I opened the box, I was shocked: It was just a spaghetti bowl of wires with nothing holding them together, and half the components weren’t seated right – the hard drive only had 1 screw holding it in place!
I’ve heard HP laptops are good, but I would never, ever buy an HP desktop.
I don’t like Windows 8/8.1/10 because I don’t like ceding control of my PC. Metro/modern apps are dumbed down fisher price style “apps”. I have Windows 10 now but uninstalled the calculator since it’s ugly and looks like something your dead grandmother would use and now when I try to run calc.exe it wants to send me to the store. I don’t need to go to the store, I need to have the same calculator (more or less) that I’ve been using in Windows 3.0/3.1/3.11/3.11fw/95/95OSR2/98/98SE/NT4/2K/XP/7/8/8.1 (probably missed a few versions). I’m a minimalist, I want an OS that does the minimum and lets me do the rest as I see fit; Windows NT 4.0 was magnificent. Windows 7 is great after some tweaking. Windows 8 and up is just Windows for Dummies™. It has some great optimizations under the hood though. It’s like Thurrott (sp?) is always carrying on about why anyone would balk at signing into a Microsoft account so it can do all these wonderful things and on a technical level I’m sure he’s right but I’m a rebel Dottie, “locul accountz 4 lyfe!”. Windows 8 (and up) isn’t complicated or hard to understand it’s just kludgy and ugly with half the stuff being metro/modern and half being “legacy”. Seriously though, removing or disabling good old stalwart calc.exe for that huge grandmama monstrosity…come on!
I have been using Photoshop (CS4) on my Toshiba laptop since 2005 and am now looking to replace my machine. My current Toshiba was a gaming laptop chosen for its ability to process and render images (like games, right?) and now I’m looking at desktop to do the same thing.
Does anyone know how well this HP model would handle CS4? I will be using a WACOM tablet with this, so won’t be using the mouse.
Technically there’s also a 2.5" internal bay, which I used to mount an SSD boot drive. Now I’ve a pretty slick machine for the family to use while the heavy-lifting is done on my bigger badder custom build. Win8 is pretty heavy-handed at foisting their not-completely-thought-out touch-centric features on you. But win8.1 upgrade (which is Free and painless) does a decent job at improving that experience. You don’t cede any control that I’m aware of (particularly not compared to a mac). And there are definitely some improvements in how it handles resources.
![[Preview 1]](http://d3gqasl9vmjfd8.cloudfront.net/43a6872c-4891-4113-86d8-7f59e944358c.jpg){kind=link}
![[Preview 2]](http://d3gqasl9vmjfd8.cloudfront.net/a45dcbcf-e7be-429f-802f-5ed9e72028bd.jpg){kind=link}
