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.
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.
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