HP Pavilion HPE Phoenix H9z

"Mass-market gaming desktop" doesn't have to meant muted opening and uncompetitive pricing. Too bad Hewlett-Packard seems to have forgotten. Both slower and more costly than its competition, the $1,049 HP Pavilion HPE Phoenix h9z desktop is roughly confusingly awful in conditions of crash is to buck. A Blu-ray expostulate and, to a obtuse extent, Beats Audio program increase a few value, but the gamers for whom this network is evidently expected will find small to similar to here.

HP introduced its new Phoenix box pattern at CES this year. The stylized look comes well-stocked with thespian angles and red LEDs. All of it will adequately talk "gaming computer" on the shelf at Best Buy, but it does basically nothing to pierce Personal Computer aesthetics forward.

Absent from this network is the Phoenix line's glass CPU cooler. HP highlighted the glass cooling hardware as a selling indicate is to Phoenix at CES. The AMD FX-8100 fragment is truly overclockable, and you can purchase the cooler as a $60 choice if you're prone to tinker with timepiece speeds yourself. Like Dell, HP requires you to perform the real overclocking yourself, but the glass cooler at least acknowledges that Personal Computer gamers conclude the chance to fist out more opening when possible. You can still overclock the CPU in this Phoenix without the glass cooling rig, but you won't be able to set the magnitude as high as you may have with the glass cooler.

HP offers versions of the Pavilion HPE Phoenix on both AMD and Intel CPU platforms. Our AMD-based examination section is the many affordable, starting at $999. The other 3 models, all Intel-based, beginning as high as $2,049 is to h9se with Intel's not essential six-core, Core i7-3900-series chips. None of these Phoenix units is that compelling, quite compared with HP's non-Phoenix Pavilion HPE h8xt . For $1,130, you can obtain an h8xt with a Core i7-2600S, with 8GB of RAM, a 2TB hard drive, and a Radeon HD 6850 graphics card. The Phoenix h9t with those specs and a mandatory Blu-Ray expostulate will cost $1,378, creation it a nonstarter.

In more aged with midrange gaming desktops from other vendors, the Phoenix fares even worse. Alienware's new X51 is faster on every assessment and usually expenses $999. Willing to outlay $150 more than the HP examination section costs? Look in to the factory-overclocked Chronos from Origin and you'll obtain a few of the most appropriate opening we've seen in a sub-$2,000 computer. Neither of those competing systems has a Blu-ray expostulate similar to the Phoenix, but for gaming systems tender opening is far more important.

The AMD FX-8100 fragment binds the Phoenix h9z back on all of our focus tests. HP's network can't outperform the cheaper Alienware network on these tests, nor can it grasp HP's more mainstream Pavilion HPE h8xt. we think the local eight-core CPU might have a chance to help the Phoenix affirm a win in the Cinebench assessment at least, but AMD's fragment can't ward off its Intel-based competition.