HP Pavilion Elite m9515y review

This system might be unique for its ability to serve up digital media, but it's also significantly slower than competing PCs in its price range. It can't even keep up with the $900 Dell XPS 430 121B. This HP is certainly fast enough to provide a quality HD video experience. It can also play some games, although we're surprised that it wasn't able to turn in a better score on our forgiving Unreal Tournament 3 test. Overall we'd look elsewhere if your primary concern is system performance and/or gaming capability.

We mentioned that upgraders will find the interior of this system a mess, and it's almost not even worth cracking open as the only spare slot is a single 1X PCI Express input. You also get a single free traditional hard-drive input, but you have to remove the drive cage entirely to access it, an unfortunate hassle. If the inside is sloppy, the variety of ports on the rear panel is only adequate. The video card provides a built-in HDMI output, and you also get a dedicated coaxial digital audio output. Each of those will get the job done as far as living room connections, but we wish HP went further and added an eSATA port and optical digital audio.

Hewlett-Packard, like most mainstream vendors, offers one year of parts and labor coverage for this system. You also get 24-7 toll-free phone coverage and onsite service at HP's discretion. The HP Web site also has a useful selection of help tools, including driver downloads, FAQs, and customer support chat.

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System configurations:

HP Pavilion Elite m9515y
Windows Vista Home Premium SP1 (64-bit); 2.5GHz AMD Phenom X4 9850; 8GB 800MHz DDR2 SDRAM; 768MB Nvidia GeForce 9600 GS graphics card; 750GB 7,200 rpm Hitachi hard drive

Dell Studio XPS-122B
Windows Vista Home Premium SP1 (64-bit); 2.67GHz Intel Core i7 920; 4GB 1,066MHz DDR3 SDRAM; 512MB ATI Radeon HD 4850 graphics card; 640GB 7,200 rpm Samsung hard drive

Dell XPS 430-121B
64-bit Windows Vista Home Premium; 2.5GHz Intel Core 2 Quad CPU Q8300 ; 6GB DDR3 1066MHz; 1GB NVIDIA GeForce GT 120 Graphics card; 750GB, 7,200 rpm hard drive

Gateway FX6800-01e
Windows Vista Home Premium SP1 (64-bit); 2.67GHz Intel Core i7 920; 3GB 1,600MHz DDR3 SDRAM; 512MB ATI Radeon HD 4850 graphics card; 750GB 7,200 rpm Seagate hard drive