CNET editors' review
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CNET editors' rating:
stars
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Detailed editors' rating
- Reviewed on: 07/13/2009
Editors' note: This review is part of our 2009 Retail Laptop and Desktop Back-to-School roundup, covering specific fixed configurations of popular systems that can be found in retail stores.
You might find it tempting to look at the HP Pavilion Slimline s5120y's $450 price tag and consider it a bargain. Think again. With mediocre-to-slow performance, underwhelming features, and a few design gaffes, this Slimline sits on the same forlorn raft as the Dell Inspiron 537s, floating out to the Island of Out-of-Date PCs. As you can perhaps tell, we don't recommend this system.
We like the softer, friendlier look of the HP's new glossy black front panel, and overall HP's slimtower case is smaller than Dell's, which might best be called a slim midtower. Both HP and Dell (especially) tower over the Gateway SX2800-01, but at least Dell gives you more upgrade options in exchange for its larger size. HP deserves credit for taking the slimtower concept to the mainstream market, and as before this new Slimline's physical dimensions would work well in a either a living room or an office setting. We just hope that HP is paying attention now that Gateway has taken the slimtower concept further.
We also miss the external drive bay port in HP's older Slimlines. Previously, if you pulled down a small door at the bottom of a Slimline you'd find a port for HP's proprietary Pocket Media removable hard drives. We never liked the case-cluttering full-size Personal Media drive in HP's Pavilion Elite midtower systems, but the Pocket Media drive in the Slimline always made sense, given the limited amount of room to upgrade the system and the Pocket Media drive's compact size. We don't know how many people actually purchased the Pocket Media drive accessories, and it's certainly possible that the drive slot disappeared because of a lack of consumer interest. But with room for only a single internal hard drive in this new case, anyone who might want to upgrade the internal storage will miss the Pocket Media drive option.
| HP Pavilion s5120y | Gateway SX2800-01 | |
| Price | $450 | $510 |
| CPU | 2.7GHz AMD Athlon X2 7750 | 2.33GHz Intel Core 2 Quad Q8200 |
| Memory | 4GB 800MHz DDR2 SDRAM | 4GB 800MHz DDR2 SDRAM |
| Graphics | 128MB (shared) Nvidia GeForce 6150 SE integrated graphics chip | 32MB (shared) Intel GMA X4500 integrated graphics chip |
| Hard drives | 500GB 7,200rpm | 640GB, 7,200rpm |
| Optical drive | dual-layer DVD burner | dual-layer DVD burner |
| Operating system | Windows Vista Home Premium SP1 64-bit | Windows Vista Home Premium SP1 64-bit |
We have few quibbles with the on-paper components for the Pavilion Slimline s5120y. The 2.7GHz dual-core Athlon chip certainly sounds fast, again, on paper, and we have no trouble accepting a slightly smaller 500GB hard drive next to the Gateway's 640GB drive given the HP's lower price. But one look at the ports on the front and back of the HP and it becomes clear that the Slimline needs more than just a design revision to stay competitive.
You get a single USB 2.0 port, a media card slot, and an analog headphone jack on the front of the HP. Around back you'll find four more USB 2.0 ports, 5.1 analog audio outputs, an Ethernet jack, a VGA video port, and a pair of PS/2 ports for the mouse and keyboard. If that seems reasonable, consider the Gateway, which gets you all of those ports, plus mini FireWire, eSATA, HDMI video out, and literally twice as many USB ports. Like Dell, HP can revise the case all it wants, but compared with the Gateway (and, incidentally, the Acer Aspire X-Series from as far back as last year), this Slimline is built on a woefully behind-the-times platform.
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The outdated ports on the Slimline might not seem so bad if HP had used the old motherboard to take advantage of a fast, affordable CPU. Sadly that's not the case here. Instead the Slimline s5120y finished either in the middle or at the bottom on all four of our performance tests. It's certainly fast enough for day-to-day Web browsing, word processing, and media playback, but considering that on top of its more advanced ports the Gateway SX2800-01 offers significantly better performance for only $60 more, the faster clock speed of the AMD chip in the HP isn't enough to save it from mediocrity.
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