I’ve become a big fan of the HP Elite line since I bought mine last year. I’ve built and rebuilt (too) many systems over the years and I worked many years as an electronic technician. I can’t recall seeing a retail computer that had better build quality. I have seen better quality systems, but they were not anything you could generally buy in a store and they cost 2x-3x more than this. If you want to spend that kind of money check out Alienware or Voodoo. The main negative I can give you about the Elite systems is that they aren’t very upgradable. Part of how it competes with more expensive systems with similar specs is by cutting the motherboard down to a fairly minimal design. This one has room for one more graphics card (the Intel X58 Express supports Nvidias SLi enabling it to run two Nvidia PCI Express 16x graphics cards) and one PCI 4x card for whatever else you may want to toss in there. The nice thing is that this system is so loaded you probably won’t need to add anything. Considering all the heat generating stuff inside it’s pretty quiet. Just a soft fan noise. The main downsize is the large case, but that’s pretty much standard for a system with these kinds of specs.
Let’s go through the specs:
2.66GHz Core i7 920: The Core i7 is the best CPU you can buy today. There are faster i7s than this but I wouldn’t stretch my wallet much more. The i7 has four cores, running two threads each, so it looks like eight CPUs to your system. You don’t always need eight threads, so if you’re running a game it can shut down some of those cores and up your clock speed. It has three DDR3 memory channels controlled by a fast on-die controller and each channel is running at 1066Mhz. All that feeding into a giant 8MB cache shared between the four cores, which each have another 1MB cache. It all adds up to a whole lot of fast.
9GB RAM: Nine? Do you need nine? I’m not sure. But that’s 3GB per channel and that’s a lot of fast memory that will pretty much guarantee you will not see any memory bottlenecks. You will probably throw this computer away before you will need to upgrade the RAM.
1TB HDD 7200 RPM: Considering the kind of user who is going to buy this system, 1TB, while a lot, seems reasonable. Just remember to pick up an external 1TB drive and back that thing up. There’s no such thing as a reliable HDD anymore.
NVIDIA GeForce GTS 250 1GB DDR3 Video card: I’ve been telling people to stay away from Nvidia lately because of some serious manufacturing issues that they have been less than forthcoming about. The GTS 250 however is built on a later (55nm) process and doesn’t have the problems associated with the previous generation. In fact the GTS 250 is pretty much a 9800+ built on the new process. It’s a good performing card and can handle any game on the market. And if you want you can pick up another in a year or so and start using the SLI in this thing to run two graphics cards (if this intimidates you take it down to your local computer store and they can have you up and running in thirty minutes). That good future proofing.
BLU RAY: It has a blu ray drive, which is cool but I can’t really see using it for much. Still, now if you want to watch a hi-def movie on your computer, you can.
HP Pocket Media Drive bay ad HP Personal Media Drive bay: these haven’t been quite as handy as I hoped. The “Pocket” media drive might be handy if you need to hand carry large files. They’re generally too small of drives to use for system backups. The “Personal” media drives are just regular hard drives that can plug into a slot in the front of your computer. My complaint is that since personal drive is tightly packaged in platstic (to keep it small) the HDD cooling fan kicks in right away and just keeps running. It’s much louder than my computer. For your money you’d be better off buying a larger form factor external drive or a Home Server (which I did, and I love it, but that’s another review).
Ports: Ports for everything. Front ports for Firewire, USB 2.0., head phones, microphone, speakers, and a card reader. The rear has more USB and FireWire along with an E-SATA port (great for external HDD). Two DVI connects for two DVI monitors. There is a VGA connector if you really need it along with HDMI.
In short for your money you’d have trouble finding a better built system with real gaming specs. If you live to add stuff inside your computer you won’t like the limited internal expansion. But if you just want to get a fast computer and have it work, this is a good buy.