HP Pavilion MS214

HP Pavilion MS214 All-in-One PC

In the past, most budget all-in-one PCs (20 inches or smaller) have come with an Intel Atom processor--a low-powered netbook favorite. So it's interesting to see HP use a faster 1.5GHz AMD Athlon 64 X2 CPU for the MS214 ($600 as of December 8, 2009). The move pays off for the system's general performance, as its WorldBench 6 score of 59 is among the highest of any all-in-one desktop of this size. Only two other all-in-ones that have also ditched Atom beat the MS214: The $650, 20-inch MSI Wind Top AE2010 (with a 1.5GHz Athlon X2 dual-core 3250e) scored 60; and Dell's $944 Studio One 19 (with a 2.5GHz Pentium dual-core E5200) is way out in front with a WorldBench 6 score of 93. No surprise, though, that integrated graphics don't do much to assist the MS214 with games--it reached a wimpy (and unplayable) 11 frames per second in our Unreal Tournament 3 benchmark (even at a high-quality resolution of 1024 by 768). But there are still some solid specs on offer. Two gigabytes of DDR2 memory are double what you'd typically find on an all-in-one system of this size (or smaller). So is the system's included storage capacity of 300GB (where typically we used to see 160GB).