HP Pavilion p6320y

HP Pavilion p6320y

The $700 HP Pavilion p6320y is a solid midlevel PC that occupies an uncomfortable middle ground. The $550 Gateway DX4831-01e is a better budget choice if you spend most of your computing time managing a music library or manipulating digital photos. Or a $730 desktop from Asus gives you generally better all-around performance with equivalent features for a marginal cost increase. That makes us recommend the HP only for its strength in multicore-friendly programs. If you're using programs that take full advantage of a quad-core CPU, the HP could make sense for you. We suspect most of you shopping for a PC in this price range want something of a jack-of-all trades PC instead. The HP p6320y features the same aesthetic design we've seen in HP's Pavilion P-series for the last couple of years. The recipe is simple: take a minimal glossy black case, add a soft-blue LED-lit power button, a sliding panel on the bottom that reveals a media card reader and two USB 2.0 ports underneath, and you have a visually attractive tower that can easily disappear into your office set up. The Asus CG5275-AR003 is another mainstream retail desktop in our 2010 spring roundup that has close to the same set of components as the Pavilion p6320y, with the exception of the processor