HP Pavilion Slimline s5370t

HP Pavilion Slimline s5370t

Although it's roughly half the width of a common midtower desktop, the HP Slimline s5370t does a great job of surpassing many of its value PC peers in performance. But you'll pay a lot for the s5370t's diet. Larger computers make full use of their fatter profiles to deliver a flurry of connections and upgrade possibilities that HP's little PC just can't match. And given the constraints of its trimmed-down profile, the s5370's $1089 price (as of February 19, 2010) makes this a difficult sell. An Intel Core i5-650 processor coupled with 4GB of DDR3 memory allows this half-size system to reach a score of 124 on our Worldbench 6 testing suite. That's a great result for the category, and it puts the s5370t in the upper range of models on the Value PC chart for performance. However, competing systems like HP's own Compaq 6005 Pro deliver slightly better performance (128) for less ($899 as of February 19, 2010). Larger, midtower desktops like Micro Express's MicroFlex 75B don't exactly blow the s5370t out of the water in WorldBench (it scored 132), but its price-to-performance ratio is vastly superior ($700 as of February 19, 2010).