Product Listing

HP Pavilion Elite m9090a Desktop PC

By Vincent Chang - 15 Dec 2007

Dream Hardware?

Dream Hardware?

Mention the Quad Core processor at the heart of this HP Pavilion Elite PC and you'll probably get your share of raised eyebrows since HP has not exactly made its name on enthusiast oriented high-end systems that the likes of Alienware or Falcon Northwest cut their teeth on. Nevertheless, that's what you'll find under the hood of this Elite PC and this multi-core processor is complemented by 2GB of DDR2-667 RAM. Enthusiasts will probably sniff at this amount of memory, particularly its DDR2-667 pedigree and this is somewhat illustrated by the Windows Experience Index, which lists the memory as one of the weaker aspects of this system.

It's not everyday that one can say 2GB of RAM is the bottleneck for a system but that seems to be the case for this Elite PC.

Looking at this index, you'll also notice that the other weak link here has to be the graphics and we have to agreed wholeheartedly too. Granted that HP itself states in its press release that this is a system for "high definition digital entertainment and immersive mainstream gaming experiences", so the key word here is mainstream and the GeForce 8600 GT that we found within the m9090a is certainly it. Even with 512MB of video memory, the limitations of the GPU mean that there are probably gaming notebooks with a superior graphics chipset. Playing the latest DirectX 10 games is of course viable but performance will suffer when the settings are set to the maximum or when you try the native 1680 x 1050 resolution of a typical 22-inch LCD monitor (that HP is apparently bundling with this Elite PC as an option). In our opinion, we would have taken a better graphics card over the other luxuries afforded by this system, even sacrificing one of the two 500GB hard drives . However, even if you're inclined to upgrade to a more expensive graphics card, the fact that the given PSU is rated at a rather low 300W could make such an upgrade impractical for most users.

On the bright side, a feature that will certainly get the enthusiasts to sit up and pay attention is the Blu-ray/HD DVD-ROM combo drive, which can read both HD formats, single or dual layered at more than decent speeds. In fact, as we found out from the Control Panel, the drive is the same as this LG drive that we recently reviewed. Besides its reading capabilities, it's also a decent Lightscribe capable DVD writer and for the purpose of providing HD digital entertainment, we can't think of a better alternative now.

These multimedia aspirations are one of the key cornerstones of this system and they are bolstered by the addition of a PAL TV tuner so that users can easily record their TV programmes onto the huge hard drives provided. With two 500GB Samsung hard drives inside, this is a system where storage space is not an issue and one can set it to record entire seasons of TV shows. Unfortunately, the presence of a single tuner means that if you're recording a TV show, you can't watch another channel. At the very least, HP should have provided a dual tuner setup if it was really serious about this machine being a true media center equivalent but we suppose there has to be some compromises given its space and cost constraints. HP however did get the outputs correct here, with the graphics card having both DVI and HDMI outputs so connecting this to a HDTV should be no issue. Then there are the other perks that come with a media center PC, like the Windows Media Center Remote, wireless keyboard and mouse.

The massive amount of hard drive space also comes into play when you consider HP's Easy Backup utility. This is an user friendly tool to assist novices in doing the necessary but tedious task of backing up their data and we recommend using it since it's already integrated. There's also HP's Recovery Manager application, which helps to create recovery disks in the event that you need to format or change your hard drive. Other HP-centric software include the usual auto-update utility and HP DVD Play (CyberLink OEM), which is an application to play DVDs, Blu-ray and HD DVD-ROMs and probably the most important application here for any movie buff. However, it's not the most polished of applications and for some inexplicable reasons, there were some minor issues with the HD DVD menus of a HD DVD movie (Black Snake Moan) that we tested when we tried navigating with a mouse. Using the remote was fine though.

Performance Benchmarks

So now that you know what's inside this Elite PC, it's time to assess how it performed. Our review unit came with Windows Vista Ultimate pre-installed, an option that we understand from HP is only available for m9000 desktops sold in Australia and New Zealand. Local versions in Singapore will have Home Premium installed instead and frankly, we think there's hardly any practical difference between the two for most users. Overall, the system felt responsive and fast, as one would expect from its specifications. Our grouses were related to the application bloat that HP has added to the system. Many of these extras, like the Microsoft Office trial version or the 60-day Norton Antivirus subscription are not really attractive to users and only add desktop clutter. There are also a bunch of other demo games and applications that's not worth mentioning except as more things to uninstall.

Moving on to the benchmarks that we ran on this Elite m9090a, we had quite a difficulty getting the appropriate comparisons, given that this is our first Quad Core based system on Windows Vista. Hence, many of the comparisons below are less than ideal and should serve only as a rough reference point to the performance of this PC.

First, we used PCMark05 to test the overall performance of this system, comparing its final CPU score with an older result that we had gotten for our evaluation of an Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600. An important difference was that the HP desktop was running Windows Vista while our Q6600 processor was on Windows XP. Both results were quite similar here, which shows the CPU in the Elite m9090a performing to expectations. Meanwhile, we also found its dual hard drives to be very competent, easily besting a SATA 7200RPM model we had tested on the Dell XPS M1330 notebook.

Like we had mentioned earlier, the graphics is where the Elite m9090a falters and our 3DMark06 scores saw it behind HP's own 'Dragon' notebook which uses an ATI Radeon Mobility HD 2600. The Elite was also only slightly ahead of the MSI GX600 gaming notebook, which is equipped with the GeForce 8600M GT, again a notebook class 'equivalent' of the Elite m9090a's own GPU. Compared to the typical desktop graphics that a high-end enthusiast would probably recommend now i.e. GeForce 8800 GT, the GeForce 8600 GT on the Elite PC falls short of its name.

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