Home > Consumer Reviews > HP Pavilion M9350F Desktop PC (2.50 GHz AMD Phenom X4 9850 Processor, 6 GB RAM, 750 GB Hard Drive, DVD Drive, Vista Premium)

I bought this unit from Best Buy, back in September. I was very happy for the due upgrade (from a 6 year old Compaq). Ran fine for a month, than troubles started. It randomly freezes and stops responding. Being I was 200 miles away from home I had no choice but to shrug the problem away. Many people have had this problem too, and here are the reasons I came across:

-HEAT! HEAT! HEAT! The GPU temperature is at 70F just idling, increases quiet a bit when under stress. The wiring is a mess inside this case. There are wires and cables running all across the tv tuner and GPU. These wires touching the circuitry only add to the heat problem. And did I mention, the insides are extremely compacted together. No air circulation at all.

-Power supply is inadequate. 460W is not enough to power this beast, and as a result any higher demand results in slowing down. Use any online calculator, recommended would be at least 600W. Tried changing power settings to High Performance, unit ran out of juice shortly after.

This machine does have great specs, but make sure you invest into a better power supply and more fans.

Model 9350f
HP Pavillion Elite
One week after purchased my computer started slowing down to the point it was unusable.
I did a system restore
It lasted a few days
I called HP service ,on the phone talked for 2 hours, tried several troubleshooting techniques but computer was too slow to do anything. Ended with them sending me the recovery disc for $15.
I did my 1st system recovery; it was an all night affair.
Computer worked normal again for about 1 week then same thing
I again did another micosoft system restore, about 4 hour process.. It worked about a week.
2 more times I went through the processes of calling HP, with no results and ended up doing a system restore myself.
Day before Christmas I called HP again, 2 hours on phone, nothing was resolved because computer was too slow. So on Christmas night I did another system restore and called HP the next morning. We then spent $100 with their PC tune-up team. And we did basic steps and searched for various. One of the steps involved chkdsk (check disc) for disc errors. This leads me to belive HP is aware of this problem with this model

I then did my own research and found many threads, one on the HP site, regarding the very same issue with this model computer.
Jan 1st we called HP again, after 2 hours of nothing more then a run around they disconnected me.

Today, Jan 2, my computer is now doing the same thing.

I jumped on this awesome gaming unit. Graphics are front row. So much power and like Tim Taylor says "POWER" arg arg arg. It's loaded with so many features how can anyone go wrong with this good buy? It's totally upgradable if you decide to upgrade in 4 years. Easy to use with many helpful hint if needed. Great saving's with this price. HP is a well known name with all the support you need. Do yourself a big favor and if your ready to be blown away get this you won't be sorry.

So much room on the Hard Drive you'll never use it all.

The thing about it also is you can play all the high demanding games out now and for some time to come.

No I don't work for HP but I must give credit where credit is due. I did many hours of research on units and this is a no brainer.

YOU'LL LOVE IT.

thank me later

Gregory C.

This computer seemed to be a decent price for the performance, but it has turned out to be very dysfunctional system. Every few days or so the system's performance degrades to the point it is essentially unusable. No amount of regular tuning, defragging, or malware checking has prevented this from happening. The only solution is let it sit for several hours, usually overnight, and eventually it becomes useable again. On other days, the computer graphics and sound will stutter randomly when attempting to play games, then a few days later it seems to function normally again.

I ultimately chose to remove the unhelpful "bells-and-whistles" software that HP pre-loads on the system. This did not fix any problems, but it did free up some memory and hard drive space. Trying to wipe the hard drive and re-install the operating system was not possible because Vista could not recognize the DVD drive it was trying to install from.

I do not know if Vista 64 bit is to blame for this unstable system, or HP, or maybe a combination of both. In any case I will not be buying an HP computer again. This system is unreliable and only good for cannibalizing into spare parts.

I bought this amazing desktop computer the last week; the computer is amazing have a lot of performance. I install Crysis in the m9350f and run in full and I don't have problems with low fps, it run perfect. I recommend this machine for gamer's o graphic or video edit. Take care with the vista 64 bit because some old programs can't run in 64bit platform.
Processor: AMD Phenom X4 9850 2.5 GHz
Chipset: nvidia 8200
Memory ram: 6 GB PC2-6400
16X DVD(+/-)R/RW 12X RAM (+/-)R DL LightScribe SATA drive
Wireless LAN 802.11 b/g/n
Video Card: GeForce 9800 GT 512 MB GDDR3 memory
TV tuner card with FM tuner
Remote control
Internal IR receiver
Memory Card Reader (16 types)
Hard drive 750 GB SATA 3G (3.0 Gb/sec) 7200 rpm
Motherboard: ASUS M2N78-LA
FSB : 5200MT/s (5.2 GT/s )
Dual channel memory architecture
Windows Vista Home Premium with Windows Media Center (64-bit) with Vista Service Pack 1