HP Pavilion Slimline s5160f

(8 out of 10)

This little machine has plenty of horsepower for everything except hardcore games.

HP pitches its Pavilion Slimline s5160f desktop PC as “made for multimedia.” But if your definition of multimedia includes hardcore games, steer a wide berth around this machine. It’s a capable enough computer for digital photography, music, TV, and movies, but it doesn’t have the graphics horsepower that state-of-the-art games demand. To its credit, HP doesn’t pitch the machine that way. We didn’t find a single reference on the company’s website or in its marketing materials to using the Slimline series to play games. But this system is no weakling when it comes to other media-oriented tasks. HP stuffed some very good components into this small, affordable package, including a mid-range Intel quad-core CPU, 6GB of DDR3 memory, an HDTV tuner, a Blu-ray player/DVD burner combo drive, and a 750GB hard drive. And where many PCs in this price range make do with integrated graphics that hog system memory while delivering weak performance, HP provides a discrete video card featuring Nvidia’s GeForce G210 paired with 512MB of dedicated DDR2 memory. This card is certainly no graphics powerhouse, but it’s better than any integrated solution we’ve seen. Continue reading full review @ Digital Trends