HP Releases Three More Pavilions for Desktop Line
HP made headlines earlier in the week with some leaked documents about how the Slate is going to beat the iPad. However, the company has some new additions to its desktop line, as it released three more PCs under its Pavilion brand.
According to Computermonger, the trio includes two new small form factor PCs, the Slimline s5305z and s5350z and the high-performance HP Pavilion Elite HPE-190t.
The Slimline s5305z is the cheapest out of the lot. It features options for either an AMD Sempron or Athlon dual core processor right up to the AMD Athlon II 250 and packs 4GB DDR3, up to 750GB of storage (HDD), and ATI Radeon or NVIDIA GeForce dedicated or integrated GeForce graphics. It starts from $299.99 so it's cheaper than what you'd pay for a lot of netbooks or nettops on the market.
The s5350z is slightly more expensive. At roughly the kind of money you'd be paying for a decent netbook, it features an AMD Athlon or Phenom processor, with the option to upgrade up to the Phenom X4 925. It comes with up to 8GB DDR3 memory, a maximum of 1.5TB of storage, and ATI Radeon or Nvidia GeForce dedicated or integrated GeForce GPU. Base price starts at $479.99.
The last of HP's new Pavilions is not as cheap and cheerful as the first two. Boasting Intel's Core i7-980X six core CPU, buyers of the Elite HPE-190t have the option for up to 24GB of DDR3, up to 3TB of storage, and ATI Radeon or Nvidia GeForce dedicated graphics. The Elite starts at $1,899.99

On another note entirely, it continues to amaze me how much OEM computers place an emphasis on the CPU compared to the GPU, even though most of the people who buy the high-end stuff probably want to do a lot of high end gaming on it. The Elite HPE-190t will actually have the mighty i7-980X, but it'll probably end up with a GPU like a GTX 260 or Radeon 4850, and the people who buy it will wonder why they paid almost $2,000 for a computer and still won't be able to play every game on max settings. Oh well.
I picked up an i7, 16", 4GB DDR, GT230 1GB, 320GB 7200rpm model about 6 months ago for $800. It's been a fantastic HTPC. Plays all the modern games at 1080p and does netflix streaming without a hitch.
/knockonwood.
If I get 3 years out of it, I'll take it as a solid investment.