HP Pavilion gaming desktop 10th Gen Intel Core i7 review – what is the best price?

What is the HP Pavilion gaming desktop 10th Gen Intel Core i7 price? Who should buy this? Everything you do feels effortless and faster than ever before with a 10th Generation Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-10700 processor and integrated Bluetooth(R) 4.2 technology. Enjoy all of your DVDs with easy navigation and enhanced video quality on a high performance DVD player optimized for Windows 10. Get 25 GB of Dropbox storage for one year to access, manage, and share your photos, music, and files from anywhere with Internet access. 

Pros & Cons

PROS

• Compact, sleek design
• Casual gaming for much less
• Plenty of connectivity ports
• Well priced

CONS

• An additional hard drive for storage would be better, too
• Not designed for tool-less upgrades

Specs – HP Pavilion gaming desktop 10th Gen Intel Core i7

• Processor Model: AMD 2nd Generation Ryzen 5
• Processor Model Number: 2400G
• Processor Speed (Base): 3.6 gigahertz
• Storage Type: SSD, HDD
• Total Storage Capacity: 1128 gigabytes
• Solid State Drive Capacity: 128 gigabytes
• Hard Drive Capacity: 1000 gigabytes
• System Memory (RAM): 8 gigabytes
• Operating System: Windows 10 Home
• Pavilion Gaming Desktop – AMD Ryzen 5 2400G – 8GB Memory – AMD Radeon RX 580 4GB – 1TB HDD 128GB SSD
• Color: Black
• Processor Brand: AMD
• Processor Model: AMD 2nd Generation Ryzen 5
• Processor Model Number: 2400G
• Processor Speed (Base): 3.6 gigahertz
• Total Storage Capacity: 1128 gigabytes
• Solid State Drive Capacity: 128 gigabytes
• Hard Drive Capacity: 1000 gigabytes
• Solid State Drive Interface: SATA
• Hard Drive Interface: SATA
• Hard Drive RPM: 7200 revolutions per minute
• Hard Drive Accelerator: None
• System Memory (RAM): 8 gigabytes
• Type of Memory (RAM): DDR4 SDRAM
• System Memory RAM Speed: 2666 megahertz
• Cache Memory: 6 megabytes
• Number Of Memory Slots: 2
• Number of Memory Sticks Included: 3
• System Memory RAM Expandable: 32 gigabytes
• Video Memory: 4096 megabytes
• Operating System: Windows 10 Home
• Internet Connectivity: Wi-Fi
• Wireless Networking: Wireless-AC
• Bluetooth Enabled: Yes
• Ethernet Card: 10/100/1000
• Number Of Ethernet Ports: 1
• Number of HDMI Outputs (Total): 1
• Number of USB Ports (Total): 9
• Number of USB 2.0 Type A Ports: 2
• Number of DisplayPort Outputs (Total): 3

• Number of M.2 Slots: 2
• Number Of Internal 2.5″ Bays: 1
• Number Of Internal 3.5″ Bays: 1
• Number Of External 5.25″ Expansion Bays: 1
• Number Of PCI-E x1 Slots: 1
• Number Of PCI-E x16 Slots: 1
• Features
• Media Card Reader: Yes
• Audio Technology: 5.1 channel surround
• Dimension
• Product Height: 13.3 inches
• Product Width: 6.7 inches
• Product Depth: 11 inches
• Product Weight: 11.4 pounds
• Additional Accessories Included
• Mouse, keyboard
• Included Software: HP Recovery Manager, HP Support Assistant, HP Games Powered by WildTangent, Netflix, McAfee LiveSafe (30 days trial), CyberLink Power Media Player, Dropbox (25 GB Cloud Storage) (free for 1 year), HP JumpStart and HP Connection Optimizer

Compare HP Pavilion gaming desktop 10th Gen Intel Core i7 vs HP Envy Desktop

Price

Coming in at $683.81 this rig falls into our budget category of gaming PCs under $750. The setup can run 559 of our target games at recommended level.

HP Pavilion gaming desktop 10th Gen Intel Core i7 review

Design

Measuring 33.74cm tall, 15,54cm wide and 30.7cm deep, the Pavilion Gaming Desktop is considerably smaller than you might expect, and will not take up too much room on your desk. The front panel is slightly raised in the centre and has a ridged V-shaped pattern. 

A traditional tower PC like the Pavilion Desktop takes up a lot of desk space compared to a laptop or an all-in-one (AIO) desktop. It stands just over a foot tall and weighs about 13 pounds, which means it’s best suited to stay underneath your desk.

Connectors

The HP Pavilion Gaming desktop gets a decent number of ports as well, including four USB 3.1 ports, one USB Type-C port, four USB 2.0 ports, an RJ45 port, a headphone jack and an SD card slot. On the GTX 1650 graphics card, there are DisplayPort and HDMI ports for multi-monitor setup.

HP bundles into the package a standard keyboard and mouse, and while they are not gaming peripherals, at least you getting something.

Lighting

The power button has a purple LED, and there is purple accent lighting in the crevice at the bottom which will reflect across your table. This can be disabled in software, though it will always light up when the computer is booting. The shiny circle around the HP logo on the bottom right also has a slight purple tint, as do the port labels.

Processor

You can choose between an Intel Core i5-9400F, Core i7-9700, AMD Ryzen 5 3500, and Ryzen 7 3700X. It’s hard to say for sure whether Intel or AMD options would be better suited to different peoples’ specific workloads, but both should be more than adequate for gaming and content creation as well as general productivity.

HP offers Intel Core i7 and AMD Ryzen 5 and 7 processors inside these rigs, and they’re all capable of handling everyday browsing, office tasks and schoolwork. The Ryzen 7 and Core i7 CPUs can tackle more demanding tasks like video editing software, too.

Graphics

The combination of AMD CPU and Nvidia GPU has been popular in affordable gaming laptops for a while now. AMD’s current desktop lineup is based on the 7nm ‘Zen 2’ architecture, while HP has chosen Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1660, an entry-level GPU that’s best suited for gaming at 1920×1080 or lower resolutions, and doesn’t support RTX ray tracing effects.

Storage

This PC comes with 8GB of DDR4-2666 RAM, a 512GB SSD, and a 1TB hard drive. A little digging revealed that HP has used a single 8GB RAM module rather than two in a dual-channel configuration, but at least the SSD is a speedy NVMe unit, not old-fashioned SATA.

Power & cooling fan

The power supply has a 310W maximum power output rating and only the bare minimum of connectors, but it is at least rated 80 Plus Gold for efficiency. There’s a single 8-pin PCIe power connector for the graphics card and only one spare SATA connector.

The next thing that jumped out at me was the relatively small CPU cooler and fan – this is definitely not as beefy as the stock Wraith Prism cooler that AMD ships with the Ryzen 7 3700X, and also understandably lacks the RGB LEDs.

Other feature

There are several HP utilities as well – curiously, you get the HP Omen Command Center which lets you monitor temperatures and control the purple front panel lighting – but you get only “breathing” and “blinking” effects which are too distracting, and no brightness control. I chose to simply turn the LEDs off. The software also should allow you to stream games across a home network to another Windows PC or a smartphone, but I was unable to try this.

HP preinstalls Windows 10 Home and Microsoft Office Home and Student, which is not subscription-based and so won’t require any additional expense. There’s quite a bit of bloatware as well, including Netflix, Spotify, Amazon Prime Video, Booking.com, Adobe Photoshop Express, PicsArt Photo Studio, the WildTangent Games store, a few freemium games, and McAfee Personal Security. Some of these are downloaded from the Microsoft Store when you click on them. You also get 25GB of Dropbox space free for a year.

HP Pavilion gaming desktop 10th Gen Intel Core i7 Performance review

For around the same price, the Acer Aspire TC-895-UR11, packs a better 10^th generation Intel Core i5-10400 processor, 12GB RAM and 512GB SSD; and even includes a USB Type-C port. However, it uses an integrated Intel UHD Graphics 630 graphics card, while the HP uses a dedicated Nvidia 1650 graphics card.

With a 10^th generation 10^th generation Intel Core i3-10100 processor, 8GB RAM and 256GB NVMe, the HP Pavilion TG01-1022 checks all the boxes for a capable multimedia or office productivity PC. It uses a newer chip and the option to use an SSD instead of a traditional HDD gives some leverage for most productivity tasks you might need to run.

If you need something for productivity, the Aspire is a better choice, but for some gaming, the HP Pavilion is an even better budget choice.

For a budget PC, this is acceptable, but if you need something future-proof without spending too much, the CyberpowerPC Gamer GXiVR8060A10 in worth a long look. It comes with an Intel Core i5-10400F processor, 8GB RAM, 500GB SSD and Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1660 Super (6GB) graphics card. It is encased in a practical case that supports future upgrades and sports a gamer look, for those who need some lighting in their rig of choice.

When not working, the Nvidia 1650 graphics card lets you play modern games, albeit at medium settings, maxed at 1080p resolution. In real world gaming, it delivers decent frame rates per second: Far Cry New Dawn (55 fps – high; 50 fps – Ultra), Assassin’s Creed Odyssey (54 fps – med; 46 fps – high), and Shadow of the Tomb Raider (57 fps – med; 49 fps – high), all played at 1080p resolution.

On average, all our CPU-bound test results ran about 13 percent slower on the HP Pavilion Gaming Desktop TG01-0203in than on the open test bench I used when reviewing the Ryzen 7 3700X CPU. This could be down to the premium components I used for the latter, especially the faster dual-channel RAM and more capable cooler. The difference doesn’t mean that the HP desktop’s scores are bad – in fact the experience is pretty great overall – but it does show that there might be more potential to be tapped.

The PCMark 10 benchmark put up scores of 5,619 in its standard run and 6,656 in its Extended run. CineBench R20’s single-core and multi-core tests returned 439 and 2,431 points respectively. POVRay’s default benchmark took 1 minute, 9 seconds to complete, while the Corona Renderer benchmark ran in 2 minutes, 18 seconds. Compressing a 3.24GB folder full of assorted files took 2 minutes, 42 seconds. Transcoding a 1.3GB AVI file into H.265 took 49 seconds.

Coming to graphics and games, I managed to get scores of 5,479 and 2,444 in 3DMark’s Time Spy and Time Spy Extreme runs. The Port Royal test returned a score of 1,401 and Fire Strike Ultra put up 2,919 points. The PC also scored 9,881 in the Unigine Superposition test running at 1080p (Medium). These are actually comparable to what I saw with a standalone Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1660 OC 6G graphics card, which interestingly enough was tested with a Ryzen 7 2700X CPU.

HP Pavilion gaming desktop 10th Gen Intel Core i7 Customer review

Great Gaming PC, Better Value than a Console

GENERAL: Seriously impressed. Out of the box you will need to install all of the Windows 10 updates. So make sure you do that first. The inbuilt WiFi is fast and updates installed quickly. There are also AMD Radeon RX 580 graphics driver updates, but you need to go to AMD.com to download their driver detect and update tool. Windows won’t install the latest AMD drivers by default. If you install the latest AMD drivers you will be able to use AMD Freesync, which gives you better frame rates on compatible monitors. I am using this with the HP 25X monitor and it’s a perfect gaming setup. I would recommend buying both together (Pavilion and 25X monitor) from BestBuy.

I haven’t used a desktop PC for a while and forgot how whisper quiet they are compared to laptops which tend to run hot. FYI, the vent on the grill is on the left side (if you’re facing the PC). Thought I’d share for anyone who is thinking of putting this in a cabinet or using as a multimedia PC. There is only a left hand and rear vent. Seriously though, I want to say again how quiet this is. I have been gaming on a laptop previously and I am use to the sound of fans kick in everytime I play. Not so with this, even on Ultra/Epic settings for games. Gosh, even my PS4 runs louder than the Pavilion. Wow!

Boot time is almost instant thanks to the 128GB SSD. The 1TB mechnical drive is rate at 7200 RPM. My Pavilion has a Samsung M2 SSD and and Toshiba HDD.

CASE: The picture on BestBuy is a little misleading as the case is actually much smaller than it looks on the website. It’s roughly 13″ tall, 11″ deep and 7″ wide. It’s about the size of a small sub woofer. It’s a compact tower case. So fits neatly under a desk or could be used as a entertainment PC.

SYSTEM UPDATES: Aside from Windows System Updates, you will also need to install some HP BIOS firmware updates. You do this through the HP Service and Support Software (it’s hidden in the start menu).

PORTS: HP have been generous with number of includes USB ports. 8 in total + 1 USB C (and a SD card reader). I laughed when I first saw all the USB ports, but after you plugin a mouse, keyboard (my HP Omen Sequencer needs 2 USB ports), and a USB gaming headset you quickly start filling up ports and would need them all if you decided to use VR. The Radeon RX580 has 1x HDMI and 3x Display ports. 2 of the USB ports and the USB C port are front mounted as is the SD card reader.

MOUSE/KEYBOARD: It comes bundled with a corded mouse/keyboard. The mouse and keyboard are good but not gaming qualty. The keys have very little travel. Comparable to laptop chiclet keyboards. If you are serious about gaming, I’d recommend buying a quality mechanical gaming keyboard. The HP Omen Sequencer keyboard (also available from BestBuy) is my personal choice and works a great.

GAMING: I tested the HP Pavilion Ryzen 5/Radeon RX 580 with Overwatch, Destiny 2 and Fortnite.

Overwatch: Played on Epic, steady 85 FPS no issue.
Destiny 2: Highest settings, steady 60 FPS no issue.
Fortnite : Played on Epic, steady 80+ FPS no issue.

I also play Civ VI, it doesn’t show frame rate as it’s not that sort of game. But it played happily on max graphics settings.

DRIVE SETUP: The system is configured as follows. SSD is the C:\ drive and has Windows. D:\ is the 1TB mechnical driver. E:\ is partitioned as the recovery drive. When installing software make sure you select to install games and apps on D:\ . This can be down within your Steam Client or Battle.net account. Please don’t use regedit to hard code a new directory, it’s best to take the few seconds to check you are selecting the right drive when you install software. There’s also a DVD drive mapped to F:\

BEST BUY FREE GAMES: If you buy this PC form BestBuy it comes with some bundled games courtesy of AMD. But only if you get this model, the one with a Ryzen and Radeon graphics cards. The choice of games changes from time to time depending on the purchase date. You should get a coupon code from BestBuy on purchase which you can then redeem on AMDrewards.com for your free games (registration required).

HP INCLUDED SOFTWARE: HP have really fixed the bloatware issue that use to plague their PCs. There’s no rubbish other than 3rd party antivirus installed by default. When you first run the Pavilion it does run “HP JumpStart” where you can download some software that HP is promoting – but I find this respectful and better than having to spend time uninstalling unwanted software. The only non-standard software installed is McAffee Live Safe trial, which is easy to remove.

HARDWARE UPGRADES: The HP Pavilion is upgradeable. There’s a single screw to remove the access panel, then 4 screws inside to remove the housing cage. There’s 1 spare motherboard slot and 1 spare memory channel. I have not upgraded or removed anything, but it was easy to open the case and access the internals. You have to disconnect the DVD driver to be able to easily slide off the housing cage but it’s easy to reach. I’ve posted shots of the internals for those interested but have blanked out the serial numbers.

CASE LIGHT TIP: The case has a green vertical ambient light to give it a gaming look. You can disable this in the BIOS. To access the BIOS. Hit ESC on boot. You will be promoted to hit ESC again. Then select

Advanced > Device Options > Chasis Light Bar > Disable > F10
Files > Save Changes

I don’t mind the case light as it does look cool. But others who have reviewed this dislike the light. The case light does not stay lit when in standby mode. You cant change the color of the light, it’s either green or off.

OVERALL: Impressed. I would recommend the Pavilion with Ryzen 5 Radeon RX 580 over a gaming console if you’re serious about gaming. As you get all the power of a gaming PC with the flexibility to get some work done as well. Just plan on buying a gaming keyboard and mouse. I would have given this 5 stars if HP had included better keyboard/mouse or a discount code to upgrade.

By teasten at Best Buy

Editor’s recommendations

• Alienware AW3420DW new curved 34 inch best price and review
• New Alienware Area-51M R2 gaming laptop review – is it upgradeable?
• Dell XPS 13 2-in-1 11th Gen 2021 review – what is the 9310 price?
• Dragon Touch S1 Pro 4K portable monitor review
• HP EliteBook 1030 x360 G2 2-in-1 13.3 review – Can you do RAM upgrade?