Hewlett Packard Pavilion Media Center a1350n (EL472AA) PC Desktop
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- Optical Drive Type: DVD-ROM DVD Burner DVD-Dual Layer Burner CD-ROM CD Burner
- Chipset: ATI RADEON Xpress 200
- Form Factor: Tower
- Recommended Use: Home theater Use
- Processor: AMD Athlon 64 X2 2.2 GHz
- Operating System: Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition
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Solid PC with minor flaws
Pros
Good price/performance and ability to upgrade. Media center OS is a nice plus.
Cons
Slow USB performance and significant amount of trial software comes pre-installed
Recommended it?
Yes
The Bottom Line:
I recommend buying this unless you have a strong dependency on USB performance. This brings it from 5 stars to 4 stars in my book.
I purchased the A1350N about 6 months ago and here is my feedback.
Installation: Setting up the A1350N was easy. Everything is color coded so I didn't need the instructions to up the various components. No concerns here.
Configuration: The PC comes pre-configured with Windows XP Media Center Edition. The O/S looks the same as Windows XP except for the addition of the media center components which makes it easier to utilize your audio and video files. However, keep in mind there is no TV tuner card in the PC so you will need to add that yourself if you want to use the PVR (personal video recorder) functionality.
The A1350N has an abundance of ports -- 7 USB and 2 Firewire ports as well as a LightScribe DVD burner (16x speed) and a regular DVD reader. It also comes with a flash card reader which reads most major media. The only piece missing here is a floppy drive and I haven't needed it so far. If you do need to install an O/S or do other operations which require booting from floppy, you can always make a bootable CD or boot from the USB ports (though I haven't tried that myself yet).
Performance: The A1350N has a dual core Athlon X2 4200 processor which is speedy enough for virtually all applications. It also has a large 250 GB serial ATA hard drive which is speedy also (7200 RPM). The PC comes with 1 GB of RAM which is enough for most tasks outside of video editing. The main downside here is that the PC comes with on-board video. You won't want to play fast action "shoot em up" video games as the performance of on-board video is not suited for this. The upside is that you have an available PCI express slot where you can upgrade to a dedicated video card. Unfortunately, the power supply is only 300W and the motherboard doesn't support SLI so you won't be able to go for the most powerful video cards.
Concerns:
I nearly gave the A1350N a rating of 5 starts until I came across two minor issues. First, the USB performance is far below average. This impacts your use of external USB hard drives and other high speed devices. While throughput is sufficient, the best I could do is about 14 MBytes/sec. Given the USB standard is 60 MBytes (=480 MBits/sec), the performance is mediocre at best. My laptop which has a slower processor turned in scores of between 25 MBytes/sec and 30 MBytes/sec. It is an ASUS motherboard problem which has been documented at http://techreport.com/reviews/2004q4/radeon-xpress200/index.x?pg=17. The motherboard has an ATI southbridge. I've upgraded to the most recent firmware and that didn't help the situation. Worse yet -- the bus gets about 10% slower with each device you add. Note that I tested this under a clean install of XP and even under a new Windows Vista Beta and found the exact same performance issue. The workaround I have used is to purchase Firewire enclosures instead. They ran much quicker with read speeds as high as 40 MBytes/sec and write speeds around 20 MBytes/sec.
The second issue is that HP puts a fair amount of "trial" software on the PC. Fortunately, it doesn't actually slow down the PC very much but you may want to uninstall some of the applications which run at startup.
Installation: Setting up the A1350N was easy. Everything is color coded so I didn't need the instructions to up the various components. No concerns here.
Configuration: The PC comes pre-configured with Windows XP Media Center Edition. The O/S looks the same as Windows XP except for the addition of the media center components which makes it easier to utilize your audio and video files. However, keep in mind there is no TV tuner card in the PC so you will need to add that yourself if you want to use the PVR (personal video recorder) functionality.
The A1350N has an abundance of ports -- 7 USB and 2 Firewire ports as well as a LightScribe DVD burner (16x speed) and a regular DVD reader. It also comes with a flash card reader which reads most major media. The only piece missing here is a floppy drive and I haven't needed it so far. If you do need to install an O/S or do other operations which require booting from floppy, you can always make a bootable CD or boot from the USB ports (though I haven't tried that myself yet).
Performance: The A1350N has a dual core Athlon X2 4200 processor which is speedy enough for virtually all applications. It also has a large 250 GB serial ATA hard drive which is speedy also (7200 RPM). The PC comes with 1 GB of RAM which is enough for most tasks outside of video editing. The main downside here is that the PC comes with on-board video. You won't want to play fast action "shoot em up" video games as the performance of on-board video is not suited for this. The upside is that you have an available PCI express slot where you can upgrade to a dedicated video card. Unfortunately, the power supply is only 300W and the motherboard doesn't support SLI so you won't be able to go for the most powerful video cards.
Concerns:
I nearly gave the A1350N a rating of 5 starts until I came across two minor issues. First, the USB performance is far below average. This impacts your use of external USB hard drives and other high speed devices. While throughput is sufficient, the best I could do is about 14 MBytes/sec. Given the USB standard is 60 MBytes (=480 MBits/sec), the performance is mediocre at best. My laptop which has a slower processor turned in scores of between 25 MBytes/sec and 30 MBytes/sec. It is an ASUS motherboard problem which has been documented at http://techreport.com/reviews/2004q4/radeon-xpress200/index.x?pg=17. The motherboard has an ATI southbridge. I've upgraded to the most recent firmware and that didn't help the situation. Worse yet -- the bus gets about 10% slower with each device you add. Note that I tested this under a clean install of XP and even under a new Windows Vista Beta and found the exact same performance issue. The workaround I have used is to purchase Firewire enclosures instead. They ran much quicker with read speeds as high as 40 MBytes/sec and write speeds around 20 MBytes/sec.
The second issue is that HP puts a fair amount of "trial" software on the PC. Fortunately, it doesn't actually slow down the PC very much but you may want to uninstall some of the applications which run at startup.
