A Product Review of the HP Pavilion M8400F Desktop PC

HP has a number separate high end lines; one of them includes their multimedia Pavilions. Many people are becoming more interested in the multimedia PC because of its versatility. Of course the gamers love them because of their robust graphic processing abilities and they can replace so many entertainment center pieces the average consumer has looked toward them as a back bone to build an entertainment center around. In this review I have my hands on a PC that falls into this category. It is the HP Pavilion M8400F Desktop which is a multimedia PC. I'm going to let you know what sort of consumer will get the most for their money out of this computer and how well it performs for me. Let me start with a few of the basics.

Hardware:

Tuner: Both ATSC and NTSC

Processor: 2.2 GHz AMD Phenom 9500 quad-core processor

Storage Space: 2 360GB hard drives

RAM: 3GB (expandable to a maximum of 8 GB)

Optical Drive: CD R RW burner with integrated DVD +/- R RW drive

Graphics Accelerator: NVidia GeForce 8500 GT

Operating System: Microsoft Windows Vista Home

This multimedia HP PC is loaded. The AMD processor is strong and the graphics card adequate for fairly graphically intensive games. I love the huge amount of hard drive space and it really allows for this multimedia desktop to become part of the entertainment center. With Vista's integrated multimedia center it can actually become a digital video recorder recording as much HD and standard definition television as you can squeeze on the 720GBs. I would like to see 4GB of RAM in this desktop but it isn't very costly to upgrade if you need to, I also would like to see the addition of a high definition optical drive.

Connectivity:

1 Ethernet input (for use with a LAN)

6 2.0 USB ports (golden standard of periphrial inputs, use these to connect to things like digital cameras, mp3 players, and printers)

2 FireWire ports (for fast data transfer between other PC's as well as digital camcorders)

1 VGA output (a typical monitor output)

1 HDMI output (to be used to connect with high definition televisions)

1 DVI output (to connect to some televisions and some monitors)