PCWorld: HP Pavilion HPE-170t: Chart-Topping Performance–and a Few Quirks
With a 2.80GHz Intel Core i7 860 processor and screaming RAID hard drive array, this was the hottest ‘value’ desktop PCWorld tested.
“At first glance, HP’s Pavilion HPE-170t might look out of place in the Value PC category. And it almost is: Its price of $1434 (as of February 19, 2010) nearly shoots above the category’s limit, close enough to make anyone wonder about the “value” in this desktop. The HPE-170t, however, is a tremendous deal, as its performance beats out every single value system on our charts–and even rivaling all but the fastest of the power PCs we’ve reviewed. You don’t often find a system with this wicked combination of savings and speed–but note that HP made a few sacrifices to get there.
The system’s 2.80GHz Intel Core i7 860 processor is speedy, but it’s not the fastest of Intel’s line, nor the highest-frequency processor we’ve seen in a desktop system. So how, then, is the HPE-170t able to hit a whopping 162 on our Worldbench 6 suite of tests? A little bit of this performance can be traced to the system’s 8GB of DDR3 memory. You don’t often see such a hefty amount of RAM in a standard desktop machine. But the stronger culprit behind the HPE-170t’s performance is its hard-drive setup: two 500GB drives in a superfast RAID 0 array. Though the array doubles your chances for data failure, it really delivers for general system use.”
