HP Pavilion Elite m9400t

The HP Pavilion Elite m9400t ($1,109 list; $1,440 with 20-inch widescreen monitor) will look familiar to some. It's housed in the same case as the m9200t I looked at not too long ago, and it's externally identical to the m9040n I reviewed last year. Like those systems, the m9400t is built to order, and it's optimized for the multimedia enthusiast—as in the teen or adult in your family who thinks that the current family PC is "too slow" and "doesn't do enough." The m9400t has as many inputs and outputs on it as a typical A/V receiver in your home theater, and it's just as much the center of your digital life. It has a friendly $1,110 price, and it's the PC you'll want to use when you get serious about the photos you shoot, the videos you post to the Internet, and the shows you watch on TV.
The m9400t comes in a mid-tower case with an abundance of discreetly hidden input and output ports for your analog and digital sound and video. With both front doors closed, the system looks like a standard PC, albeit one with an attractive black glossy finish and silvery accents. The right door hides the Personal Media Drive bay (more on that later), and the left one hides easy-to-reach inputs for FireWire, USB, headphones, a microphone, and a full set of A/V inputs for video-in, audio L/R-in, and S-Video-in. (That's right, you can hook up your analog camcorder or VCR to the system.) On the back there's another set of A/V inputs that connect right into the TV tuner card (for set-top boxes such as cable boxes), antenna jacks for over-the-air and FM radio, more USB ports, another FireWire port, and digital audio input and output. Along with the ports, there's a digital media card reader.

The m9400t comes with a Blu-ray reader, so you can play back high-definition movies. It can burn CDs and DVDs, but not BD-R (Blu-ray) discs. This is fine, because it saves you a few hundred dollars over the Blu-ray burner model. BD-R media is still too expensive, and Blu-ray drives are rare enough to make the ability to burn Blu-ray discs not absolutely necessary. The m9400t has HDCP-compliant DVI and HDMI ports on the back of its GeForce 9500 GS card, so you can hook up a DVI monitor or an HDTV. Both formats look terrific played back on the m9400t. The system also has 802.11g Wi-Fi networking, so you don't have to set it up near your cable modem if you don't want to.

Home video files, music, and photos can take up a lot of hard drive space. The system's 500GB built-in hard drive is roomy but likely to fill up quickly. The m9400t has, in addition, slots for two different types of removable hard drives. The first is for Pocket Media drives, which come in 160GB and 320GB capacities, at $120 and $180 direct, respectively; they are notebook-class drives that can be powered via a USB cable. The other is for Personal Media drives, which come in 500GB and 1TB capacities (at $120 and $180) and are desktop-class drives—they need an external power adapter when not plugged into the m9400t. Both will give you seemingly unlimited storage, and both work with the "easy backup" button on the front of the system. You can set the button to launch an automatic backup of anything you have on the system, including your documents, digital media, and more. Especially on a media system, where you're storing all your family's memories, it's important to back up your data.

When it comes to performance, the m9400t's 3GB of memory and quad-core Q6600 processor helped the system obtain impressive benchmark test results. The m9400t finished the Windows Media Encoder test in a speedy 46 seconds, and the Photoshop CS3 test in 29 seconds. Earlier this year, high-end machines like the Gateway FX7020 performed the same tests in around a minute, but the m9400t is pretty much on a par with what we're seeing in multimedia PCs nowadays.

Even though the system has a discrete GeForce 9500 GS graphics card, it's not ideal for 3D gaming. The m9400t's World in Conflict score of 29 frames per second at a resolution of 1,280-by-1,024 indicates a mostly playable speed. On Crysis at the same resolution, however, the system's score was a jerky 20 fps. That said, it should have no problem playing more modest games like Company of Heroes or World of Warcraft. If 3D performance is important, you can swap the graphics card for something more powerful when you configure it to order, but of course that will cost more money.

If there are any drawbacks to this system, it's that it has a bunch of bloatware on it, including programs like a Microsoft Office 60-day trial, "My HP Games" by Wild Tangent, Yahoo! Toolbar, and Snapfish Picture Mover. I classify all these as bloatware because you can download them free on the Internet: They don't give you any extra utility by coming preinstalled, and three of the four programs will try to sell you something (more game time, digital photo prints, and a full version of Office, to be exact). While there may not be anything inherently malicious about any of the three, they constitute advertisements that you really don't need. Speaking of ads, there are plenty of them on the desktop and in the Vista Welcome Center (the first screen you see after you've setup your PC, and every time you turn on the PC unless you turn Welcome Center off), including ads for eBay, Juno and NetZero (dial-up Internet providers), MSN, and WeatherBug. The m9400t isn't alone in this offense (systems from eMachines and Sony are similarly burdened with bloatware), but that doesn't make it right.

HP does redeem itself a little bit by offering a 15-month subscription for Norton Internet Security. This is a vast improvement over systems from Dell and Gateway that come with measly 30-to-60-day subscriptions.

Ultimately it's the features you get for the price that earn the HP Pavilion Elite m9400t its Editors' Choice award for mainstream desktops. This is the system to buy if you want to spend around $1,000 and still enjoy multimedia-rich features and performance.