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HP Pavilion Elite E9220y review: HP Pavilion Elite E9220y

HP Pavilion Elite E9220y

Rich Brown Former Senior Editorial Director - Home and Wellness
Rich was the editorial lead for CNET's Home and Wellness sections, based in Louisville, Kentucky. Before moving to Louisville in 2013, Rich ran CNET's desktop computer review section for 10 years in New York City. He has worked as a tech journalist since 1994, covering everything from 3D printing to Z-Wave smart locks.
Expertise Smart home, Windows PCs, cooking (sometimes), woodworking tools (getting there...)
Rich Brown
5 min read

Editors' note: This review is part of our 2009 Retail Laptop and Desktop Holiday Roundup, which covers specific fixed configurations of popular systems found in retail stores.

4.6

HP Pavilion Elite E9220y

The Good

Reasonably attractive exterior.

The Bad

Poor value and performance compared with less expensive desktops, including one from HP; adding hard drives is a pain because of obstructed drive bay; poor power efficiency.

The Bottom Line

HP's Pavilion Elite E9220y strikes out because of slow performance and underwhelming features for its price. We can't recommend this desktop to anyone.

Yeesh. HP's Pavilion Elite has missed the mark before, but the discrepancy between this $799 Pavilion Elite E9220y and other retail PCs might be as wide as we've seen. HP is essentially asking you to pay $150 for $80 worth of features and slower performance than its competition. If you haven't already guessed, we don't recommend this desktop.

HP's Pavilion Elite chassis has been around for just over two years, and we continue to find it a mixed offering. It looks good on the outside, and for many of you that might be all that matters. Its black plastic is accented by soft, blue LED buttons. Wireless and drive activity indicator lights add a touch of functional polish. In general this system cuts a profile that strikes a balance between approachable and sophisticated.

The disconnect comes by way of the specialized bay HP includes for adding one of its proprietary Personal Media drives. HP only included one of these bays this time (we've seen two of them crammed into older Pavilion Elites), so the internal clutter and redundant functionality is reduced, but you're still faced with the Personal Media drive cage that blocks access to the standard hard-drive bays. Adding a second or third standard hard drive to this system is thus much more complicated than it should be.

The drive issue is familiar, and also of little consequence compared with the Pavilion Elite E9220y's larger problems. The side-by-side comparison with the $650 Asus system above tells only part of the story. Aside from the price, and the CPU, the primary differences between the two systems features-wise are that the HP has wireless networking and also a discrete budget graphics card. Asus sticks with wired networking and integrated graphics.

Wi-Fi and better graphics are great, of course, and worth paying extra for as long as the value lines up. Considering that you could add Wi-Fi and the same ATI graphics card yourself to the Asus for around $80 or so, we'd need to see more from the HP to justify its higher price tag. You can argue that it's more visually attractive than the Asus system, and also that HP's service and support is more comprehensive, but we tend to take a more practical-minded stance, and the HP's laggard performance offsets any intangible benefits that might improve its value.

Adobe Photoshop CS3 image-processing test (in seconds)
(Shorter bars indicate better performance)

Apple iTunes encoding test (in seconds)
(Shorter bars indicate better performance)

Multimedia multitasking (in seconds)
(Shorter bars indicate better performance)

Cinebench
(Longer bars indicate better performance)
Rendering multiple CPUs  
Rendering single CPU  
HP Pavilion P6230y
10,825 
3,021 
HP Pavilion Elite E9220y
10,734 
2,993 
Gateway DX4300-11
10,199 
2,872 

The HP Pavilion Elite E9220y is plainly slower than the less expensive Asus, but we find the $799 HP's speed relative to the $679 HP Pavilion P6230y almost as problematic. That lower-end HP comes up marginally faster than the Pavilion Elite E9220y, and because it also offers wireless networking, and HP's polished aesthetics and robust support, the only thing the Pavilion Elite really has to recommend it over that model is its budget ATI graphics card, which you can find online for $40. That hardly accounts for the $120 premium HP wants for Elite over the standard Pavilion. If the Asus doesn't convince you that this HP is a dog, surely HP's own Pavilion P6230y will.

We can't even argue that the Pavilion Elite E9220y's graphics card gives it an advantage by adding more video outputs. Yes, the Radeon HD 4350 card in this HP has VGA, DVI, and HDMI outputs, but so do both the Pavilion P6230y and the Asus. None of the systems has eSATA jacks, but all three have optical audio outputs. HP's only connectivity advantage is its FireWire 400 port, which you'll also find on the Pavilion P6230y. The two HPs also share the same motherboard, which means they have the same combination of three 1x PCI Express slots and a single 16x PCI Express slot. The Asus expansion slot array has a few variations, none particularly crucial.

Juice box
HP Pavilion Elite E9220y  
Off (watts) 0.49
Sleep (watts) 1.92
Idle (watts) 80.97
Load (watts) 131.49
Raw (annual kWh) 309.04842
EnergyStar compliant Yes
Annual operating cost (@$0.1135/kWh) $35.08

Annual power consumption cost
HP Pavilion Elite E9220y
$35.08 

As if the Pavilion Elite E9220y didn't have enough issues, it's also a power hog compared with its faster, less expensive competition. Around $35 on the year isn't all that burdensome, but it still adds roughly another $3 to your monthly power bill. That's only an extra dollar above the Pavilion P6230y and the Asus, but compounded with the Pavilion Elite's other failings it might as well be an extra $100.

HP's service and support is on par with its large vendor competition. You get a year of parts and labor coverage out of the box, plus 24-7 toll-free phone support and a variety of resources online and on the system itself to help you troubleshoot. That's more than you get from Asus, but no less than what you'll find with the less expensive Pavilion P6230y.

Find out more about how we test desktop systems.

System configurations:

HP Pavilion Elite E9220y
Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit; 2.6GHz AMD II X4 910; 8GB 1,333MHz DDR3 SDRAM; 512MB ATI Radeon HD 4350; 1TB Western Digital 7,200rpm hard drive

Apple iMac (21.5-inch)
Apple OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.1; 3.06GHz Intel Core 2 Duo E7600; 4GB 1,066MHz DDR3 SDRAM; 256MB Nvidia GeForce 9400 integrated graphics chip; 500GB 7,200rpm Seagate Digital hard drive

Asus Essentio CG5270-BP004
Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit; 2.5GHz Intel Core 2 Quad Q8300; 8GB 800MHz DDR2 SDRAM; 32MB Intel GMA X4500 integrated graphics chip; 1TB, 7,200rpm hard drive

Gateway DX4300-11
Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit; 2.5GHz AMD Phenom II X4 805; 8GB 800MHz DDR2 SDRAM; 256MB ATI Radeon HD 3200 integrated graphics chip; 1TB, 7,200rpm hard drive

HP Pavilion P6230y
Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit; 2.6 GHz AMD Phenom II X4 810; 8GB 1333MHz DDR3 SDRAM; 256MB ATI Radeon HD 4200 integrated graphics chip; 750GB, 7,200rpm hard drive

4.6

HP Pavilion Elite E9220y

Score Breakdown

Design 5Features 4Performance 4Support 7