HP Pavilion Elite m9300t review: HP Pavilion Elite m9300t

At its core, our $1,100 HP Pavilion Elite m9300t review unit is a reasonably priced example of Hewlett-Packard's midrange desktop. It gives you about $900 worth of basic computer, and an extra $200 in home theater-style extras. The good news is that this system is configurable, so if, like us, you find the idea of home theater PCs increasingly tiresome, especially in a standard midtower, you can opt out of any features you don't want. Even with that flexibility, HP's clunky design makes us find similar PCs from Dell and Gateway more appealing.

We've seen the Pavilion Elite design in its earlier incarnations, and our complaints remain the same. The slick-looking glossy black front is fine, and we especially appreciate the integrated infrared receiver for the remote control. The issue is the two empty bays for HP's proprietary removable hard drives. You have to buy the drives to go in those bays separately, and in the meantime, you're left with a lot of wasted space. This isn't necessarily an issue on the outside of the system, but once you go inside you'll see that the cages for these superfluous drives take up a significant amount of room. The drive cage for the included internal hard drive is pushed to back where it's basically made inaccessible, and the internal wiring is dense and sloppy because of the cramped interior.

Design issues aside, there's actually a decent PC buried under all of that mess. If you discount the Blu-ray drive, the sound card, and the wireless networking adapter, you're left with a roughly $900 desktop that fares very well against its competition. Our review unit came with 32-bit Windows Vista Home Premium, but HP offers the 64-bit version for no extra charge. And with its fast Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 processor, its 500GB hard drive, and 2GB of 800MHZ DDR SDRAM, the Pavilion Elite m9300t is one of the best Photoshop systems in its price range.

The Photoshop test stands out because the HP outpaced both Apple's iMac and the

You'll note, for example that we're comparing the $1,100 HP's performance to that of a $750 Dell. That's because the HP is loaded with secondary extras like a Blu-ray/HD DVD combo drive, a sound card, and a wireless adapter. If you have $1,100 to spend and want more performance, instead of a Blu-ray/HD DVD drive and the sound card, you could configure this system with a faster CPU, more memory, and switch over to 64-bit Vista for $20 less. Of the options you are stuck with, we'd like to see the TV tuner go. Right now HP's configurator doesn't let you deselect it.