HP Pavilion Slimline s5510y review: HP Pavilion Slimline s5510y

Editors' note: This review is part of our 2010 retail laptop and desktop back-to-school roundup, covering specific fixed configurations of popular systems that can be found in retail stores.

4.7

HP Pavilion Slimline s5510y

The Good

Small size; support policies meet industry standards.

The Bad

Outdated motherboard lacks HDMI output; slower and has fewer features than desktops that cost $70 less.

The Bottom Line

Do not buy this HP Pavilion Slimline s5510y. Its slow performance for its price and its outdated motherboard prevent it from leveraging the strengths of its slim tower case in the living room. You can find faster, better-equipped PCs for the same price or less.

Multiple desktop vendors tell us that the PCs you find at Best Buy are the product of rigid formulas cooked up by the company's corporate office. From what we understand, Best Buy regulates the specs, design, and the price of the various PCs the company is willing to stock, on the theory that its formula can predict the kinds of computers consumers are most likely to purchase. A retail partner's formula-driven stocking strategy might partially exonerate HP for the existence of this underfeatured, out-of-date Pavilion Slimline s5510y. Regardless of its origins, we encourage you, strongly, to buy a different PC.

First, let us say that we like the slim tower's desktop chassis quite a bit. Gateway and Acer's recent models have fared very well in our reviews, and we've written positively about previous incarnations of HP's Slimline family. The problem with this current model is that HP failed to upgrade the system's motherboard for at least a year, leaving the PC with the same generations-old integrated Nvidia graphics chip and no HDMI port.

Since the Slimline lacks a convenient means to connect to your television, the slim tower case has only its space-saving benefits to offer desktop shoppers. That's a reasonable selling point, but it's not enough to overcome the Slimline's features and performance deficit compared with its more affordable midtower competition.

The eMachines ET1831-07 is a standard midtower PC that costs $70 less than the Slimline, and it has a larger hard drive, more RAM, and better overall performance. During our first time out with the eMachines, we found its HD movie playback suboptimal. We circled back to that system to compare it with the Slimline, and with an updated Flash player the eMachines handled 1080p video content about as well as this HP does. Neither system plays HD movies perfectly, but since neither system has an HDMI port, you're not likely to use either PC as a home theater system.

Their video playback quality equal, the HP only has its small size as a distinguishing factor. Combine that with its lack of features next to the eMachine, and this Slimline looks like a terrible value.

CineBench tests
(Longer bars indicate better performance)

Rendering multiple CPUs

Rendering single CPU

Asus Essentio CM5671

6,141 

3,288 

eMachines ET1831-07

5,880 

3,079 

Dell Inspiron i560-2050NBK

5,684 

3,076 

HP Pavilion Slimline s5510y

5,631 

3,092 

Our benchmark tests provide an equally damning argument that you should avoid this system. The Slimline lags behind the less-expensive eMachines system on every single test. We could see value in an affordable slim tower PC if it offered competitive performance. With its poor performance in our tests, the Slimline has little going for it.

Its lack of an HDMI port hinders this HP as a living room system, but we're also unimpressed by its other connectivity options. You get two USB 2.0 jacks on the back, a set of analog audio inputs, a VGA output for video, and an Ethernet jack--that's it. We've seen $450 slim towers from Gateway and Acer with FireWire and eSATA jacks, so it's not out of the question that this HP system could have them, too. Again, we'll blame its lack of options on the outdated motherboard that holds this system back in a variety of ways. You at least get reasonable expandability inside the Slimline for its size, with half-height slots for a 1x PCI Express card and a 16x PCI Express graphics card. It unfortunately lacks room for more memory or a second hard drive.

Juice box
HP Pavilion Slimline s5510y	Average watts per hour
Off	1.4
Sleep	3.7
Idle	59.04
Load	100.41
Raw (annual kWh)	233.36202
Energy Star compliant	No
Annual power consumption cost	$26.49

At risk of piling on, the HP's relatively inefficient power consumption also bears mentioning. Whether it's the chipset, the CPU, or some other component, we can't say. But for whatever reason, this slow Slimline costs about 50 percent more to operate per year than its budget PC competition does, or about 80 cents per more a month than the eMachines. Monetarily speaking, we suspect most of you can handle that, but we hope you won't have to. Not only is this desktop slow for its price range, it's also a power hog.

HP's service and support matches the industry-standard one-year warranty coverage with 24-7 toll-free phone support. HP's Web site also has some useful features, from FAQs, driver, and manual downloads, as well as support chat. The system also comes with a few diagnostic tools, although you'll have to sort them out from the various trial offers and bloatware icons in the dock at the top of the Windows desktop.

Find out more about how we test desktop systems.

System configurations:
Asus Essentio CM567105
Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit); 2.7GHz Intel Pentium Dual Core E5500; 4GB 800MHz DDR2 SDRAM; 128MB (shared) Intel GMA X4500 HD integrated graphics chip; 1TB 7,200rpm Hitachi hard drive

Dell Inspiron i560-2050NBK
Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit); 2.7GHz Intel Pentium Dual Core E5400; 4GB 800MHz DDR2 SDRAM; 32MB (shared) Intel GMA X4500 integrated graphics chip; 500GB 7,200rpm Western Digital hard drive

eMachines ET1831-07
Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit); 2.7GHz Intel Pentium Dual Core E5400; 4GB 800MHz DDR2 SDRAM; 256MB (shared) Nvidia GeForce 7050 integrated graphics chip; 750GB 7,200rpm Seagate hard drive

HP Pavilion Slimline s5510y
Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit); 2.8GHz AMD Athlon II X2 240; 3GB 800MHz DDR2 SDRAM; 256MB (shared) Nvidia GeForce 6150SE integrated graphics chip; 640GB 7,200rpm Western Digital hard drive