Deals.Woot

Good PC for the price. As others often point out on these refurb HP's, with a better Power Supply you could add a dedicated graphics card and have a great gaming PC.

@lpsession: You answered my question as I was commenting. Thanks! I don't know much about PC gaming. What would be the cost estimate for the power supply and graphics card upgrade to make this a decent rig? Would it be capable of running games like Battlefield 3 pretty well?

@wnyx585am: it definately, it has nice room in the RAM department. It also has a quadcore which is very handy. a nice video card as mentioned is about 200 bucks. but you can find deals on even those if you keep a good look out on like newegg. the brand new line of video cards are due out next month which means prices should drop very soon.

The only thing you have to be careful about is if these things use proprietary PSUs. I know older Dells used to have them, and if you tried to plug in a PSU not from Dell you'd wind up frying everything.

@racinreaver: Most of the time they are using basically COTS components so you can upgrade/change with out having to use only OEM stuff.

However, by the time you put in a new quality PSU & video card in this, you can build your own for right around the same price. If you think your skillful enough to upgrade those components then really look into building your own. Of course, you won't get all that great (rollseyes) pre-installed software.

there are only a few problems with turning this into a gaming machine. The first is that the processor is a 2.1ghz, and the 8gb of ram is ddr3 1333, not 1600.

it will run it, but don't be expecting to max the settings..

last, the highest settings on BF3 really need a video card with 2gb of vram. Lower settings obviously dont.

@szetoa: not sure why the thumbs down, but for the money you would spend on this unit ($400) and upgrading the PSU ($50) and GCard ($100-$200), building a machine isn't a bad comparison. That is assuming you are comfortable building one or know someone that is - either way you'd be messing with the hardware replacing parts.

I have HP machines at work and have seen some personal use around me and mostly have good experiences with them. I've seen more issues with Dell laptops, but I guess if you survey owners of every brand, there will always be some with bad experiences.

@sumduud: I'm always in favor of building your own. I gave Szetoa thumbs down because he didn't take into account an OS ($100) and a keyboard/mouse (around $40). That takes the total closer to $700. When I'm talking to friends about building their own, the cost of an OS is almost always overlooked.

edit: Your pc is almost the exact same thing I'm running! I even ran a 9600gt for a while.

Looking for a new computer not for gaming but just business applications, such as excel, word and quickbooks. any suggestions?

@dadmicfly: If you're looking for a desktop computer something like this is a good option, given that you don't want to build it yourself. This is a nice computer for basic use, to make it gaming you'd have to buy extra.

@szetoa:

You would be better off buying this $300 and dropping in a GPU and power supply for maybe $200 more. You would be spending $600 total and have a PC capable of running any current game at decent settings and resolution.

Your build doesn't include a GPU or an operating system, so adding those would put you over $700. Plus you would have to have the time and knowledge of being able to build the entire thing, install proper drivers, etc.

And this processor has a higher benchmark than the i3 2100.

@lordhewlett: I second this. I have an HP pavilion tower that I bought in 2002 that is still going strong. One hard drive clicked out about six months ago. I've added ram and a video card but the beast has been running constantly all day every day for Almost ten full years now. I reboot about once a month when the power goes out. Apart from that its always on. Don't know where all this hate is coming from. I have had a couple HP printers that all worked very well unitil I upgraded. And lastly an HP laptop Ghats been working fine since 2005 or so

@eastonfrost: Good point, I tend to forget about the OS because I just recycle my own. That and I quite building for friends, because I got sick of playing tech support when they would do something to the machine. As for the mouse and keyboard I will use an existing, since I have far too many. But from a point where you are starting fresh, those must be considered.

I've got to say that if you're just going to be surfing the internet and/or just some office/business work, this computer would be well worth the price to buy. Most work oriented software are just starting to take dual core cpu's into account, so quad cores would actually be over the top for at least this year. I'm not saying you can run the newest autocad application, or similar products without a hiccup or two, but lightroom3, photshop elements and the like would work fine on this system.

For gaming, for example, battlefield 3, you would definately need a good videocard, as stated above, a larger power supply to go with it. Something along the lines of a NVidia 420 or better to be on medium settings would be all you really would need to play bf3.

I'd reccomend syating away from overclocked videocards with this computer as it seems bf3 has some issues with them.

@chalion: Can you share your datapoints that support your claim that 64-bit as an architecture is a "bandwagon"?I'm fairly certain it's the next step in the evolution of the personal and enterprise computing infrastructure.

A 32-bit OS is incapable of addressing more than 4GB of addressable memory (the amount of actual RAM 32-bit Windows can access is 3.25 GB, in actuality, as the remaining memory is dedicated to certain hardware devices), whereas a 64-bit OS can address up to 1TB of both physical and addressable memory.

But it's not only memory usage that increases. 64-bit Windows is more secure, more scalable and supports virtualization...things a casual user may not understand or care about, but that which benefits them nonetheless.

Windows 7 64-bit is absolutely appropriate for this system and necessary to take advantage of this system's hardware configuration.