HP ENVY Desktop - TE01-0150xt motherboard

Productivity maximizers looking for an everyday desktop PC could do worse than to make the HP Envy Desktop [starts at $549] their workhorse. The $749 price of our review unit is a bit steep for the budget class [though we did see it on sale periodically for less than $700 during the course of our review], but it includes powerful components like a six-core Intel Core i5 processor, a solid-state drive instead of a hard drive, and 12GB of memory. Need to load your old movie collection? You'll appreciate the optical drive that can read and write DVDs, as well as the Gigabit Ethernet connectivity for serving your content to the rest of your devices.

A Ribbed Box

Although the Envy Desktop shares the same boxy shape that PC towers have used for decades, HP has jazzed up the exterior to help it compete with sleek ultraportable laptops and all-in-one desktops. The Nightfall Black chassis has rounded corners and a ribbed front, which gives off a vague Sydney Opera House aesthetic [if the Opera House were rectangular]. You should still probably hide this PC beneath your desk if possible, but if the front shows, at least it won't look boring.

The Envy Desktop's front ports are located in a column along the right edge beneath the power button, and include a headphone jack, four USB Type-A ports, a full-sized SD card reader, and a USB Type-C port. This cornucopia of ports won't leave you searching for a space to plug in external storage or charge several handheld devices simultaneously. Too many companies cram a token selection of ports into a tiny area on a desktop's front edge, and it's nice to see that HP is bucking the trend.

The Envy's chassis measures 13.3 by 6.1 by 11.9 inches [HWD] and weighs about 13 pounds depending on configured options. It's light enough to move easily with two hands, but it's nevertheless big and heavy compared to the Apple Mac mini and other similarly tiny desktops, which typically take up no more space than a wireless router and weigh much less than 10 pounds.

One of the reasons to buy a desktop PC of the Envy's size is expandability. If you plan on increasing memory or adding a more powerful graphics card in the future, a traditional desktop PC is a far better choice than an AIO or mini PC. The Envy Desktop offers a 2.5-inch drive bay, a 3.5-inch drive bay, and two M.2 slots on the motherboard for a total of four possible places to stick storage devices. [At least one of these will be occupied by the drive that comes with the PC.]

The PCI Express add-in card possibilities are far more limited. You get a single full-length PCIe x16 slot, which will come already occupied if you order the Envy Desktop with a discrete GPU. Most people won't care, but the limited PCIe situation could be an issue for some niche use cases, for instance if you need both duplexed Ethernet and dedicated graphics.

The Envy Desktop includes a 400-watt power supply, which should provide plenty of power for any components that you want to add, though a high-end graphics card could be a push.

Ports on the Back

Around back, there are four more USB Type-A ports, the Gigabit Ethernet jack, HDMI and VGA video outputs, two 3.5mm audio outputs, and a microphone input. A total of eight USB-A ports is generous, but unfortunately all of the rear ports are limited to USB 2.0 speeds, which is fine for keyboards and mice but makes for glacially slow data transfer speeds. The front USB ports all follow the faster USB 3.1 Gen 1 spec.

We look for at least two oval-shaped USB-C connectors on desktops these days, so it's disappointing that the Envy Desktop only has one. We also like to see at least one DisplayPort video output. While the Envy Desktop lacks a built-in one, many discrete GPUs include DisplayPort, so adding one isn't too difficult.

In addition to its physical connections, the Envy Desktop includes 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 5.0 for wireless connectivity.

HP includes a one-year limited hardware warranty and 90 days of phone support, starting from the date you purchase the PC. The company also throws in some basic peripherals—a keyboard and mouse that are sturdy, but not comfortable enough for marathon writing or gaming sessions. The peripherals are available in either wired or wireless versions.

Configuration Options

The version of the Envy Desktop reviewed here includes a six-core Intel Core i5 processor with Intel UHD 630 integrated graphics; 12GB of DDR4-2666 memory; and a 512GB SSD. Other configuration options include an eight-core Core i7 CPU, Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 graphics, and up to 16GB of memory.

The latest Envy Desktops use Intel's 9th Generation CPUs, although you might still find one with an 8th Generation chip like the Core i5-8400 in our review unit.

See How We Test Desktops

I compared the Envy Desktop's performance in our benchmark tests to that of other similarly priced desktops including the HP Pavilion, the Acer Aspire, the Lenovo IdeaCentre 510A, and the Apple Mac mini. The Envy's six-core processor helped propel it to impressive results in multimedia tasks such as editing photos and encoding video files. When it comes to basic tasks like word processing, spreadsheet editing, and casual gaming, it's still a step ahead, but the performance differences aren't as great.

We use PCMark 10 to measure overall system performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, web browsing, and videoconferencing. A score of 4,000 or greater on this test represents fine performance, and indeed I noticed no slowdowns while web browsing or installing and uninstalling apps.

PCMark 8 has a storage subtest that we use to assess the speed of the system's boot drive. Since all of the PCs here have SSDs, their storage performance is roughly equal.

For multimedia performance, we use Maxon's CPU-crunching Cinebench R15 test, which is fully threaded to make use of all available processor cores and threads. Cinebench stresses the CPU rather than the GPU to render a complex image. The result is a proprietary score indicating a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads; it's clear that while the HP Envy is no workstation, it can handle occasional rendering tasks much better than the Mac mini or IdeaCentre can.

The results of our Handbrake video encoding trial are similar, although the Mac mini skipped this benchmark. The Handbrake test is a highly threaded CPU workout that scales well with cores and threads.

We also run a custom Adobe Photoshop image editing benchmark [as with Handbrake, lower times are better here]. The Photoshop test stresses the CPU, storage subsystem, and RAM, but it can also take advantage of most GPUs to speed up the process of applying filters. None of these systems is great at photo editing, but the Envy Desktop and Acer Aspire are clearly a cut above their competitors thanks mostly to their more powerful CPUs.

Gaming Performance

If you plan to use the Envy Desktop for playing games any more complicated than Candy Crush or Minecraft, you'll want to configure it with a discrete GPU. Otherwise, you'll get results similar to the disappointing numbers that our integrated-graphics-equipped Envy achieved in the 3DMark and Superposition tests. The IdeaCentre fares better because of its AMD Radeon Vega integrated graphics.

3DMark measures relative graphics muscle by rendering sequences of highly detailed, gaming-style 3D graphics that emphasize particles and lighting. We run two different 3DMark subtests, Sky Diver and Fire Strike. Both are DirectX 11 benchmarks, but Sky Diver is more suited to laptops and midrange PCs, while Fire Strike is more demanding and made for high-end PCs to strut their stuff.

Like 3DMark, the Superposition test renders and pans through a detailed 3D scene and measures how the system copes, offering a result in frames per second [fps].

A Capable Daily PC

The Envy Desktop is a proficient everyday PC, offering excellent productivity performance in an attractive chassis with a bit of room for expansion. While its gaming performance is lackluster, that can easily be remedied by adding a discrete GPU. However, if you plan to add several PCIe cards or have lots of USB-C peripherals, you'll want to look elsewhere.

See It

$529.99 at Walmart

Base Configuration Price $549.00

Pros

• Solid productivity performance from six-core Intel Core i5 CPU.

Cons

• No discrete graphics card.

• Lackluster gaming performance.

• Limited interior room for expansion.

• Only one USB Type-C port.

The HP Envy Desktop is a proficient everyday PC, offering excellent productivity performance in an attractive chassis with room for expansion.

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