Best Buy’s Most Popular Gaming Desktop is a Budget Gamer
And now on to an examination of Best Buy’s gaming laptops. The HP HPE-210y is their popular gaming desktop designed for the budget gamer. It’s got the AMD Phenom II quad-core processor humming along at 3.0GHz, 8GB PC3-8500 DDR3 SDRAM for excellent multitasking, and the ATI Radeon HD 5450 graphics card which adequately handles games at low resolutions. The huge 1TB hard drive and Blue-ray Disc-enable DVD±RW/CD-RW drive are nice touches. It comes with Windows 7 Home Edition (64-Bit), wireless N networking, 7 USB ports, and a 15-in-1 media reader (aren’t those becoming extinct?).
The HP HPE-210Y is priced $899 at Best Buy. It’s a store item, not an outlet item. Yes! You can buy it at the local Best Buy store.
What’s it good for?
So is this is a good desktop? It’s a great desktop if you love playing basic 3-D games like spore, The Sims, and World of Warcraft. If you’re into more serious games like Company of Heroes or World in Conflict you’ll either need to buy the machine and replace the ATI Radeon HD 5450 graphics card (and 300W power supply) or keep looking. The HP HPE-210Y has a powerful 3.0GHz processor and 8GB of RAM but the ATI Radeon HD 5450 just doesn’t have the power to just not enough power to render more than low level resolution games. This Computer Shopper review indicates the $49 GPU is a slight over the previous Radeon HD 4550. The Radeon 4550 had previously gotten a score of 18.2 frames per second (fps) in their 1,280×1,024 Company of Heroes test. The Radeon HD 5450 got a 22.8fps on the same test…not so good! Both cards turned in the same average frame rate of 11fps in their World in Conflict test.
User Opinons:
You’ll find that the HP HPE-210Y has 20 reviews with a 4.4 Star rating at Bestbuy.com. Here’s a summary of the pro’s and con’s:
Positives > Users who buy this machine for basic gaming (like StarCraft2) are happy with it. The 5450 graphics card will handle mid to low level graphics detail on SC2. Another gamer plays League of Legends, World of Warcraft, and Left 4 Dead 2. This system runs LoL and WoW smoothly at mid-range settings. It can handle running these games at higher settings, but the frame-rate drops significantly. Another buyer did some significant researched and decided on the HPE-210y because of its competitive price. He’s not a big gamer but does watch some online videos. He describes that the video buffering has not been noticeable. The system is fairly quiet and sleeps very well. Most users explain that the bottom line with this system you get what you pay for: simple/basic 3-D gaming, entertainment, and browsing the internet, email,and finances.
Negatives > One user pointed out that the video card is sub-par. It will run World of Warcraft fine for the most part, with frame rates ranging from 60 when there’s not much going on to 20-30 when there’s any kind of action happening (and this is with most game visuals set to low or medium). Most of the time while playing, the movements were sluggish and it felt like I was playing underwater with most animations being slow or delayed a bit. He replaced the video card with the 1 Gig NVIDIA 9800 GT and the 300W power supply that fixed the problem. The new machine now runs like a champ with no delays, no sluggish movements, no complaints. Replacing the 300W power supply adds another $50-$150 to your total cost. Upgrading the video card can cost as much as $400.00.
Jeremy Ashburn
http://www.buyapc.org/ > Desktop & Laptop Reviews
