The HP Pavilion a6130n Desktop PC is a great buy

My wife recently decided to go back to college and pursue her Master’s degree, which meant she would need to take our laptop with her. I took this as a good opportunity to finally have a reason to buy myself a good desktop for playing games, especially since I’ll have a lot of free time with her away at class. I spent over a month shopping around various different places and even considered building one of my own before I finally decided that this HP Pavilion a6130n Desktop PC was the best deal I could find.

I bought this PC at Circuit City for $730 and also got a monitor to go along with it. Circuit City is currently offering a $150 PC/Monitor combo rebate on this machine and a few others, so I got a nice 22” monitor for almost half its original price. Be sure to shop around before you buy. Although I could have gotten the monitor a little cheaper online, I didn’t want to have to wait for it to be shipped.

There were several things about this PC that attracted me to it. For one, it features an AMD Athlon 64 x2 dual core 5000+ processor. I have always been partial to AMD for their price and performance when compared to Intel – they are cheaper and better. AMD is a big reason why computer prices dropped so much over the past several years, and I will continue to support them as long as they make chips. The processor on this machine operates at 2.6 Ghz with a 512k + 512K L2 cache and the system bus speed is 2000 Mhz.

Another thing that I really liked was this machine came with 3 gigs of RAM, as opposed to the 2 gigs that you find on most other machines. It uses DDR2 PC2-5300 RAM and can support up to 8 gigs total memory. The motherboard has 4 banks for memory storage, and all 4 of them are taken by the 3 gigs that come pre-installed. It has two 1-gig sticks and two 512-meg sticks, so if you want to add more RAM you will have to pull some of them out.

The extra gig of RAM is there to also take up some of the slack from the very lackluster Nvidia GeForce 6150 LE video that is on the motherboard. I upgraded the video card in this machine within a week of buying it, because even with the faster processor and extra RAM, it still couldn’t run newer games very well. If you plan on buying this for a gaming computer, be ready to buy a new video card to go along with it, because the 6150 just can’t handle the graphics detail of modern PC games. Luckily, HP included a PCI-Express x16 slot that will support most modern video cards. It does not have an AGP slot, though.

One thing to consider before upgrading the video is that this PC only has 250 watt power supply, and most high end video cards require a minimum 350 watt supply. I bought an MSI 8400GS card for my system, and although Newegg.com didn’t say so on the product listing, it required a 350 watt power supply. I went ahead and installed the card anyway, and it works fine. Of course, I don’t have a bunch of extra peripherals on this desktop. I will eventually upgrade the power supply after HP’s one-year warranty runs out, but in the meantime I’m not going to pull any parts out of a brand new machine and void my warranty.

Audiophiles and PC gamers will be happy to know that this computer has a 7.1 channel sound system built into it, provided you have the speakers to make it work. It comes with a digital out connection as well as individual outputs for the subwoofer and surrounding speakers. I’m very impressed with the audio quality I’m getting just out of my 2.1 channel Altec Lansing speakers.

This PC comes with a 400 gigabyte 7200 RPM SATA hard drive that includes a 9 gig ‘recovery’ partition. Although HP didn’t include any restore discs, you can burn your own using the included DVD-RW drive. If you want to add another hard drive or DVD drive to this machine, there are two more SATA slots available to go along with some open bays inside. Just be careful about adding new stuff that draws power in case you put a better video card in this PC.

An Ethernet port is included on this PC, as well as a modem, but it does not have any wireless support. I bought a Linksys Wireless-G USB adapter for this machine and it works perfectly, even with Windows Vista. HP also included a 15-in-1 media reader that can read from a variety of different memory cards. There is no floppy drive, though. As for USB ports, it has two in the front and four in the back, plus firewire ports in front and back. There’s also a slot in the front for an HP Pocket Media Hard Drive, which is some kind of portable hard drive that most people probably won’t ever buy.

One of the things that held me off from buying a new computer versus building my own was Windows Vista. I just didn’t want to convert over to Microsoft’s new OS just yet, but I relented when I found this machine. So far, I’m not completely sold on Vista due to various software crashes and some instability issues that I’ve already encountered. I’m sure that over time, Microsoft will eventually patch Vista enough to make it fully reliable. The simple truth is that you’re going to have to adopt it one day as more software makes it a requirement.

In the end, I’m pretty happy with my HP Pavilion a6130n Desktop PC. It has a lot of good hardware on it, with the exception of the onboard video, and HP is a reliable brand name. I’ve worked in the computer field for nearly ten years now, and I’ve seen too many problems with Dell and Gateway products to even consider them nowadays. HP/Compaq used to be sort of a cheaper brand, but now I think they’ve really stepped up.