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The HP Pavilion Wave (starting at $549) is the antithesis of the boring, boxy desktop PC. It’s built to be the entertainment nexus for your home, hooked up to a TV in your family room, office, or bedroom. Neutral styling, full desktop components, and a tuned Bang & Olufsen (B&O) speaker are highlights of this innovative desktop.
Design and Features
The Pavilion Wave( at Amazon)(Opens in a new window) is shaped like a vertically oriented triangular tube—think of a Toblerone chocolate box, but a little more rounded. It’s certainly more angular than the circular bodies of the Apple Mac Pro or the MSI Vortex( at Amazon)(Opens in a new window). Dark gray acoustic fabric wraps around the side panels for a good reason: They’re meant to evoke the look of high-end audio equipment. The system resembles a speaker that you’d shop for at Bang & Olufsen’s stores in upscale shopping centers. It’s attractive enough to sit out in the open.
Measuring 9.25 by 6.62 by 6.81 inches (HWD) and weighing just over 6 pounds, the Pavilion Wave can be moved from room to room fairly easily. Its triangular top is surrounded by an open space that projects sound into the room and concentrates your voice when speaking to the dual array microphones. You can ask Cortana in Windows 10 to read your schedule, look up things on the Web for you, or start playing music. The mics are also optimized for conducting Skype sessions or using Facebook Messenger to talk to family members in different parts of the world. Sound from the built-in speaker is clear and can fill a medium-size room easily. It’s not bass-heavy, but it is tuned to take advantage of the Pavilion Wave’s size and it sounds good overall.
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The front of the Pavilion Wave has B&O branding, and its single USB 3.0 port and headset jack stand ready to connect a pair of headphones and a USB memory stick, for example. The back panel is the vertex of the triangle, and features a DisplayPort connector, an Ethernet port, an HDMI jack, a Kensington lock port, a Power jack for the AC adapter, an SD card reader, a USB-C port, two USB 3.0 ports, and the Power button. While we think that the SD card slot would be more convenient on the front panel, the Pavilion Wave has an excellent set of I/O ports. You can use the DisplayPort and HDMI ports simultaneously to drive two full HD or 4K displays. Dual-band 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.2 enable wireless connections.
Interior Accommodations
The inside of the system is chock full of components. Processor choices include the Intel Core i3-6100T or i5-6300T processor, 8GB of memory is standard (upgradeable to 16GB), and there’s a 1TB 7,200rpm hard drive on the base model. Depending on the configuration, solid-state drives (SSDs) and AMD Radeon R9 M470 discrete graphics are also options. Three vertical panels hold the PC components and motherboard vertically, for efficient air cooling.
We’ll wait to give our final recommendations when we review the Pavilion Wave later this year, but from our brief hands-on time, it looks and feels like the desktop you’d want if you’re still regularly monitoring your kids’ online activities from across the family room, or if you want a PC for entertainment and Skype calls to grandparents. It’s a good fit for the rooms in your house that you spend a lot of time in, and hooking it up to a large screen lets you share music, photos, and videos in a group setting easier than using a laptop or mobile device. Stay tuned for a full review before the 2016 holiday season.
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The HP Pavilion Wave merges the desktop PC with a tuned speaker design, creating a communication and entertainment hub for your home.
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Source link : https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/hp-pavilion-wave