With Storage and Power to Spare!
Written: Jan 28 '01 (Updated Jan 28 '01)
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Pros: Fast and reliable.
Cons: No ISA expansion slots.
The Bottom Line: This is a suburb computer, you will have to pay extra for the monitor.
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| surferdude7's Full Review: Hewlett Packard HP Pavilion 9790C (P1338A#ABA) PC ... |
The HP 9000 series come in a translucent blue chassis and are available with the Pentium III processor or the AMD Athlon processor. There are three-color kits available for you to change the appearance, cobalt blue, krypton green and xenon purple.
This review is on the HP Pavilion 9790C with the AMD Athlon 1GHz processor. This baby is loaded down with almost anything you need. It lists for $2399 and can be found for slightly under $2000 if you just shop around.
First of all you have a great processor with the AMD Athlon 1GHz processor, this baby will out run the Pentium III 1GHz processor according to most tests.The AMD Athlon runs on a 200 MHz Frontside Bus verses the Pentium III at a 133MHz Frontside Bus.
Do you need hard drive storage? The HP Pavilion 9790C has a Maxtor 7200 RPM 60GB Ultra DMA hard disk drive for plenty of storage. This is more storage than most people will need for a long time.
They didn’t cut corners on the video, they installed a very impressive 32MB SDRAM Nvidia TNT2 Pro AGP card. While most companies use a 16MB, HP went with a major brand name and twice the memory.
There is a 3.5" 1.44MB Floppy Drive, a 12 speed DVD-ROM and a HP CD-Writer Plus CD-RW drive. The HP CD-Writer Plus (8x/4x/32x) will write your CDs at 8x maximum speed, it will re-write at 4x maximum and read your CDs at 32x maximum speed. With this system you can create your own CDs and watch DVD movies.
Here is a nice feature, not only do you get a 56K modem, you also get a DSL modem and a network card. The 56K modem is a Data & Fax modem, ITU V.90 K56flex, download up to 56K and fax at 14.4K. The DSL modem is a 1.5Mbps Digital Lucent WildWire modem with 2 USB ports and front access serial port. There is also a 10/100 Base-T networking card. This machine is made for all your Internet hookups.
Other Features
There is 128MB of SDRAM memory at 100MHz that can be expanded up to 512MB. There is a total of 2 DIMM slots for the memory with one being free.
You get a USB connecting 2-button scrolling mouse.
Premium Polk Audio speakers with PowerPort technology, they sound great.
Your Expansion Slots are 5 PCI and 1 AGP, there are 2 PCI slots free.
The External Ports are 4 USB, 2 serial, 1 parallel, 1 game port and 2USB ports on the Keyboard. (One USB port is used for the Keyboard and one for the Mouse, there are still four USB ports free.) The Keyboard is a one-touch Internet USB keyboard.
The Cache is Primary 128K and Second-level (L2) 512K.
Software
This unit came with Windows 98 second edition back last year sometime, the ones sold today may have Windows Me, I’m not sure.
For the DVD software they use WinDVD 2000 by InterVideo.
For the HP CD-Writer Plus they use Adaptec DirectCD and Adaptec Easy CD Creator. (I recommend Nero for all your CD writing.)
You also get Microsoft Encarta Deluxe Online 2000, Microsoft Works 2000, Microsoft Money 2000 and Quicken Basic 2000.
For your Fax you get QuickLink III by SmithMicro.
There are many other programs especially for the Internet.
Overall
This computer belongs to a friend of mine and after four months he is very happy with it. My own personal experience is that HP has done their homework on this one. It is expandable, though I wish they had included at least one ISA slot.
I was very impressed at the performance of it all and the quality of parts that went into building this beauty.
Overall I highly recommend the HP Pavilion 9790C.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): $2199
Operating System: Windows
Processor: AMD Athlon (K7)
Processor speed: over 1000
RAM: 128
Internal Storage: CD-RW and DVD
Hard Drive (GB): Over 50
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surferdude7
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Location: Elizabethtown, Ky.
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