Great for Digital Video & Requires little desk space!
Written: Mar 07 '08
Product Rating:
Ease of Use:
Quality of Tech Support:
Pros: 1000 MHZ Bus Speed, Dual AMD 64 CPU, Price, Fire-wire, Wireless, HD Audio, Size, Lightscribe
Cons: One PCI slot (filled) & one PCI express slot, Ram shared with Video, VGA port
The Bottom Line: A great computer for prosumer video, graphics, web design, mp3, CD or DVD burning, small in size, fast and lots of storage space. It is almost perfect with some limitations.
dj_white_rice's Full Review: Hewlett Packard Pavilion Slimline S3300F PC Deskto...
I have to be honest; writing about my new HP Pavilion Slimline S3300F Desktop PC is a pleasure. I have been fully impressed with this computer. I currently own six desktops for various uses, but this one is the best.
As a musician, video producer, graphic artist and seller on eBay, I know how important having the right PC for the job is. A slow PC that can not handle the task at hand or is not upgradable enough will ruin your day and your year.
My goal for this particular desktop computer was to find a powerful computer in a slim and short case to install into a video production unit for portable studio use. Based on the last 18 years of buying windows based computers I knew I would be buying either an HP or Dell computer, two names I have come to trust. I also needed this new computer be able to fit into a rather small and confined location that would be locked up and after looking at all my options and not being satisfied I happened to see an advertisement for this brand new model at what I consider a great price, so I drove 80 miles round trip to a local Fry's store to look at it and see if it would meet my needs and then several days later purchased this computer from a local Circuit City store at the same price.
The HP Pavilion Slimline (currently sitting on my desk as I write this on another PC) is about 12 to 13 inches tall and about 3 inches wide. It can stand up like a desktop or laid on its side which is the way I needed the computer since I would be placing it essentially into a metal drawer.
The cooling fans are extremely quiet which was very important to me since it is being used for video production and it has fire-wire (I-link) built into the front and back - also important for digital video production.
It comes with 2 gigabytes of RAM standard which is partial shared with its internal video card. This particular version of the Slimline comes with standard VGA rather than Digital video monitor connection. Only one video card can fit into the case unless you want to use the PCI express video port with your own video card.
One draw back with this pc though is that it only has two PCI slots. One is taken by a pre-installed modem card that can be removed and the other is a PCI express slot that is mainly used for video cards as a replacement for the AGP cards of the past.
Other than the limitations of the PCI slot, everything that you could want at this time other than dual monitor ports is already built-in to this pc, including 6 USB-2 slots, Fire-wire ports, Network slot, Modem, Wireless network device, PS-2 slots, a quality audio driver system, etc. The only thing missing is the old joystick port that is often used by musicians as a midi cable connector, however most new midi devices are using USB now so that is not much of an issue.
While most people using a PC for video production still stick with Windows XP professional, this pc as with all new pc came with Windows Vista. For my video purposes, Vista will be just fine. As mentioned though most people doing video production use Windows XP because of its ability to be legacy compatible.
I love the Light Scribe Multi-platform DVD writer that comes in this unit as well as the HP Media Drive slot.
The HP Media Drive Slot is essentially a removable external hard drive that slides into this PC. When removed from the PC, it can plug into other PCs via a USB connection. The HP Slimline S3300F does not come with a media hard drive which cost about $140 at the time I am writing this. This feature is excellent for my video purposes since I will be recording digital video directly to the media drive at the studio and then bringing it home for editing on my video editing PC and Macintosh G5.
The Slimline has an AMD Athelon 64 dual processor with an incredible 1000 MHZ bus rate of processing speed - faster than any of my current computers.
The 500 gigabyte hard disk is great and is needed for video or large graphic uses. I am also using a 750 gigabyte external fire-wire (I-link) drive for my video capture.
One feature that I do not imagine I will use often is the multi-media card reader built into the front. While I do use digital media cards with my Canon digital camera, I do not imagine needing it for video, however, that may change in the future.
Closing Comments
Presently I am using this new high end pc that has high definition audio for standard definition high-end video camcorders, what is lacking is a high-definition video card. I imagine that within about a year of so, I will begin upgrading some of the video cameras to high definition camcorders which means at that point I will have to upgrade to a high definition video card via the PCI Express slot.
As soon as I purchased this PC I upgraded it with an additional 1 gigabyte stick of ram to compensate for the ram being used by the video device inside. This PC can be upgraded to a total of 4 gigabytes of ram. According to the information I read, Vista currently effectively uses up to 3 gigs of ram, but this pc comes with an already installed update allowing it to use all four gigabytes of RAM if you want to add it. At a price of $40 to $90 for a gigabyte stick of RAM it is worth upgrading right away. I will be adding another gigabyte before installing this pc into the video production unit.
By the way, I prefer AMD processors over Intel; I have found them to be more stable and faster overall.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 549.00 Operating System: Windows Processor: Other Processor speed: over 1000 RAM: More than 256 Internal Storage: SuperDisk Hard Drive (GB): Over 50
Powerful, slim PC that's one-third the size of a traditional PC tower with sleek, silver-and-black chassis 2.6 GHz AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+ dual-core pr...More at Amazon Marketplace
Epinions.com periodically updates pricing and product information from third-party sources, so some information may be slightly out-of-date. You should confirm all information before relying on it.
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.