The HP Pavilion Elite h8-1124 ($899.99 list at Best Buy) follows its forbears as the newest version of the HP Pavilion Elite line. This desktop is one to consider if you want high-end computing power to edit photos and re-encode videos for your tablet, smartphone, and on the Web. Even tasks like surfing the Web are fast, and it's nicely priced. There's an intangible price to pay, however: the system is full of extra programs you may never use, and it's somewhat limited in expansion room. The h8-1124 is, therefore, recommended with reservations.

Design and Features
The h8-1124 looks a lot like the other systems in the Pavilion Elite h8 series, like the HP Pavilion Elite h8-1050 ($1,299.99 direct, 4 stars) that we gave an Editors' Choice award to earlier this year. It's an upmarket tower, with a red-backlit line bisecting the front panel, plus an indented tray with USB ports on the top of the system for servicing your smartphone or tablet. Like other towers, the h8-1124 has a decent amount of internal upgrade space: There's room for three PCIe x1 cards, an extra internal hard drive, and one more optical drive. The desktop's two memory DIMM slots are full, as is the PCIe x16 graphics card slot, but these two components won't need to be upgraded for a while. The h8-1124 comes with a 300W power supply, which is a little light for future upgrades.

It comes with quite a bit of pre-installed software, which is surprising for a Best Buy system (we'd rather see a pre-installed e-commerce app like the Best Buy PC app, then install nothing else but the hardware drivers and a few utilities). On the desktop screen alone are six unnecessary icons: Blio (an online book store), eBay, Office 2010, HP Games, Snapfish, and Zya Music service. Aside from these, there are other programs strewn all over the Start menu: Skype, Kobo (another book store), Press Reader, Zinio, HP Download Store, HP Movie Time (yup, you guess it, a movie store), and Sprint Mobile Broadband. The last program is puzzling, as the h8-1124 is not a mobile device. The desktop's Norton Internet Security is a short 60-day trial. There are a couple of useful apps however, like the HP Link Up software that lets you remote control another Windows 7 desktop on your LAN or wireless network.

Performance
Performance is the h8-1124's raison d'être. Its Intel Core i7-2600 processor, 8GB of DDR3 memory, and ATI Radeon HD 6570 graphics card combine (like Voltron) to provide enough power for complex multimedia tasks, like editing photos and encoding video. It was able to turn in a quick 1-minute 12-second run time on our Handbrake video encoding test and 2:58 on Photoshop CS5. Both scores are at the top of our charts, especially compared with desktops like the Dell XPS 8300 (x8300-4004NBK) (1:21 on Handbrake; 3:35 on CS5) ($699.99 list, 3.5 stars) and Apple Mac mini (Thunderbolt) ($799 list, 4.5 stars) (1:42 on Handbrake; 3:47 on CS5).

The h8-1124 was a decent performer at medium quality settings on our 3D game benchmarks: 70 fps at Crysis (DiretX 10) and 28 fps at Lost Planet 2 (DirectX 11). Crysis is most definitely playable, and Lost Planet 2 could be playable with some tweaking. The Dell XPS 8300 has a discrete graphics card too, but its lower-powered ATI Radeon HD 6450 results in scores on the 3D tests (29fps Crysis, 13fps Lost Planet 2). The Mac mini is in the middle performance-wise, thanks to an ATI Radeon HD 6630M graphics card (48fps on Crysis; 19fps on Lost Planet 2). Either way, you'll need a beefier GPU in order to play newer DirectX 11 titles.

The HP Pavilion Elite h8-1124 is a vexing choice. It's a better performer than the Dell XPS 8300 (x8300-4004NBK), justifying some of its added cost. But the h8-1124 is held back by its bloatware and more limited expansion. For the person who has an unused copy of Windows 7 lying around, it would be nice if you bought an h8-1124 and then put a "clean" install of Windows 7 on the system. Unfortunately, this isn't an option with the included version of Windows 7 on the h8-1124 (since that version already has the bloatware pre-installed). The more expensive HP h8-1050 holds on to its Editors' Choice award because its added features (Blu-ray, USB 3.0, HDTV Tuner, etc.) justify its higher price tag. The HP Pavilion Elite h8-1124 still comes in as a recommended high-performance desktop, but one recommended with reservations.

BENCHMARK TEST RESULTS
Check out the test scores for the HP Pavilion Elite h8-1124

COMPARISON TABLE
Compare the HP Pavilion Elite h8-1124 with several other desktops side by side.

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