HP Pavilion Mini review

More and more small form factor PCs are making it to market thanks to PC manufacturers turning their attentions to alternative designs and clever use cases to try and tempt buyers into splashing out on a new deskop.

The HP Pavilion Mini is the latest of these, and wouldn’t look out of place on even the tidiest of desks thanks to its tiny footprint, curved corners, tapering edges and grey/silver metallic design. This classy design is matched only by the Mac Mini, which has similar specifications but is £50 more expensive.

Inside, you get a 1TB 2.5in hard disk (which is replaceable – more on that later), 4GB of RAM and a dual-core Intel Core i3-4025U processor running at 1.9GHz. A laptop-level spec, then, so you should expect laptop levels of performance.

Indeed, in Expert Review’s dual-core benchmarks, which pits lower-end processors up against a reference Core i3-4030U that scores 100, the Pavilion Mini managed an overall score of 95. I was slightly surprised to see the PC manage just 81 in the short photo rendering portion of the benchmark, but it picked itself up for the long haul of converting video and multitasking, managing scores of 101 and 95 respectively.

Impressively, the chassis never became uncomfortably hot at any point during our testing. The fan remained similarly moderate, only picking up speed in an audible fashion when tasked with our toughest benchmarks. It’d definitely be audible in a quiet room, but anywhere with a fair amount of ambient noise will drown its whirring out entirely.

Actual day-to-day performance is fine; you’ll notice a little slowdown if you’re trying to do multiple things at once and opening multiple multimedia-heavy web pages. You’ll also probably notice stutter when loading lots of photos at the same time, but if you moderate your usage and don’t expect the world, the Pavilion Mini will serve you well.