HP TouchSmart 610-1030uk review

HP’s TouchSmart 610-1030uk looks rather generic, but there’s plenty to set this modern touchscreen all-in-one apart from the crowd, with a big 23in touchscreen, USB3 ports and a Blu-ray drive.

Most of the 610’s ports are located at the back, behind a pull-down panel through which you can route your cables. This is a neat and tidy solution for connectors that you won’t wish to unplug very often, such as such the Gigabit Ethernet port, TV tuner and speaker outputs, but accessing it depends on the display being tilted to exactly the correct angle, which is inconvenient if you’re trying to reach around behind your PC. Because of this the four rear USB ports – two USB3 and two USB2 – are probably best used with extension cables.

We’d have preferred to have the USB3 ports in place of the pair of USB2 ports on the front left side of the computer’s display panel. The other commonly used connectors are there, including a card reader, line input and a 3.5mm port designed for Beats-branded combined headphone and mic connectors, but which will work with any pair of headphones. At the right-hand side of the panel is a Blu-ray reader, as well as a pair of HDMI inputs that allow you to use the 610 to display content from external devices such as consoles and cable or satellite TV tuners.

While all-in-ones don’t have the potential to produce the same kind of processor power as a desktop PC, due to the nature of their compact case and limited cooling capacity, the TouchSmart nonetheless did a fair job in our benchmark tests. Its 3.2GHz Intel Core i5-650 processor is a generation old now, but it’s still pretty powerful, helping this PC to an overall score of 58 in our benchmarks. This means it will handle most applications with little complaint.

There’s also 6GB of RAM, to provide plenty of scope for anyone who spends a lot of time video editing, image manipulation or similar memory-intensive tasks. A whopping 1.5TB of disk space also gives you plenty of room for projects, installed software or a massive multimedia collection.