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.

If you like to tinker as much as I do, you’ll soon find yourself burrowing beneath the rubber foot on the bottom of the device, hunting for screws to loosen.  Inside, you’ll find a compact build with a fair amount of room for expansion. Your first port of call will be the 1TB 2.5in Samsung hard disk, which has been mounted to a caddy that in turn has been attached the chassis with four screws. The hard disk is connected to the board with what appears to be a proprietary SATA connector. However, the other end of the connector is a standard SATA connector, so if you want to upgrade to an SSD or a higher capacity disk, you can.

Remove those four screws and move the hard disk aside and you’ll find two RAM slots, one of which is occupied by a 4GB stick of SODIMM memory. There’s a free slot above it, so it’s easy to double your RAM for a little extra money. Perhaps most interesting is the free M.2 slot on the board.  If you were feeling particularly adventurous, you could install a small 42mm M.2 SSD for the snappiest performance you can get on a PC this tiny.

Be warned that any modifications you make will probably void your warranty, but at least you’ll have fun doing it.

The Pavilion Mini has a decent selection of ports for such a tiny device, including two USB3 ports on the front and two more at the rear. There’s a gigabit Ethernet slot, a full-size HDMI port and a DisplayPort connector, so this PC is well-suited to more modern displays. There’s also a three-in-one memory card reader for SD, SDHC and SDXC cards and a 3.5mm audio jack, which is awkwardly mounted at the rear instead of the front of the PC, which means plugging in headphones on a regular basis will be rather fiddly. You also get 802.11n dual-band Wi-Fi, but the chip does not support faster 802.11ac Wi-Fi, sadly.

Conclusion

Up against its mini PC rivals, the benefits of the Pavilion Mini are slightly less clear. The Acer Revo One RL85 has a Core i3 variant that’s priced nearly identically to the Pavilion Mini and includes room for two extra 2.5in hard disks, although the spec of that machine leaves it with a measly 500GB hard disk and only two USB3 ports. The Mac Mini, meanwhile, comes in with a minimum specification of a 1.4GHz Core i5 chip, 500GB of storage and Intel Iris graphics but is £50 more expensive at £399. Considering all of this, it’s unclear where the HP Pavilion Mini fits into the mini PC market. It’s a stylish device that would fit on any desk, but the same can be said of the Mac Mini. It could also work as a media centre PC, but the Acer Revo One RL85 is arguably better at that, too, and it also comes with a remote control.

The HP Pavilion Mini, then, is a fine mini PC with room for tweaks and upgrades that’ll serve modest users very well indeed, but it lacks the clear selling point that would earn it a Recommended award. If it came with a keyboard and mouse it’d very clearly find its niche as an office PC, but without any bundled peripherals it’s left a little bit out in the cold.