HP Pavilion Mini review

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.