HP Pavilion 23-Q110na review – AMD Carrizo hits AIO PC

All-in-one PCs are a great way to get a complete computer, including peripherals and monitor, without having to clutter your desk with cables. They also offer the distinct advantage of being far larger than a laptop, while taking up around the same desk space. If your laptop never finds itself leaving your desk, an all in one like HP’s Pavilion 23 can be a real alternative. It’s the first All-in-one we’ve seen with AMD’s new Carrizo APU so we were curious to see how it would perform.

Read our round-up of the best desktops of 2015

The Pavilion 23’s 23in, Full HD touchscreen is bright and reasonably colourful, although I didn’t find much reason to prod the touchscreen all that often; I treat AIOs like I do a monitor, with my head at least two feet away from the screen. That’s quite some distance to stretch just to tap a button I could have easily done with the supplied wireless mouse.

The screen is of a decent quality for a mid-range all-in-one. It’s pretty bright, at a little over 224cd/m2, and black levels are nice and low at 0.24cd/m2. Colour coverage is about average at 89% of the sRGB colour gamut. This means the most vibrant colours aren’t catered for, and will put off photographers who want to see every colour in their images. Audio was perfectly reasonable; I found both music and speech were clearly relayed from the downward-firing speakers.

The PC itself is a mostly plastic-coated affair, with a large black bezel around the screen. The stand is made from silver plastic, while the back is a textured white plastic. For a mid-range AIO, it’s relatively good looking, and you could quite happily have it facing into a room, thanks to a cable routing hole keeping the wires in check. In fact, the only cable you might ever need is the one attached to the power brick. The supplied keyboard and mouse are wireless, although you’ll need to occupy one of the USB ports in order to connect them to your PC.

The mouse is far too chunky, without offering any benefits over a smaller mouse; you only get two buttons and a scroll wheel, in a casing that’s far too large (and ugly) for my tastes. The keyboard is similarly poor. It’s a full-size set, but it’s spongey and uncomfortable to type on and picks up dust, dirt and grease unsettlingly quickly.

The majority of the Pavilion 23’s USB ports are about as far from accessible as you could imagine, sitting at the rear of the PC, right in the middle. This makes reaching for them a challenge, and because the bottom of the stand isn’t slippery, it takes real effort to spin the machine around. Thankfully, two USB2 ports are slightly more accessible, having been recessed into the underside of the display alongside a 3.5mm audio jack and an SD card reader. If you’re plugging in temporary peripherals such as a USB stick or headphones, you won’t have to go through the effort of spinning it around – even if it isn’t immediately obvious where the ports actually are.

Specs and benchmarks

The Pavilion is powered by a quad-core, 1.8GHz A10-8700P, one of AMD’s new ‘Carrizo’ line of low-power processors. While the budget CPU has allowed HP to spend more money on the decent screen and chassis, performance isn’t quite up to scratch. Even paired with 8GB Of RAM, it only scored 30 overall in our multimedia benchmarks. Considering these tests challenge the PC to a bout of photo conversion, video rendering and multitasking while playing a 4K video, this score shouldn’t be sniffed at, but a meagre 32 in the photo conversion portion translates to slightly hesitant performance when loading image-heavy web pages and opening programs. It’s a bit frustrating to use for anything beyond the most basic of tasks. It’s not stuttery, at least, which means that when you’re not pushing it too hard its shortcomings won’t be immediately obvious. I was a little concerned by its fans’ need to fire up for seemingly no reason when the PC was under hardly any load. They’re fairly loud and can’t really be ignored when they’re sitting right in front of you.

It’s a shame that performance is so mediocre because, as is often the case with AMD chips, the onboard graphics processor is powerful enough to play some lighter 3D games. Our Dirt Showdown test was too much for it to handle, only recording 17.6fps at Ultra detail settings and 1,920×1,080 resolution. However, dropping it down to Medium and keeping the resolution at Full HD yielded a much more playable 37fps. While modern titles will be asking too much, more basic 3D games will be fine once you’ve fiddled with either the resolution or the graphical settings.

Conclusion

The Pavilion 23 is a reasonable all-in-one with an attractive design, decent screen and reasonable graphics performance, but this isn’t enough to overcome its slightly stuttery performance. If you have very basic needs and will play the occasional game, it’s a reasonable buy, but if you’re going to be opening lots of programs and media-heavy browser tabs, it won’t be powerful enough to meet your needs.