HP Pavilion HPE h9-1120t Phoenix

The HP Pavilion HPE h9-1120t Phoenix ($1,838.99 direct) walks the tightrope between powerful but expensive gaming rigs and affordable desktops that don't cut it on the gaming grid. It's a smart move for HP to target the gamer who doesn't want to drop three or four grand on a tricked-out gaming rig, but wants a midrange desktop PC that will handle games and anything else that comes up in daily life. Unfortunately, HP has handicapped the Phoenix h9-1120t by removing Turbo Boost, and offers a rather cheap product without bringing the price down quite far enough. It's still a solid gamer, but it's not the best value you'll find for the price.

Design
The h9-1120t keeps the same stylized design seen on previous models in the h9 line-up, a jazzed-up version of the staid glossy black and matte grey plastics seen on HP's more mainstream towers. Measuring 16.22 by 6.89 by 16.34 inches (HWD), the regular-sized PC tower comes bundled with a wired premium HP keyboard and optical mouse. The glossy black front panel is highlighted by a metallic silver-colored plastic and glowing orange-red LED accents. The top of the tower has a curved surface for holding whatever peripherals you may want to connect through the two USB 3.0 ports or the headphone and microphone jacks on top of the tower.

The sides of the tower are basic black-painted stamped metal, so don't expect the brushed metals and large side-panel windows seen on gaming rigs from boutique vendors, like the Editors' Choice Cyberpower Zeus Thunder 3000SE ($2,299 direct, 4 stars). The h9-1120t does have perforated vents across both sides of the tower, letting the interior orange-red LEDs glow through in addition to providing plenty of air flow. One of those vents is covered with a layer of translucent glossy plastic, which mimics a regular window, but is really just a vent. Such are the compromises you make when purchasing a ready-made gaming PC.

Features
On the front of the tower you'll find a Blu-ray reader/DVD burner optical drive, four USB 2.0 ports and a handful of card reader slots that accommodate several memory formats. On the back of the tower you'll find two additional USB 3.0 ports and four more USB 2.0 ports. You'll also find both HDMI and DVI-D outputs for connecting to monitors or HDTVs, two mini DisplayPort connections (with bundled mini-to-full size adapters), and both regular audio outputs and an optical connection for digital 7.1 surround sound, taking full advantage of the h9-1120t's Beats Audio. With both Gigabit Ethernet and 802.11n Wi-Fi, you should be able to get on the gaming grid whether the desktop is situated near your router or not.

Crack open the case?which is easy, thanks to a single thumb-tightened screw?and you'll find a liquid cooling system pumping fluid throughout the well-ordered tower. In addition to the quad-core Intel Core i7-3770k processor and the AMD Radeon HD 7950 graphics card you'll find a 600W power supply, and room for two additional hard drives and a second optical drive. There's also easy access to DIMM slots, so upgrading the 12GB of included DDR3 RAM to the maximum 32GB won't prove difficult.

Windows 7 Home Premium comes preinstalled on the Phoenix h9-1120t, but HP also shovels on the bloatware. Fresh out of the box, the desktop is crowded with icons for RaRa Music, Rift, Microsoft Office 2010 Starter, and a generous 15-month subscription to Norton Internet Security 2012. If it stopped there, we wouldn't have much to complain about, but HP also includes HP Magic Canvas (a UI layer better suited to all-in-one touchscreen desktops), a few Canvas Games in addition to the sample pack of WildTangent games, and a host of HP branded apps and utilities (RecipeBox, Weather, Picture Mover, etc.). Also included is HP LinkUp, which makes sharing and syncing between desktops and laptops a snap. HP also covers the Phoenix h9-1120t with a 2-year warranty with limited hardware support.

Performance
The h9-1120t is outfitted with a quad-core Intel Core i7-3770k and 12GB of DDR3 RAM. It's the same third-generation processor found in the Cyberpower Gamer Xtreme 4000SE ($1,899 direct, 4 stars), but without any overclocking, thereby limiting the CPU to 3.5GHz instead of the 3.9GHz it could put out. As a result, the Phoenix h9-1120t produced a PCMark 7 score of only 3,808 points and a Handbrake time of 1 minute 5 seconds, 2:46 in Photoshop CS5, and a CineBench score of 7.29. The Cyberpower Gamer Xtreme 4000SE blew right past it using the same model processor, scoring 6,032 points in PCMark 7, 53 seconds in Handbrake, 2:17 in Photoshop, and 9.55 in Cinebench. By removing Turbo Boost from the h9-1120t, HP has handicapped the Phoenix h9-1120t from the starting gate. But even with the overclocking potential hobbled, the Phoenix h9-1120t did still put up a better score than the console-like Alienware X51 ($999.99 direct, 4 stars), which scored 3,055 points (PCMark) and 4.91 (Cinebench).

But the real draw of the h9-1120t is gaming, and thanks to an AMD Radeon HD 7950 discrete graphics card and 3GB of dedicated memory, the Phoenix h9-1120t does just fine. In 3DMark 11, the Phoenix scored 8,754 points at Entry settings, and 1,854 at Extreme settings, ahead of both the Nvidia-powered HP Pavilion HPE Phoenix h9z ($1,049 direct, 3.5 stars) (4,088 Entry, 841 Extreme) and the Alienware X51 (5,184 Entry, 1,059 Extreme), and only slightly behind the Dell XPS 8500 ($2,049.99 direct, 4 stars) (9,570 Entry, 1,918 Extreme). It couldn't top the Cyberpower Zeus Thunder 3000SE, with two AMD Radeon HD 7950 graphics cards in Crossfire configuration (16, 471 Entry, 6,352 Extreme).

In our gaming tests, the h9-1120t was squarely in the middle of the pack, producing 109 frames per second (fps) in Crysis on medium quality settings at 1,280-by-720 resolution and 44 fps at very high quality and 1,920-by-1080 resolution with 4x anti-aliasing. In Lost Planet 2, the h9-1120t produced 130 fps on medium detail and resolution settings, and 57 fps on high detail and resolution. This may not match the dual-GPU performance of the Cyberpower 3000SE?which scored 132 fps (medium) and 84 fps (high quality) in Crysis, and 157 fps (medium) and 125 fps (high quality) in Lost Planet 2?but it did top both the Alienware X51 (Crysis 88 fps, Lost Planet 2 86 fps, both medium quality) and the previous HP Phoenix h9z (Crysis 54 fps, Lost Planet 2 65 fps, both in medium quality).

The HP Pavilion HPE Phoenix h9-1120t may not be the gaming rig of choice for the competitive gamer or custom rig crowds, but it's not a bad fit for someone wanting a system that provides decent gaming performance with off-the-shelf convenience. But even a little time spent picking out a customized system from a boutique PC manufacturer can get you as good or better performance and value, like the Editors' Choice Cyberpower Zeus Thunder 3000SE. Choose wisely, but don't write off the HP Pavilion HPE Phoenix h9-1120t.

BENCHMARK TEST RESULTS:

COMPARISON TABLE
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