HP TouchSmart IQ510 review

No prizes for deducing that this HP all-in-one, like the Eee Top, features a touchscreen. Indeed, it looks like a big brother to that nettop, with a classy design that eschews an adjustable stand in favour of an A-frame design.

Luckily, where the Eee Top suffered from a lacklustre screen, the HP's 22in TFT leaps out from its low-key casing with bright, intense colours and deep blacks. It doesn't quite match the iMac, but it's a pleasure to watch.

HP also echoes Asus in offering a super-sized touch interface for launching applications, although once again the programs you launch are rarely optimised for finger manipulation.

Of course, it's a more powerful PC than the Eee Top, with 4GB of RAM and a real Core 2 Duo CPU - but that's a mobile model rather than the full-fat versions found elsewhere, and our test system achieved only a mediocre 2D benchmark score of 1.03.

And when it comes to graphics, the Nvidia GeForce 9300M GS is fine for Vista Aero effects, but struggles with modern games, averaging just 6.9fps in our medium Crysis test.

Still, these lightweight components keep power consumption relatively low - and the price. At just £850 exc VAT, the IQ510 is the cheapest of the big-name media PCs, and while it won't blaze through ray-tracing tasks, it had no problem with any sort of media we threw at it. With its integrated DVB-T tuner and a Media Center remote, it could even steal into the living-room - though there's no Blu-ray, and turning the volume up led to boxy distortion.

For more mundane computing tasks there's a decent complement of network and data ports, though it comes with 64-bit Vista, so if you planning to attach older peripherals you'll need to find 64-bit drivers.

With better speakers the TouchSmart IQ510 would make an attractive media centre. With more powerful innards it might make a decent luxury PC. As it is, though, it feels like a compromise that isn't quite at home in either role.

Note: HP has confirmed that retail models will use a 2GHz T7250 CPU instead of the 2.17GHz T5850 found in our review system. Performance may be slightly slower in some applications.

Author: Darien Graham-Smith