HP DC5750 Small Form Factor PC

[flibberdipper]

 

INTRO

So, for this review on an old PC, I decided that I might as well do it on the one that I snagged from my mom for an HTPC. My unit in particular has an Athlon 64 X2 4600+, 8GB of DDR2 667MHz RAM (4 sticks of 2 gigs), a 250GB WD Blue, a 250GB Momentus 5400.6, and finally an ASUS DVD rewrite drive.

 

GENERAL PERFORMANCE

Generally speaking, this machine does okay. Sadly, I have to use the onboard graphics which severely limits what I can do (more on that in the next few sections), but just typing up documents, checking email, and doing basic web browsing were okay. One major beef I have is the fact that the window animations in Windows 7 were incredibly choppy with the display set to 1080p. Windows above roughly 480p (854x480) started to get choppy, and by 720p it was pretty bad, and at 1080p it was hilariously bad.

 

GAMING PERFORMANCE

Two words: Complete garbage. Being a business/school oriented PC from at least 10 years ago, it doesn’t really have the strongest GPU built in. The iGPU in this is actually based on a Radeon X300, so you know it’s complete trash. But even compared to my Latitude E4300, it’s laughable. Flash games are a mess, basic Steam games such as Little Inferno and The Sandbox were a mess (when they worked), and it was just bad. Minecraft refused to work properly as well. The only games this does fine are the old 2D XCOM games and Adventure Capitalist.

 

MULTITASKING PERFORMANCE

Depending on what you’re doing, this machine will either take it and run with it, or it will fall to its knees and beg you for mercy. Since my machine has 8 gigs of RAM, I really don’t have to worry about running out. Care to guess what you do have to worry about? That’s right, the GPU. It flounders REALLY hard when you have a bunch of windows open and the Aero theme enabled, with the windows being different sizes and overlapping each other. The CPU was fine, though. It had a good deal more life left in it for this purpose.

 

VIDEO PERFORMANCE

Oh boy, guess who holds the ENTIRE system back, yet again? The GPU! I installed VLC, and did what I normally do. I just set the process priority to Increased in VLC’s settings, and hope for the best. Now, to put this in comparison, I ran this on my OptiPlex 760 and Latitude E4300 as well, seeing as they could be seen as competitors (I hooked them up to the same monitor as well using DVI, just to make it as fair as possible).

 

1080p? Nope. Even with DirectX acceleration, the GPU simply was not able to play a 1080p MP4 movie, which had a mediocre bitrate (15Mbps or less). The Dells did it fine. What about 1080p60? This was even WORSE, and yet again, the Dells did great. Well, what about 1440p? That had to be a slaughter-fest, right? For the HP, it was. Once AGAIN, the two Dells just kept going. They did fine until 1440p60 and 2160p, where they both started to show their age.

 

TL;DR: If you want to watch video, stay at 720p or lower. It’s the only thing that will play.

 

PORTS

Finally, I can stop beating a dead horse (the GPU). Really, this machine has a fairly good selection of ports.

 

Starting on the front, you have two USB 2.0 ports as well as HD Audio headphone and microphone.

 

On the back, you have the power plug, HD Audio headphone and microphone/line in combo (really annoyed there isn’t a dedicated line in, since they are very nice to have) SIX USB 2.0 (oh baby), 1 gigabit ethernet (usually a Broadcom chip), serial, VGA, DVI, printer, and finally a PS/2 keyboard and mouse.

 

NOISE/COOLING

Unfortunately, the original front fan in this died a few years back, but from what I can remember it was fairly quiet as a whole. The chassis didn’t rattle when you beat the pulp out of your hard drives, which I seriously like.

Now for cooling, I do have some gripes. The headers (other than the CPU fan one) all use a weird variation of a normal connector. The little clip goes ALL the way across the connector. But normal fans work, you just gotta kinda push hard and hope you don't mess something up. The power supply fan connects to the motherboard, but I found the system is a LOT quieter if you unplug the connector. The fan will still be powered by the PSU itself, and it stays at a decent temp.

Oddly enough, it will get mad if the front chassis fan is not plugged in, since it’s used to cool the CPU, as there is no actual heatsink fan. You can plug the fan into the CPU fan header, but it will still gripe and moan. So what I did (since the temps are not pleasing with the fan I put in), is take the chassis fan and plug it into where the PSU fan normally plugs in, and then I grabbed the 70mm fan off a Sempron 145 stock heatsink and duct taped it to the heatsink. It’s actually a perfect fit, and with the front fan running at about 5v, the system is nice and quiet, and the CPU doesn’t pass 62C (ambient of about 22C).

 

BUILT-IN SPEAKER

The built in speaker on this is actually quite nice, given its target “audience.” As you’d expect, the low frequencies are pretty… Not there… But the higher frequencies are actually fine. They’re not harsh or overly pronounced, but rather quite balanced. Of course, when you crank it up, the audio gets distorted and muddy, not to mention that the speaker starts to vibrate the case which causes an irritating buzz effect. But it does get moderately loud, which makes sense given the size of the woofer and magnet.

 

BUILD QUALITY

This machine is fairly tank-like, I have to admit. The body is made completely out of steel, and it’s fairly thick steel as well. The motherboard is screwed in with the standard (what I assume to be) BTX holes, as well as two additional ones near the front of the machine, which screws the heatsink backplate/slide mechanism in (as I remember, at least). Taking the machine apart is quite a nice experience really. The drives use the same screw-in-drive and slide it in the spring-loaded lock deal as previous older cases, and the drives stay in there nice and snug.

 

Once you got those in, you can lift the latch on the SCREWLESS PSU and take it out (brownie points there). And of course, you can unscrew the mobo and then slide it out (and maybe even use the space under it to route the front speaker wire to its location under the edge of the PSU).

 

POWER SUPPLY

It’s kinda poo, let me start by saying that. My PC came with a 240 watt unit that delivers a truly god-like 7A of the +12v rail, 15A on +3.3, and 17A on +5. I noticed some coil whine with mine as well when I was doing anything intensive or when I was beating the brains out of the hard drive, however this was with the side panel off. It’s certainly better than the joke of a unit used in my grandma’s P7-1234.

 

OPERATING SYSTEM (or in this case drivers)

I can’t really speak about any stock OS, since my PC didn’t come with the hard drive, but I’ll talk about the drivers. The selection of drivers is pathetic. You have Windows 2000, Windows XP (Home Edition and Professional are listed separately for whatever reason), as well as Vista (Business and Enterprise, again listed separately for whatever reason). The Vista drivers will work on any version (at least they did for me), and they even worked on Windows 7, which is fantastic GIVEN THAT THERE ARE NO WINDOWS 7 DRIVERS. The fact that there aren’t any drivers for Windows 7 is a major blow to the capabilities of this machine, even though the iGPU struggles like mad just with Aero.

 

CONCLUSION

Overall, this is a decent machine, with a few major setbacks. The iGPU is the largest setback of them all. Another one is the fact that you are fairly limited on your storage options, unless you decide to grab a bunch of 2.5 inch drives and throw them in (4x SATA II ports with only 2x 3.5” bays and a single 5.25” bay). But with a few dollars in upgrades, this would be a solid guest, family, kids, or even business PC.

 

IS IT WORTH IT?

This topic all depends on you, and how much you can find one of these for. Personally, I managed to get mine for free, so I’m not going to complain too much about how weak it is in comparison to other machines that came out around the same time as it. I will at some point throw a Radeon HD 5450 in it with HDMI and it will probably end up being used as an HTPC, along with a Steam machine and maybe a few other things, so the free price tag of this is a major bonus.

[Mohenjo]

id put a gtx 1080 in that

[Aytex]

1 minute ago, Mohenjo said:

id put a gtx 1080 in that

or r9 295x2

[Tedster]

1 minute ago, Mohenjo said:

id put a gtx 1080 in that

Not with the 240w PSU you wouldn't.

[Mohenjo]

1 minute ago, Aytex said:

or r9 295x2

hell ill put in 2 

[Mohenjo]

1 minute ago, Tedster said:

Not with the 240w PSU you wouldn't.

you are right, ill use my hamster and hamster wheel to power the gpu