HP TouchSmart 610: For Business or Pleasure
by Dustin Sklavos on November 2, 2011 2:50 PM ESTApplication and Futuremark Performance
While the Intel Core i7-2600 is one of the fastest processors currently available, HP has hamstrung it in our review unit with a slow hard drive. As a result it's unreasonable to expect too strong a showing from the PCMarks. Likewise, the Radeon HD 6550A (or is it an HD 5570?) is pretty middling. In a notebook it would be fine, but here it has to drive a 1080p screen.
It isn't until we get out of PCMark that the TouchSmart 610's i7-2600 starts to sing. The Western Digital Caviar Green isn't a bad hard drive...for it's intended purpose. It's hardware that was never intended to be a system drive, and this is why. The user experience on the 610 suffers drastically for it. The CPU is plenty fast, and while there are overclocked systems that easily surpass it, every day applications rarely need this much computational power.
Meanwhile, the TouchSmart 610's Radeon HD 5570 (or is that 6550A?) keeps pace with the NVIDIA Quadro 600s in our workstations, basically glorified and underclocked GeForce GT 430s. That's damning to say the least. This GPU is about as good as the TouchSmart 610 gets, proving unfortunately that while the all-in-one manufacturers can throw their lot in with desktop-class CPUs, graphics are another affair entirely. AMD is theoretically trying to make inroads by producing all-in-one-specific GPUs, but if all they're going to do is just rebrand mobile parts I'd just as soon they not bother. All-in-ones continue to be stuck in mobile GPU limbo with desktop-class screens.
By comparison, Apple offers faster GPUs even in their 21.5" iMac; it comes with the HD 6750M or HD 6770M, while the 27" unit offers the HD 6770M or the 6970M. The 6970M in particularly is a viable gaming GPU for a 1080p display (though it would struggle at the native 2560x1440 resolution of the 27" iMac). As for the HD 6750M/6770M, you get 480 shader cores running at 600/725MHz, and more importantly you get 1600MHz GDDR5 memory, which nets you twice the bandwidth at the same clock speed relative to DDR3. HP would certainly benefit from ditching the overload of GPU "upgrades" and sticking to just a couple offerings that clearly scale in performance.
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ABR - Wednesday, November 2, 2011 - link
That's all I have to say.GotThumbs - Wednesday, November 2, 2011 - link
Whats the point of including an i7 and 8 gigs of ram when your running the OS off a drive with turtle speed? At least include a decent WD Black/Blue drive or better yet.....Run the OS off a separate SSD and use the Turtle drive for media storage.I still prefer building/upgrading my own systems, but this would be a decent unit for the kitchen. I'd be even more interested if they offered this with an AMD APU at a much lower cost. I just don't see the value in offering this product at such a high price.
Good review though.
shin0bi272 - Wednesday, November 2, 2011 - link
While I was working on an iMac in 1999 I noticed that it didnt have a floppy drive. forward thinking sure but all the boot disks that we had for that version of the mac os were on floppy and cd burners were really expensive. So while it was forward thinking it also screwed its customers and the techs trying to repair one hit by lightning.Roland00Address - Wednesday, November 2, 2011 - link
When you use a TN panel with a touchscreen, and you actually touch the panel the image distorts where you touch it.IPS does not have this limitation, this is why many touchscreen phones use IPS panels over the cheaper TN, furthermore IPS have better viewing angles.
PLS is a variant of IPS that Samsung has come out with.
Death666Angel - Thursday, November 3, 2011 - link
I don't really understand you. Any touch screen of course needs a layer of glass or something else that is between the panel/pixels and the finger, because if you touch any open LCD, the image distorts.shashank7040 - Thursday, November 3, 2011 - link
Great.....Asus Eee Pad is the first Android tablet with slide out QWERTY.....................http://goo.gl/B4rJU
Samus - Thursday, November 3, 2011 - link
Really HP? REALLY!?Why didn't you just put a 7200RPM 2.5" in there if you were concerned about heat/power!? This is just stupid. Why bother pairing the fastest CPU on the market up with the slowest hard drive?
Snotling - Thursday, November 3, 2011 - link
they wanted to save a dollar on each system sold.Really, the difference in heat and power draw nowadays is close to non-existent and of course, at least on 2.5 HD... which I hope is what they used right?
What... They didn't??? those stinking bastards!
Snotling - Thursday, November 3, 2011 - link
"The HDMI input is great,"not so great if you consider that you have two of them (or so it seems) and no VGA, HDMI or otherwise method of plugging in a second display, projector or whatever...
please... laptops half this size have had it for decades.