HP Touchsmart 520 All-in-One PC Review


SiSoft Sandra & CineBench

We continued our testing with SiSoftware's SANDRA, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. We ran four of the built-in subsystem tests (CPU Arithmetic, Multimedia, Memory Bandwidth, Physical Disks).
 
Preliminary Testing with SiSoft SANDRA
Synthetic Benchmarks

   

We don't want to seem overly impressed with the TouchSmart 520-1070, but several times during testing we had to remind ourselves that this is an all-in-one machine and not a desktop tower. This was one of those times. To put the above numbers in perspective, both scores are around double what the Asus ET2410 posted. The 520 has the added benefit of two additional cores to play with, as the Core i7 2600S is a quad-core part clocked at 2.8GHz with a maximum Turbo frequency of 3.8GHz and 8MB of cache.

   

Things go a little more tight in Sandra's memory and storage tests. The HP system posted stronger memory bandwidth numbers (17.17GB/s versus 15.64GB/s), but its 5400 RPM hard drive wasn't able to keep up with the 7200 RPM HDD in the ET2410 (94.38MB/s versus 110MB/s). HP chose storage capacity over spindle speed, though if it were up to us, we'd compromise between the two.

Cinebench R11.5 64bit
Content Creation Performance

Maxon's Cinebench R11.5 benchmark is based on Maxon's Cinema 4D software used for 3D content creation chores and tests both the CPU and GPU in separate benchmark runs. On the CPU side, Cinebench renders a photorealistic 3D scene by tapping into up to 64 processing threads (CPU) to process more than 300,000 total polygons, while the GPU benchmark measures graphics performance by manipulating nearly 1 million polygons and huge amounts of textures.

Asus ET2410 (Core i3 2100 / Intel HD Graphics 3000)

HP TouchSmart 520-1070

With four cores, eight processing threads, discrete graphics, and 8GB of DDR3-1333 memory at its disposal, the TouchSmart system is plenty capable of handling content creation chores and could probably handle a bit of CAD work, though if workstation level performance is what you're after, the 520's going to fall a bit short. Impressive showing in Cinebench, nonetheless.


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