HP to update media PCs with AMD Phenom, hybrid high-def drives

While even HP has admitted consumers' shifting preference toward notebooks as desktop PCs, for 2008, it plans to give desktops a boost with multimedia form factors, new AMD CPUs, and some intriguing price points.

If the desktop PC form factor has any room left in which to grow this year, it's in the media form factor. There, it has to be willing to assume an odd shape, perhaps not so much an element of your desk as something that can be wedged in an open cavity between cabinets in your home entertainment system.

This year at CES 2008, Hewlett-Packard is giving the fixed PC form factor one last big push, on a gamble that most US consumers may be willing to pay just under $1,000 for a respectable media network, but not more. To that end, it plans to show a handful of buildouts, each of which cramming in enough features to stop just short of breaking the four-digit barrier.

None of these new entries may be completely full-featured, but each has made some tradeoffs to stay under the $1,000 mark.

For example, HP's s3330f, the newest addition to its Slimline product line, will feature one of NVidia's high-end graphics cards, its GeForce 8500 GT -- not its top performer today, but certainly high up in the pack -- coupled with a hybrid Blu-ray/HD DVD player and a combination HD DVD/Blu-ray burner (high-def burners are still out of the value-conscious consumer's price range), and backed up with 500 GB of hard drive space. Powering the system is last year's double-dual-core setup: a pair of AMD Athlon 64 X2 5400+ CPUs.

The s3330f will sell for $949, and a pre-built model showed up today on HP's Web site.

Though a check of HP's current list of pre-built models showed its larger-footprint Pavilion m8330f being powered by a single dual-core AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+, several press sources yesterday were given advance word that HP plans to show it with AMD's quad-core Phenom 9500, which is a big leap forward while staying at the $959 price point. In keeping with the trend toward RAID configurations in media PCs, the m8330f will continue to use a pair of 360 GB hard drives, in addition to its standard 3 GB of memory and NVidia 8500 GT graphics card.

What's the sacrifice here? The hybrid high-def player, which goes away in exchange for the newer CPU.

Both systems will continue to feature HP's personal video recorder setup, which is tailored to work with LG's Super Multi DVD drives. But it may still be the lack of high-definition recording that keeps these systems from making a major breakthrough; and since the format war continues, now may not be the time for such a breakthrough anyway. BetaNews will have more on HP next week, during our wall-to-wall coverage of CES 2008.