Embarrassingly Bad: HP Pavilion $1430 Prebuilt Gaming PC (TG01-1160XT Review)

what the hell is this what is no this is like dell all over again this is an io well that's nice and flexible how's that for a motherboard looks great the main thing i want to look at for the board is probably [Music] we're back with another pre-built review today this one is of a small hp box we've already reviewed the likes of dell which is hp's closest large oem competitor we've looked at smaller ones like skytech and abs with the challenger those two were the two thus far that have done the best in our reviews and then we've looked at an assortment of others so hp comes in now as one of the largest players we asked hp's support for help to choose the parts and that was the the wrong decision if we actually needed help but it was a great decision for making content about one of the honestly just dumbest assortments of parts we've seen in a gaming pc from our pre-built yet before that this video is brought to you by be quiet and the silent base 802 case the silent base 802 got high accolades in our review for its high build quality and its versatility in both size focused and airflow focused built the 802 comes with swappable mesh panels or noise damped panels so you have options for either approach the silent base 802 case is able to fit larger builds as well without being overbearing and it stands out for its mechanics quality and assembly quality learn more about be quiet's new case at the link in the description below for the quick overview our pre-built reviews go pretty in-depth but we really like to focus on the assembly quality the tear down and sometimes we'll throw in a curve ball for the manufacturers like randomly doing an audit of their support capabilities we did that with nzxt a year or two ago at this point and they failed miserably at the time and we decided you know it's it's time to do this again so we tested hp support we'll talk about some of that today our normal process for this involves buying a pre-built gaming pc that typically is one of the truly pre-built ones meaning they've pre-selected the parts it's not a you go through and pick and choose and sort of customize the build it's this is one of the skus they offer in this price point we buy it and then we review it because a few things one that's where they'll typically do the best because they build a lot of them and two it's the most representative of what the most people buy from that pre-building company this time we had a slight customization they helped us get to the largely pre-built box and then they uh helped us with choosing some extras to add on uh like 32 gigabytes of ram with our i5 cpu because if you're playing games then more ram or better at least that's what hp led us to believe so we have some extras today we're looking at for this one we looked at the bloatware again it was pretty bad on this the shopping experience was they were very helpful in the sense that they were quick to respond they had answers to questions it's just that most of them were wrong but if you didn't know anything about computers you would think it's pretty good customer service maybe there's value in that don't really know at 1430 we got the 10 400 it is the one with the igp in it it's not a 10 400 f we got an rtx 2060 super it was sold for 70 more than the 3060 from hp so the reason we didn't choose the 360 is because they weren't going to have any for about two months after the point we were buying the system and that just wasn't gonna work for us for most people so we bought what was in stock which was their overpriced 2060 super for reference yes video cards are expensive now we get it but we looked into this one and you can go on ebay right now and you can go get gouged by some other seller and get a uh a 2060 super from an actual video card partner brand that has actual designs and heatsinks that aren't just whatever hp has done here for about 650 to 750 us buy it now it's a bad price and uh it would be terrible to actually spend that on a 2060 super that said however spending 1430 on this and getting this garbage with this 2060 super if you are capable of diy and the only reason you're here or looking at pre-built reviews is because you're thinking i just need a way to get a video card that seems like a good avenue you're correct in that regard however perhaps reevaluate the point that maybe the oems and the sis are in fact also gouging or minimally are charging a lot more than what the assortment of parts is worth and probably you could pick better parts yourself we wouldn't have picked that configuration but that's what they picked for us and now it's time to sort of start looking at it from we'll start with support then we'll get into the teardown and the gaming performance and everything else as a quick reminder we have been buying all these pre-built with our own money that's thanks to you all who support us via either patreon on patreon.comgamersnexus where you can get some behind the scenes videos and extra footage or from those of you buying from the gn store where you can get usable products like the gm mod match for running low on the gm vault large mod mat for pc building protecting your table and your components alike as an anti-static work surface and we also sell things like desk sized mouse mats with a wire frame blue and black design and we also have the red and black mouse pads alongside shirts and all kinds of other things go to store.gamersnexus.net if you want to get something in return for helping us out with buying more of this stuff so we told them gaming only target is 1080p 144 fps that gives them something specific to shoot for we told them we want to play the game's split gate which by the way is awesome if you haven't played it uh cs go rocket league and rainbow six siege which happens to be in our testing suites that gives us something to validate against and uh we also told them that we weren't sure how much money we wanted to spend because we as the user were not knowledgeable enough to know how much we should spend to get something worthwhile so basically we said the goal for the pc is playing these games at this frame rate this resolution please help us figure out what to buy hp quickly linked us to this this is the hp pavilion tg01 1160xt pricing is variable but it starts in the high hundreds and it goes into the thousands when we asked hp about the differences of amd and intel they told us that amd was good for a cheaper pc while intel was good for high-end gaming they also told us quote if you really want to enjoy and have greater gaming experience it is best to have a 32 gigabytes of ram which also a lot of gamers prefer to have for their pcs they asked us how quickly we wanted the pc we told them no later than three weeks two to three weeks for sure we need it here and then they promptly recommended us a computer that allowed us to add it to cart and yet would not be shipping to us for eight weeks so instant massive fail on that especially because it's very easy to overlook the text that says won't arrive until whatever date it is and it was eight weeks away this was after they sort of sold us on the rtx 3060 as being the right card for the job but we then looked around and said hey there's 2060 supers in stock let's order one of those and we asked them what's the difference at this point hp more or less stopped responding and sort of said yes that's also good for what you're doing and we just gave up on chat and bought this thing so we ended up with something where we've wasted a lot of money on something we won't need which is 32 gigabytes of memory for something that has an i5 cpu we have gotten information that was not particularly useful about amd versus intel's differences it's not as simple as amd is cheap and intel is for high-end or whatever it was they said and we ended up with an initial recommendation that was many times multiple further in the future than what we had actually requested so hp starts out with a hard f for the support system and now we can move on to taking apart the computer at this point the computer's been completely tested we've finished thermal testing game testing noise everything else so we can take it apart now without accidentally making it better when we reassemble it so this is the pavilion it's very small actually hang on one second okay so that's the dell g5 i feel like there should be a wilhelm scream every time we bring this thing out but you can see they're similar in size and actually the hp system manages to be somehow smaller they're both using proprietary parts it's very clear but they're technically made by competitors and we've already reviewed the g5000 similar in size though there's no ventilation at all this is just the thing we noticed immediately when we took it out of the box was the front panel was not even sealed you can see they've sealed off the video ports to make sure that the only idiocy that happens is that hp and not at the user's end of things let's uh oh there's this too really appreciative of this feature where they've used what the hell is that like a torx screw with a flathead bisection in it so just to make it really easy to get the panel off so instead of using a phillips head or a thumb screw we're going to go ahead and use a bizarro land torx screw because we don't want customers to open it but we also want to make sure they can if they have to so we're going to do both the chassis is almost certainly 20 years old not that's not i'm not exaggerating they're not mounting a fan or anything like that there what the hell is this what is what is going on okay all right so uh i don't know where to start it's like i'm being gaslit by hp i'm actually not sure if i've ever taken a computer apart or if i've ever built one or even seen the inside of one because this is a foreign concept to me so we have a motherboard allegedly unfortunately they've already done a lot of the work for us here and not connected the panel oh no oh no it's even worse no this is like dell all over again this is an io there's the front io so there's your well that's nice and flexible there's your uh chassis io built into the motherboard just you know hp is just doing everyone a favor they want to make sure that uh once you realize you're done with this computer it can go where it truly belongs which is the trash because this is not maintainable this is a custom motherboard it's not a standard form factor and that means it has truly zero use outside of this specific chassis and that's tremendously wasteful and sad so that's a great start to things where we've got the i o built into the front of the board including oh there it is including the power switch right there because why make a separate pcb in the chassis when you can just make a motherboard that is useless in any other scenario okay all right watch this i was just i was thinking about maybe disconnecting the power cable and when i went to look for the uh the tab to pull i noticed how well the pcb is secured to the rest of the video card it is completely separating as i push on it this is an hp branded card obviously nvidia makes the gpu itself but hp is responsible for whatever is underneath the shroud and we'll look at that soon i see at least two heat pipes in there so that's good there's something we'll do a separate teardown on this i mean it looks like a kind of real cooler it's single fan the gb temperature average was okay but the problem was the hot spot temperature we think there's probably a bad mount uh likely because there's only four screws securing the cooler to the gpu okay there's the power supply that is a bizarrely shaped power supply oh no i've made a classic mistake i tried to use a phillips head screwdriver on a computer that obviously is not what we use on computers oh the motherboard's weird too wow this is it's like it's as if dell and hp uh envy each other so much that they're copying even their competitors and confidence check this out uh so the power supply is 80 plus gold allegedly and do 18 amps on 12 volt main so it's got a couple 12 volt rails there or 12 volt lines you see 18 amps max on them total power can't exceed 400 watts and it is only 12 volts now whether it's 12 volts only is a different story we'll need to pull up the search for this and look at it more closely uh 12 having only 12 volts is not necessarily 12 volt only as the spec goes but it does only have 12 volts here's the weird scenario there's this cable uh three wires plugged into what on the board is labeled power command p2 and then there's this cable which is sata so 12 volts goes into the board at the board level it's going to get converted to include your five volts whatever else might be wanted by a particular connector so in the case of sata they'll have to convert for five that's just a sata connector and then this is eps 12 volt four pin no wait sorry this is eps 12 volt four pin what's the other one i think this is what they're using to feed the 5 and 3.3 getting converted oh no wait wait oh there's no 24 pin either and there's no 10 pin this is not atx 12vo that's what we've learned we have now come to the conclusion atx 12bo would have a 10-pin connector instead what they've done is hp's got sorry if i i seem a little scattered on this but it's they're doing bizarre things again so uh video card pcie and then these two power the motherboard and that would include connected devices so a 3.3 volt 5 volt they still exist even if the power supply is only doing 12 it just goes into the board via 12 and then comes and becomes something else so you've got these two which means this power supply is not usable for basically any other computer except for one built like this except for this computer so again we're into the e-waste even if the power supply is good and fine uh it is not following a standard with its connectors or form factor together and maybe it's it's something you can use in hp systems but that's kind of about it so that's very unfortunate to see that makes this computer difficult to upgrade not particularly useful long-term hard to keep it alive all the normal things that come with proprietary parts or mostly proprietary parts whatever the case may be motherboard time how's that for a motherboard looks great i did want to say something nice i noticed i think if i were working on this computer if someone brought this to me and said i don't know what's wrong with it it's not booting and i just delivered it like this when i looked at the computer i wouldn't be able to tell if it's from 1990 or yesterday it's a timeless design it could be from any decade so there is some good news uh the cpu cooler is not load bearing i found a phillips head screw also unfortunately i already threw out all the phillips head screwdrivers when i realized i wouldn't need any for this build so that's the chassis it came out of not particularly impressive but the motherboard is what we're more interested in so i think the main thing i want to look at for the board is probably the cpu cooler mount okay sorry i can't say i've ever used a flathead on a cpu cooler so there's fairly full ihs contacts that's kind of nice to see at least missing corners a little bit over here and over here but it's mostly centered they're doing that same weird hockey puck thing where they sort of had a cooler and then they protruded it got a protruding piece of aluminum out of the bottom of it to make sure it fit everything i feel like that line should be on the outside of the computer itself they're not lying there's definitely nothing serviceable in here in the event you want to buy one anyway we're going to look at it for game performance power thermals everything else and we'll talk about bios and the included instructions too thermals start us off first with the auto configuration testing ignorance of every other factor in this build the cpu looks actually okay here it's at about 80 degrees celsius after it settled on a fan speed under load and that's something we'll talk about in the noise section later so that's not bad the gpu also looks acceptable at first it's borderline on harder throttles with nvidia boost behavior but it's around 83 degrees celsius so that's okay the real trouble is in the gpu hotspot measuring at about 98 degrees celsius as the gpu average temperature is fine this indicates to us an impressively bad mount or design specifically as it relates to securing the cooler to the gpu we'll take apart the video card potentially in a separate video and maybe run a review of it if there's enough interest in it so check back for that in the very least the cpu fan is behaving as it should and mostly ramping evenly to deal with the heat load as we get into gaming benchmarks just a reminder that gaming performance is mostly results of a good cpu and a good gpu neither of which are actually made by the company selling these computers and that's fine but that means if a pre-built has bad gaming results for its included hardware the manufacturer has done something truly remarkable and downgraded performance through its own incompetence somewhere else we've seen this a lot sadly and the oems and the sis really do have a lot of power to bring down the performance of something that's otherwise good rainbow six siege is one of the games we told our sales rep that we wanted to play so we'll start with this one rainbow six runs ridiculously high frame rates in general so this one does manage to hit our fps target that we told the sales rep about the pavilion runs at 215 fps average with lows better positioned than some of the other systems that ran only one stick of ram unfortunately though the low end cpu for the price limits performance to only seven percent better than the abs challenger despite costing 43 more money that's a horrible value you shouldn't get scaling that bad until you're at a much higher class of hardware the ram doesn't help us at all here and the cpu is the reason we're limited on performance more than anything else that budget for the memory it would have better gone towards the cpu you'd be better off saving the 430 and buying the challenger instead and then if you wanted to upgrade the ram it's something that pretty much everyone can handle on their own and the same goes for storage you could spend less than half of the savings and upgrade both aspects while getting a better case a better cooler and better overall assembly at 1440p the pavilion ran at 162 fps average allowing it more of a lead over the challenger than previously that's now a lead of 28 and this is because we've become gpu bound rather than cpu bound lows are below where they should be thanks to some of the bloatware that hp installs but not low enough that it's producing noticeable stuttering they've definitely left performance on the table for multiple reasons here in cyberpunk 2077 the pavilion managed at 90 fps average about 36 percent more performance than we saw on the 10400f with gtx 1660 super combo from abs and again that's 42 more expensive to get that performance uplift the rtx 2060 super is responsible for this performance increase and it encroaches on the rtx 3060 and 3060 ti turf where we see them combined with some of the higher end systems obviously the 2060 super out does the slew of 1660 super skus we've tested for these pre-builts previously so it's really not a surprise that it's performing where it is the performance isn't bad in this test or this game but the value would be significantly better if our sales rep didn't push 32 gigabytes of ram onto us so that it can fit more games to be clear to any novices that's not how it works for hitman 3 the pavilion gets a did not finish score it did finish the testing technically but it had extremely high variance even across eight test passes the averages didn't make sense and they're not representative of the variance or the experience the reason for the variance again is largely attributable to hp's decision to load a dump truck worth of bloated useless software onto the computer this run to run variants is harmful to the consistency of the user experience and is unacceptable at the level we observed for the money we paid red dead redemption 2 is last for gaming the pavilion ran at 76 fps average here meaning it holds a lead of 18 in average fps over the challenger once again hp manages to orbitally nuke itself with the bloated background services constantly running successfully tanking it's one percent and especially 0.1 lows below even a 900 computer that we condemned previously now for noise testing this chart shows the noise levels measured at 20 inches distance and all testing is controlled and like for like the pavilion ran at 42 dba under maximum load or about 30 dba idle the idle noise level is actually appropriate for this and it's better than most of the others so that's a positive it only took us half of the review to find a positive but it is a positive the maximum noise level also is okay here it doesn't really become noticeable in an annoying way until approaching or exceeding maybe say 44 dba for this type of system in our test environment the time to ramp to maximum noise level under 100 cpu and gpu loads about 178 seconds in this one this is looking at hysteresis and the fan curve and faster ramp means stopping thermals running away too much sooner but ramping too quickly means transient or jumpy fan speeds during the loads that start and end rapidly like you might get in gaming we think the 80 to 200 second range seems to make sense for this type of build depending on the context of course of how hot the commons are getting and more powerful cooling solutions can react slower that's one of their advantages while worse cooling solutions should react faster power testing will give us a better picture to the performance of the computer the hp system runs at just 108 watts under an immediate blender load limiting its performance capabilities obviously by how little power it's drawn it's on the low side of power consumption which can be good but it's also mixed in with the lower performance in gaming power consumption the pavilion ran at 247 to 266 watts on average that's about what we'd expect for this combination of parts so there's nothing weird to talk about here time to talk about the bios setup and instructions on first boot windows went through some typical oem uls screens and some registration information requests that we skipped past once booted into the os we were greeted by pop-ups for a wide range of hp's advertisers namely mcafee dropbox and expressvpn hp installs plenty of first party help and support on their systems as well the omen gaming hub and more requests for information made appearances after the first round of oem bloatware 2 and connecting to the internet for the first time brought a third and fresh wave of pop-ups as if hp had pre-installed a virus from the windows xp days microsoft edge even had some preset bookmarks for hp and its other advertisers the pop-ups will continue until the programs are uninstalled or until morale improves we're not sure which this level of bloatware is completely unacceptable for a pre-built the entire point of paying someone else to build the computer is that they don't sell you a piece of weighed down by malware and yet here we are presumably because we had already exhausted our idiot budget on sales recommending 32 gigabytes of memory and an rtx 2060 super for 144 fps gaming hp then had to work its hardest to idiot-proof the rest of this system hp's quick start guide is more general purpose than the guys we've seen from smaller companies like skytech it's more suitable for all of hp's computers and there's no internal packing foam for better or worse as highway power has shown us in the past the hp pavilion's peripherals are similar to the flimsy generic ones that shipped with the dell g5 and the alienware systems except worse dells aren't the literal worst hp's keyboard on the other hand is it has the f keys and their secondary functions swapped so for example in order to hit f12 you need to hit function f12 this is incredibly annoying and ruined our day the mouse works normally but it's flat and sharp edged in what looks like an attempt to either imitate an apple magic mouse or excoriate the user this is a scenario where it's actually not better than nothing because literally nothing would be better for both the user and the planet you could get a better mouse and keyboard from the dumpster of a local organization remember too this is being sold as a gaming pc onto bios controls are extremely bare bones fan speed cannot be controlled through bios and everything is locked down the sole notable feature is that the 10400 igp can be enabled if desired but it's off by default the discrete 2060 obviously is vastly more powerful for gaming but it's worth enabling intel's igp for video decoding in premiere and handbrake there are menus outside of bios for running diagnostics and updating bios although these presumably aren't meant for end users to access the included ram has no xmp and we wouldn't be able to run it if it did anyway which on the upside is one fewer opportunity for hp to screw this up the sticks have genetic timings specified for up to 3200 cl22 but they're limited to 2666 cl19 because of this particular platform choice and this is the speed they were set to out of the box the timings on this ram are atrocious especially for the speed it's running and there's really nothing else to say about it the pre-installed nvidia driver was 460.93 this is a release from late 2020 so hp is about a year back on that nvidia driver it's bizarre and unnecessarily old while the bios was from july of this year there's no missing drivers or other obvious problems reported by windows device manager so that's good and on first boot we had a problem when connecting an asus strix arion external drive to any of the onboard usb ports front or rear which caused a usb power surge message to appear repeatedly but since then the issue hasn't recurred and to be clear this shouldn't happen we've used this drive on a lot of computers at this point so that's it for the pile of e-waste we bought for fourteen hundred and thirty dollars at this point not really sure what to do with it i guess we'll reassemble it or something anyway uh maybe we'll find something to do with this but obviously we don't recommend this computer we did not have a great experience with hp the problem with hp specifically from our experience with their support is that it comes across as may be helpful and may be competent because the answers are most the time fairly direct and they appear to have confidence but then they recommend stupid things so thus far the best things we've found have been skytech based on that one build we bought and abs the challenger from newegg both skytech and abs have builds that we wouldn't recommend so you'll need to exercise some judgment look at the configuration make sure it makes sense especially the case the cooling that's where most the companies trip up but at least the components list was on the competent side the pairings made sense the pricing wasn't outrageous whereas here you're spending an extra say really about 430 over the abs challenger and you're not getting much more in most of these instances and in several you're getting less like quality overall to build the components the usability of them the secondhand life of them the ability to replace maintain and keep alive a system that uses standardized standard form factor parts versus this pile of eventual trash so that's really the difference and if you were to buy something that's a thousand dollars using standardized parts instead you can take the 430 difference between this hp box and whatever that is and spend your way up to getting equivalent gpu and cpu silicon components especially with the 10400 to this thing while ending up with overall a far better experience far better build quality uh the difference is you would have to socket those parts yourself so if you're capable of that that's no problem if you're not capable or you're uninterested in doing that that's fine too there's nothing wrong with not wanting to build your own computer or modify it or maintain it but we would still recommend shopping somewhere else instead certainly don't buy the tg01 1160xt this thing is atrociously bad so that's it for this one thanks for watching as always you can go to store.gamersnexus.net or patreon.com gamers access helps out directly and to answer the question of did it get the it's better than dell award no no it didn't it's it's it's at best equivalent to dell we'll see you all next time

Channel: Gamers Nexus

Views: 1,106,669

Keywords: gamersnexus, gamers nexus, computer hardware, pre built gaming pcs, best pre built gaming pcs, $1500 pre built gaming pc, gaming pc build for $1500, hp pavilion worth it, hp pavilion review, hp pavilion tg01-1160xt review

Id: 4OZGmWZyhac

Length: 29min 46sec (1786 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 26 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Michelanvalo]

I still don't quite understand why Dell and HP use custom motherboards over standard ones. It feels like the process for design and manufacturing is way higher than just using a standard form factor.

[u/ariolander]

How those background services are destroying the 1% lows. The proprietary hardware is something but hot damn that software experience is horrible. If this is what people are picking up at Walmart and BestBuy, no wonder these OEMs/SIs are driving people to Apple products.

[u/gstelettel]

My Dad bought one of these with a Ryzen R7 5700G, 16gig ram, 1tb nvme ssd and an 3060ti... For the price of what a single 3060ti would have cost him at that time. The cpu cooler looks janky, but does its job surprisingly well. The whole build is pretty low noise when gaming. The graphics card is hp custom but looks like it has a decent cooler. All Temps are fine while gaming. So yeah... actually one of the best pcs he ever bought price wise, while at least for him no drawbacks. Would he have a couple of fps more with a custom build and an 5600x, probably. Does he care? Definitely not

[u/kxta_]

shit in a box yet again

[u/Put_It_All_On_Blck]

The way Steve lets customer service choose the build and being on a short deadline really screws up price to performance.

Looking at HP's site right now for the same TG01-1160XT $750 base price for a 10400, 8GB, 256GB and 1650

If you upgrade to the i7-10700 it bumps you up to 16GB of RAM and its faster 2933mhz (10400 gets 2666mhz). Total becomes $1060

Throw in the 3060, and like Steve said its $70 less than a 2060 Super. Total becomes $1420.

So yeah, 10700+16GB faster RAM+3060 for the same price as what Steve paid for a shit box because of customer support and his deadline.

[u/Cynical_Cyanide]

What exactly SHOULD a rep say when asked 'what's the difference between Intel and AMD"?

For the vast majority of people, unless there's some whacky pricing going on ... They're pretty interchangeable, no? Maybe iGPU is the only main difference? OCing is a very minor thing for most people ...

[u/kaustix3]

Lol people act as if these will self destruct in a year. Our family's old HP lasted 10+ years before it was too old and thrown out.

[u/LivingGhost371]

It takes about 18 minutes to get past the typical Steve rant about proprietary parts. As if 99% of the people that buy a prebuilt are suddenly going to have a change of heart and will start upgrading and replacing components as opposed to discarding the entire thing, standard parts or not, and then buying another prebuilt. Steve and the enthusiasts here are not the typical market for prebuilts,

Not everyone knows how to or thinks swapping out CPUs and power supplies is fun like we do, maybe you just want to buy a computer that works and plays modern games and do other things with your time.

[u/cuttino_mowgli]

Ahh yes HP, where every plastic part of that Computer awaits the landfill