Specs at a glance: Hp Stream and Pavilion Mini Stream Mini Pavilion Mini (base model) Pavilion Mini (upgrade model) OS Windows 8.1 with Bing 64-bit Windows 8.1 64-bit CPU 1.4GHz Celeron 2957U 1.7GHz Pentium 3558U 1.9GHz Core i3-4025U RAM 2GB 1600MHz DDR3 (upgradeable to 16GB) 4GB 1600MHz DDR3 (upgradeable to 16GB) GPU Intel HD Graphics Intel HD Graphics 4400 HDD 32GB M.2 SATA SSD 500GB 7200RPM HDD 1TB 5400RPM HDD NETWORKING 2.4GHz 802.11b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.0, gigabit Ethernet PORTS 4x USB 3.0, DisplayPort, HDMI, SD card reader, headphone jack SIZE 5.71" x 5.71" x 2.13 (145 x 145 x 54.1mm) WEIGHT 1.2 lbs 1.46 lbs 1.46 lbs WARRANTY 1 year PRICE $179.99 $319.99 $449.99 OTHER PERKS Kensington lock slot

HP's Stream Mini and Pavilion Mini desktops are for everyone who was excited about Intel's NUC until they saw the price.

While we definitely like the NUC and think it's a good value for what you get, the fact of the matter is a lot of people don't need all the stuff it's offering: fast-but-expensive PCI Express storage, a brand new Ultrabook-class CPU with a premium integrated GPU, and a build-it-yourself philosophy that your average computer buyer won't want to deal with.

By contrast, the Stream and Pavilion Mini are inexpensive fully-equipped systems that are ready to work out of the box. They use lower-end processors and have lower specs all around, but they include a Windows license and even a keyboard and a mouse. If you or someone you know has a years-old mini-tower on or under their desk, these systems are attractive, inexpensive drop-in replacements.

If that was all they were, they'd be worth a passing look but not a whole lot more. They are rather low-specced, as you'd expect from $300-and-under desktops, and they use last-generation Haswell processors. The NUC is a showcase for this year's high-end Ultrabook chips, and these HP desktops are showcases for last generation's budget models. However, the fun thing about these mini desktops for enthusiasts is that they're dead simple to open and upgrade, and if you're willing to spend just a bit more money it's easy to tweak them to better suit your needs.

Design

PC companies like HP and Dell are paying more attention to design and consistency lately. HP's EliteBook 1020 looks and feels a lot like a premium version of its Stream 11 and 13 notebooks, and the Stream and Pavilion Mini share some elements in common too. HP still has a huge lineup of different, sometimes poorly-differentiated systems with a bunch of different designs, but here there are signs that the company has created some design conventions being adopted across multiple product lines.

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Beyond size, though, the design of a desktop really doesn't have a whole lot to do with how you interact with it day-to-day. Both Minis are larger than the latest Intel NUC by quite a bit (the NUC in its entirety will almost fit in the Mini's shell), but they're still small enough to fit in most of the places a NUC would go. There's a good reason for that larger footprint, but we'll get to that later.

Both the Stream and Pavilion Minis share the same port layout—and, for that matter, the same motherboard, BIOS, driver set, and internal layout. They give you two USB 3.0 ports on the front and another two on the back, a gigabit Ethernet jack, and full-sized HDMI and DisplayPorts. We actually prefer the full-sized HDMI port to the mini version on the NUC since it's much more common, though mini DisplayPorts seem to be more common than the full-size version. Win some, lose some.

Both PCs also have a headphone jack, though it's on the back instead of the front as it is on the NUC. The layout you prefer here will depend on your audio setup; if you have speakers on your desk that hook into the jack, having it on the back will make your setup cleaner. If you have the desktop on your desk and want easy access to a port for occasional headphone use, a front-mounted jack is preferable. In any case, the Minis don't have integrated speakers, so you'll need to use that jack or send audio over HDMI or DisplayPort to a monitor or TV with speakers if you want sound.

Neither Mini has an integrated IR receiver for use with remote controls as some NUC models do, but both have integrated SD card slots that the NUC lacks. They're useful for importing photos or expanding storage in a pinch—it's not the best way to get more space, but it's the cheapest and easiest way.

Out of the box: Specs and performance

The first differentiation point for the Stream and Pavilion Mini is in specs. At $179, the lone Stream Mini configuration has the least inside it: a 1.4GHz dual-core Celeron 2957U CPU, 2GB of 1600MHz DDR3 RAM, and a 32GB SATA SSD attached via a B-keyed M.2 port. Since they share similar components, power consumption is broadly comparable to the Asus Chromebox we reviewed last year.

At a high level, the spec sheet looks just like the one for the Stream 11 and 13 laptops: Celeron, Intel HD integrated graphics, 2GB RAM, 32GB storage. The Haswell-based Celeron in the desktop has a slightly faster CPU and substantially faster GPU, though, which is something we touched upon a bit in our original Stream 11 review. The sole difference between the Celeron 2957U and the 2955U referenced in that piece is support for Intel's Quick Sync video encoding and decoding feature.

Another point in the Stream Mini's favor is that its 32GB of storage is connected to the SATA bus and not the slower eMMC bus.

Because of the way SSDs work, a 32GB drive is going to have lower read and write performance than a higher-capacity model—those drives have more NAND chips on board, and part of SSDs' performance advantage comes from the ability to perform multiple reads and writes from and to different chips at the same time. It's why OEM-provided performance numbers for 128GB drives are usually lower than those for 256GB or 512GB drives. Still, having that NAND chip attached to the SATA bus will give you higher disk performance than eMMC.

The Pavilion Mini comes in two flavors: a $320 base model with a dual-core 1.7GHz Pentium 3558U and a 500GB 2.5-inch 7200RPM hard drive, and a $450 upgraded model with a 1.9GHz Core i3-4025U and a 1TB 2.5-inch 5400RPM drive. Both come with 4GB of RAM. Power consumption in the Core i3 box was broadly comparable to the Haswell NUC we reviewed, with a few watts added to accommodate the spinning hard drive.

The Pentium CPU has the same features as the Celeron—same cache, same GPU, same Quick Sync support—but bumps the maximum speed up by 300MHz. The Core i3 adds another 200MHz plus some other perks, including Hyperthreading, another MB of cache, an HD 4400 GPU, and Wireless Display support.

These are all desirable features, but the price of this model is creeping up into NUC territory (especially if you're considering RAM or drive upgrades), and Intel's is still the more capable box. The presence of Quick Sync in the lower-end models also reduces the need for a faster CPU if you plan to use the computer as some kind of media box.

The 2GB stick of RAM in the Stream Mini is problematic for two reasons. First, it's only 2GB of RAM, which feels especially limiting in 64-bit Windows. Having faster storage along with a better CPU makes the Stream Mini feel faster than the Stream 11 just about all the time, but 2GB is still a tight bottleneck once you get to multi-tab Web browsing and general multitasking.

Second, that stick only populates one of the Mini's two RAM slots, limiting memory performance to single-channel mode (in other words, you lose half your theoretical bandwidth). This is also true for the Pavilion Minis, which include a 4GB stick of RAM that likewise fills only one slot.



















Though the loss of theoretical bandwidth doesn't hinder your actual performance, it does slow down operations that rely on memory speed. In these systems, the integrated GPU is one of those things, and running in single-channel mode will lower your GPU performance by 10 or 20 percent in most cases.

While the Pavilion Mini's large hard drives make them better candidates for full-on desktop replacements than the storage-challenged Stream Mini, the fact that it's a spinning HDD means that the more expensive computer often feels like the slower computer.





Software

The Stream Mini comes with the 64-bit version of Windows 8.1 with Bing, while the Pavilion Mini comes with vanilla Windows 8.1. The only real difference between the two is that the Bing version requires OEMs to leave Bing selected as Internet Explorer's default search engine in exchange for a discount. Users can change it, though, and since the Pavilion Mini uses Bing as its search default anyway there's no difference in Windows features or functionality.

Of its 29.8GB of storage, the Stream gives users about 19.4GB of usable space out of the box. 6.71GB of that space is used by a recovery partition and is therefore unusable by default, something we criticized in the Stream 11 and that we'll criticize again here. Windows 8.1 comes with a "Create a recovery drive" feature that will copy that partition to an external USB drive; once you've done that, you should be able to delete the local partition and regain the space.

Because of the relatively small amount of drive space, HP's add-on software selection is reasonably restrained on the Stream. McAfee is here, easily uninstalled in favor of Windows Defender if you don't care for it. A 25GB Dropbox offer, various HP support and documentation apps, a handful of Start screen apps and website shortcuts, and an Office demo round out the list. The Stream Mini includes a 200GB-for-two-years OneDrive offer, but no free Office 365 subscription.

The Pavilion is another matter. 26.8GB of the 1TB drive was taken up by the core OS and apps and 20.7GB was dedicated to the recovery partition, leaving 882GB of free space out of the box. Copying the recovery partition over to a (larger) USB drive is still an option, though it's perhaps not strictly necessary here.

HP uses the larger drive as an excuse to load up more bloatware, though. In addition to all the stuff on the Stream Mini, the Pavilion includes full CyberLink media suite install, a total of 31 (!) WildTangent Games, Foxit PhantomPDF trialware, and Evernote. Neither desktop has a clean "Signature Edition" version available for purchase from the Microsoft store, so you'll have to clean all of this up yourself if you like stock Windows installs.

Alternatively, at least on the Pavilion, you can use a Windows 8.1 upgrade installer and the product key included in the box to download a stock Windows 8.1 ISO, create a USB installer drive, and perform a clean installation yourself. HowToGeek has fairly thorough step-by-step instructions on how to do it.

Out of the box conclusions

Neither system is perfect as-is. The 2.4GHz 802.11n and Bluetooth 4.0 combo adapter is a weak point in the spec sheet (5GHz 802.11n would be preferable, 802.11ac is still well outside this kind of system's price range). The Stream Mini's SSD feels quick but doesn't give you enough space to replace most full daily-use desktops, while the Pavilion Mini's HDD has the opposite problem. And neither computer's RAM configuration is ideal.

But the foundation these desktops are built on is fundamentally pretty good. Sure, we'd like to see some Broadwell CPUs instead of Haswell versions, but Broadwell's CPU performance improvements are minor (we wouldn't mind those CPU upgrades, though). Even low-end Haswell GPUs are capable of very basic gaming, and the addition of Quick Sync makes them all fairly appealing HTPC candidates. The Pavilion is a decent desktop replacement, and the Stream is a good TV streaming box or kiosk PC.

Still, you can get more out of these desktops. In the next section, we'll show you how to get the most out of both. As it turns out, each is dead simple to open and upgrade.

Listing image by Andrew Cunningham