HP Pavilion 23-Q110na review – AMD Carrizo hits AIO PC

Specs and benchmarks

The Pavilion is powered by a quad-core, 1.8GHz A10-8700P, one of AMD’s new ‘Carrizo’ line of low-power processors. While the budget CPU has allowed HP to spend more money on the decent screen and chassis, performance isn’t quite up to scratch. Even paired with 8GB Of RAM, it only scored 30 overall in our multimedia benchmarks. Considering these tests challenge the PC to a bout of photo conversion, video rendering and multitasking while playing a 4K video, this score shouldn’t be sniffed at, but a meagre 32 in the photo conversion portion translates to slightly hesitant performance when loading image-heavy web pages and opening programs. It’s a bit frustrating to use for anything beyond the most basic of tasks. It’s not stuttery, at least, which means that when you’re not pushing it too hard its shortcomings won’t be immediately obvious. I was a little concerned by its fans’ need to fire up for seemingly no reason when the PC was under hardly any load. They’re fairly loud and can’t really be ignored when they’re sitting right in front of you.

It’s a shame that performance is so mediocre because, as is often the case with AMD chips, the onboard graphics processor is powerful enough to play some lighter 3D games. Our Dirt Showdown test was too much for it to handle, only recording 17.6fps at Ultra detail settings and 1,920×1,080 resolution. However, dropping it down to Medium and keeping the resolution at Full HD yielded a much more playable 37fps. While modern titles will be asking too much, more basic 3D games will be fine once you’ve fiddled with either the resolution or the graphical settings.

Conclusion

The Pavilion 23 is a reasonable all-in-one with an attractive design, decent screen and reasonable graphics performance, but this isn’t enough to overcome its slightly stuttery performance. If you have very basic needs and will play the occasional game, it’s a reasonable buy, but if you’re going to be opening lots of programs and media-heavy browser tabs, it won’t be powerful enough to meet your needs.