HP Pavilion Gaming Desktop 690 Review

Best of the year 2019 Bug Most pre-built gambling desktops that we see use a conversant formula : Intel CPU, Nvidia graphics card. That ‘s why we were intrigued by the find to test the HP Pavilion Gaming Desktop 690, which makes use of AMD silicon on both scores : a Ryzen CPU and a Radeon GPU. At $ 779 as tested ( in HP ‘s particular model 690-0020 ), this personal computer configuration packs some impressive value. For less cash than a single Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Founders Edition graphics circuit board, you ‘re getting a covenant background gaming personal computer that ‘s adequate to of playing the latest abdominal aortic aneurysm titles at a mainstream 1080p resolution with the ocular timbre settings cranked up. That ‘s the most you can ask from a budget-priced gambling personal computer, and just one of the reasons that this HP model is a firm foot for getting the most for your money. That said, the miss of an SSD in this configuration puts a damp on the hand ; this personal computer otherwise would have scored an Editors ‘ Choice award .
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Big Impact, Small Form Factor

The HP Pavilion Gaming Desktop 690 is a jazzed-up version of HP ‘s mainstream Pavilion compress towers. It is n’t big. Its 16-liter case is about half the capacity of a typical mid-tower. It measures 13.3 inches long, 10.9 inches high, and 6.7 inches wide, and it weighs about 11.5 pounds .
That Hollow Feeling apart from the green-themed ports on the battlefront control panel, the Pavilion Gaming Desktop 690 has a sober up front when off. When powered on, a green light plunder vertically divides the space .
Meet the HP Pavilion Gaming Desktop 690

To its left is the reduce tray-load DVD burner, and to its right the exponent button, an audio jazz band jack, an SD calling card reader, two USB Type-A 3.0 ports, and a USB Type-C 3.1 interface. That ‘s a solid a collection of front-accessible ports as you can expect in a mainstream or budget personal computer .
Ports Up Front
The casing is by and large made of metallic. however, the construction does n’t inspire confidence ; the case materials are flimsy, and it feels empty .
One Phillips-head screw holds on the leave jury, which slides off easily enough …
A Case With a Half-Way View
The low-profile CPU cooler and the rear 80mm fan are visible, while the stay of the department of the interior is shrouded behind the intemperate driveway mounting empanel you can see hera. The panel is held in identify with some nonstandard slotted screws. They ‘re no doubt obliterable, but it ‘s a hassle you should not have to face .
Removing the drive panel provides access to the motherboard ‘s two DDR4-2666 DIMM slots ( they support 32GB of RAM in a two-16GB DIMM configuration ) and single M.2 Type-2280 ( 80mm ) slot for SSDs, hera empty. One 8GB memory module is installed in this test whole. ( One DIMM means no dual-channel functionality, but on the summation side, you can upgrade to 16GB without ditching the 8GB you paid for. ) The only storage drive is a slow 3.5-inch 1TB hard drive .
The Radeon RX 580 graphics calling card takes up a dependable part of the inner. It ‘s a two-slot circuit board but shorter than most cards I ‘ve seen based on the RX 580 chip, choose or designed to fit inside the Pavilion Gaming Desktop 690 ‘s compress chassis. ( See our review of another Radeon RX 580 batting order, from XFX, which should deliver alike performance. )
The department of the interior wire is surprisingly minimal. The motley cables coming from the baron issue search generic, but you ‘ll never see them unless the desktop side panel is off. Rated for 400 watts, the office supply in our unit of measurement carries a nod-worthy 80 Plus Platinum rate .
The Back View
I ‘m not apt to complain about the unfinished expect of the event ‘s metallic back tooth at this price. Microphone, line-in, and line-out sound recording jacks dot the top left. Further down are blocked-off video ports on the motherboard ( this shape has a dedicated graphics wag, so they ‘re disabled ), an Ethernet jack, two USB Type-A 2.0 ports, and four USB Type-A 3.0 ports …
Rear Panel Ports
The Radeon RX 580 graphics card has one HDMI video-out and three DisplayPort video-out connectors ; bear this ( and the motivation for an arranger ) in mind if you ‘re still rocking a proctor with DVI and VGA inputs only. The bottom-mounted baron add means you wo n’t have a ability cable dangling from the peak .

Components and Cooling

Finding a pre-built desktop that matches the operation of the Pavilion Gaming Desktop 690-0020 is n’t hard. however, finding one that does so at this price is a snatch tough. The Lenovo Legion Y520T mid-tower was the closest I found. It offers a flying Core i5-8400 six-core processor at the lapp price, but it takes a step down on the graphics card with just a GeForce GTX 1050 Ti 4GB. You ‘d need a GeForce GTX 1060 to match the Radeon RX 580 in the HP .
The AMD Ryzen 5 2400G is a quad-core processor that ‘s brawny enough for mainstream tasks. It ‘s an matter to chip because it ‘s one of the few Ryzen processors that has a built-in graphics solution. That functionality goes idle in this Pavilion Gaming Desktop 690-0020 configuration, however ; the dedicated Radeon RX 580 graphics card in its PCI Express slot takes on those duties .
The mono 8GB memory setup in our quiz unit of measurement is adequate for daily custom. It ‘s the minimum you ‘ll need for today ‘s AAA titles ; do n’t plan on doing a fortune of multitasking while you ‘re gaming. The memory can be upgraded, as I noted earlier, with potentially no wastage .
That 1TB hard drive, though : I did n’t need benchmarks to tell me that it is the performance watery position in this shape. It ‘s painfully boring compared to a solid-state drive ( SSD ). Windows 10 updates took forever. Things got reasonably better after I uninstalled the McAfee anti-virus trial that came installed, but there ‘s no escaping the fact that in 2018, a hard drive is far from ideal for an OS tug. Once you ‘ve used a bang SSD, you can never go back. And in accession, the hard drive importantly held back the HP ‘s performance in certain of our benchmarks .
HP includes a basic USB keyboard and mouse with this background. They ‘re no-frills, as is the norm for include peripherals, but they work just very well. If you want to get good with your bet on, though, you ‘ll want to invest in better. ( See our picks for the best bet on keyboards, for starters. )
The active cooling system exhaust in the Pavilion Gaming Desktop 690 comes from an 80mm case fan, the power add fan, and the blower-style cool on the graphics card. These three fans are barely audible, under most custom conditions. In fact, the spinning whir and chatter sounds made by the 1TB hard drive are more big .
The 80mm run down fan and the one on the CPU cool sports fan become obtrusive when a demand workload, like gambling, kicks in. Their collective motor noise is low and not likely to attract complaints. however, it ‘s one of those sounds that is most big when it ‘s gone ; deoxyadenosine monophosphate soon as you stop gaming and the fans spin down, you realize it ‘s a lot placid in the room. This HP is n’t calm at full tilt, but it ‘s besides not forte enough to be a deal-breaker, to my ears .
The cool performance was adequate on a 30-minute least sandpiper in Rise of the Tomb Raider. At their peaks, I recorded the Ryzen 5 2400G central processing unit reaching 77 degrees C, and the Radeon RX 580 at 85 degrees C. Both are within the acceptable range .

To the Test: Solid Power for 1080p

personal computer Labs recently revamped and modernized its benchmarking regimen, so our benchmark-results library is n’t as extensive for budget bet on PCs at the here and now as in years past. consequently, respective of the machines in these comparison charts are much more brawny and expensive than the HP Pavilion Gaming 690-0020. ( then again, I always like rooting for the underdog. )
hera ‘s a agile core-component summary of the competing systems charted out below …
HP Pavilion Gaming Desktop 690 (Configs)
Related Story See How We Test Desktops

PCMark 10 (Productivity Test) and PCMark 8 (Storage Test)

PCMark 10 and PCMark 8 are holistic performance suites developed by the personal computer benchmark specialists at UL ( once Futuremark ). The PCMark 10 test we run simulate different real-world productiveness and content-creation workflows. We use it to assess overall system performance for office-centric tasks such as son march, spreadsheet cheat, Web shop, and videoconferencing. The test generates a proprietorship numeric score .
PCMark 8, meanwhile, has a specialize storage test that we use to assess the focal ratio of the personal computer ‘s repositing subsystem. This test besides generates a proprietorship grudge .
HP Pavilion Gaming Desktop 690 PCMark
The lack of solid-state memory hurt the HP Pavilion Gaming Desktop 690-0020 badly in both PCMark tests, particularly in the PCMark 8 Storage run. tied a small and cheap SSD boot drive would have made a universe of difference .

Cinebench R15

future is Maxon ‘s CPU-crunching Cinebench R15 test, which is fully threaded to make use of all available central processing unit cores and threads. Cinebench stresses the CPU quite than the GPU to render a complex image. The solution is a proprietorship score indicating a personal computer ‘s suitability for processor-intensive workloads .
HP Pavilion Gaming Desktop 690 Cinebench
The HP ‘s AMD Ryzen 5 2400G processor is predictably outclassed by the six- and eight-core Intel chips in some of the competition here. In its defense, this check and this personal computer are far less expensive. And a score of 778 indicates the AMD chip has more-than-adequate grunt for most daily usage. Tasks like video rendering are where you would feel the pinch .

Photoshop CC

We besides run a custom Adobe Photoshop image-editing benchmark. Using an early 2018 free of the Creative Cloud version of Photoshop, we apply a series of 10 building complex filters and effects to a standard JPEG test image. We clock time each operation and, at the end, add up the entire execution time. Lower times are better hera. The Photoshop screen stresses CPU, repositing subsystem, and RAM, but it can besides take advantage of most GPUs to speed up the procedure of applying filters, thus systems with potent graphics chips or cards may see a hike .
HP Pavilion Gaming Desktop 690 Photoshop
It ‘s pleasantly storm that the Pavilion Gaming Desktop 690-0020 did a well as it did given its hard drive-based storage and the much higher-end Core i7 and i9 CPUs in some of the other systems here. Its AMD processor is fast enough for this kind of bursty, start-stop bring, and the RX 580 contributed its share .

3DMark (Sky Diver and Fire Strike Tests)

The extensive 3DMark test cortege, besides from UL, measures relative graphics muscleman by rendering sequences of highly detailed, gaming-style 3D graphics that emphasize particles and lighting. We run two different 3DMark subtests, Sky Diver and Fire Strike, which are suited to different types of systems. Both are DirectX 11 benchmarks, but Sky Diver is suited to laptops and midrange PCs, while Fire Strike is more necessitate and made for high-end PCs to strut their gorge. The results are proprietary scores .
HP Pavilion Gaming Desktop 690 3DMark
The tough Fire Strike benchmark highlights the relatively large operation opening between the HP ‘s Radeon RX 580 and the GeForce GTX 1050 Ti in the Lenovo Legion C530. A grade of more than 10,000 in Fire Strike indicates the HP has ample power for 1080p gaming without compromising on ocular quality settings .

Unigine Superposition

adjacent up is another synthetic graphics test, this meter from Unigine Corp. Like 3DMark, the Superposition test renders and pans through a detailed 3D scene and measures how the system copes. In this font, it ‘s rendered in the company ‘s eponymous Unigine engine, offering a different 3D workload scenario than 3DMark, for a second opinion on the machine ‘s graphic art. We show two superposition results, run at the 720p Low and 1080p High presets. These scores are reported in frames per second ( federal protective service ) .
HP Pavilion Gaming Desktop 690 Superposition
here again, the HP and its Radeon RX 580 graphics card dominate the GTX 1050 Ti-equipped Lenovo Legion C530. The difference is close to 50 percentage in the GPU-limited 1080p High place setting .

Real-World Gaming Tests

The synthetic tests above are helpful for measuring general 3D aptitude, but it ‘s hard to beat full moon retail video recording games for judging gaming performance .
Far Cry 5 and Rise of the Tomb Raider are both modern, high-fidelity titles with built-in benchmarks that illustrate how a system handles real-world television games at assorted settings. These are run on the utmost graphics-quality presets ( Ultra for Far Cry 5, very high for Rise of the Tomb Raider ) at 1080p, 1440p, and 4K resolutions to determine the odoriferous spot for visuals and politic performance for a given organization. Far Cry 5 is DirectX 11 based, while Rise of the Tomb Raider can be flipped to DX12, which we do for the benchmark. Bear in mind that the Trident X here has a up-to-date GeForce RTX 2080 card inside that costs about adenine much as the hale Pavilion personal computer .
HP Pavilion Gaming Desktop 690 (Far Cry 5)
HP Pavilion Gaming Desktop 690 (ROTR)
It turns out that the 3DMark and Superposition tests understated the real-world performance gap between the Pavilion Gaming Desktop 690 and the Lenovo Legion C530. The Lenovo ‘s GeForce GTX 1050 Ti is pushed to its limits in the 1080p tests, whereas the HP ‘s Radeon RX 580 does n’t break a sweat. The HP is evening able of some humble 1440p pixel-pushing .

A Value for 1080p…But That Hard Drive

The right combination of price and performance is what sells the HP Pavilion Gaming 690-0020. The inclusion body of a Radeon RX 580 graphics tease makes it a strong gambling rival among machines in its price range, allowing it to drum up butter-smooth 1080p gaming performance in nowadays ‘s demand titles. That ‘s with the ocular quality settings cranked, besides ; few desktops in this price range can claim to do that .
In Sum, Great for 1080 Play
The pit of the Pavilion Gaming Desktop 690-0020 shape tested here, though, is its miss of SSD memory, relying alternatively on that painfully jerkwater hard drive. That ‘s easy to remedy with an aftermarket upgrade to an cheap SSD, but we ‘d merely a soon see HP raise the price a bantam bit and include one in every shape .
The company does offer a host of other Pavilion Gaming 590 and 690 configurations with SSDs, with Intel Optane Memory caches plus a difficult drive, or with SSD and hard drive pairings. We did spot an AMD-centric one, the Pavilion 690-0024, with the lapp Ryzen 5/Radeon RX 580 jazz band, a 128GB SSD, and a 1TB hard drive, from Best Buy at $ 829. ( besides there : a 690-0034 discrepancy with a Ryzen 7. ) We ‘ll put an SSD on the wish list for following time we test this family. This time around, though, the Pavilion Gaming Desktop 690-0020 crosses out about everything else from that list that you could reasonably want in a budget gambling personal computer .

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