Gadgetory

ha you know it's a funny thing it's like Apple does something and then everyone else goes hmm that's a pretty good idea and as the same thing three years later for a fraction of the cost meet the latest member of the club the HP wave a trashcan PC starting at 600 bucks enjoy VR without obstacles with ZOTAC s-- VR go backpack which features a gtx 1070 and intel core i7 processor learn more at the link below so what exactly is this thing well HP's slogan is a desktop PC designed to be seen so we'll mark it on its looks first at nine and a quarter inches high and close to seven inches wide in a rounded triangular shape it's very small for a desktop with this much Hardware inside and features a grey fabric wrap around the outside that looks really modern but doesn't draw unnecessary attention that is assuming you can find somewhere to stash the unsightly power brick so it is pretty but can it perform actually the specs are not bad our core i7 model sports a power optimized lifestyle CPU whatever that means which basically trades some performance for lower heat and power consumption it's got a good mix of solid state and spinning storage and a functional if not 4k triple-a gaming ready GPU curiously HP's website says up to 16 gigs of RAM but as far as we can tell there's no way to order such a beast so you might have to upgrade it with one of those empty slots yourself noise is probably the biggest downside of the wave which peaks at 50 decibels and a whopping 86 degrees on the CPU under load though that in itself isn't the biggest problem even short bursts of activity like installing a program make the fan wind up then wind back down and this irregular fluctuation in the sound quality makes it very hard for the wave to blend in with background noise which isn't to say there isn't any reason you couldn't try to drown it out in a bit of an unusual move HP has integrated a speaker into the tower it sounds best at about half volume which is loud enough for background music at a small dinner party but not for movie watching and sports half-decent bass although it suffers as sounds get more complex everything I am by Kanye sounds right at home but busier tracks such as LCD Soundsystem's Daft Punk is playing at my house get muddled and a bit messy a problem that is exacerbated by the fact that the speaker's output grille is also the exhaust vent for the cooling solution to look inside the wave all we needed to do was remove three screws and from here the RAM and three and a half inch storage harddrive are easily accessed for upgrades but an m2 SSD swap would be much more difficult totally disassembled we can see why the thermal performance was a little lackluster system cooling is handled by these copper heat pipes that lead to a small heatsink with a single blower style fan for airflow even compared to a stock intel heatsink it's a little anemic looking and it's responsible for the video card as well not that it's a super powerful one or anything the wave isn't made for gaming and it shows but I still give HP credit for including more than onboard graphics rise of the Tomb Raider on the lowest settings at 720p ran at a playable 40 fps and eSports games like dota csgo or overwatch will run fine as long as you manage your expectations and you don't try to play them with the included wireless keyboard and mouse they're functional and it's neat that they don't require any setup thanks to the receiver that's zip tied to an internal USB port but they're possibly actually worse than what you'd expect for included peripherals in a starting at $5.99 computer I'd replace the keyboard immediately if I intended to do any serious word processing work and the mouse is unusual kind of sonic the hedghog profile shape didn't fit the hand of anyone that I showed it to so yeah but while at this point in the video you might be thinking gee he sure doesn't like this thing very much truthfully I wasn't that stoked on it until I tried to find something that outcompetes it and if you want a reasonably high performance little machine thermals and acoustics aside it's very functional it powered through productivity image editing watching 4k content and even light video work and it does it without taking up a lot of space or looking ugly in your apartment or your studio for competing trashcan PCs there's really not much else out there the Mac Pro is in a totally different class using workstation hardware at five times the price the msi vortex is similarly much more expensive and the extra $700 you'd be giving Samsung for an art PC seems to be going towards an aluminum chassis and easy storage expansion and for that kind of money you could swap a 10 terabyte Seagate enterprise hard drive into the wave and still have enough left over for 436 Chicken McNuggets even looking beyond trash cans it's very competitive a similarly Specht laptop will cost you an additional 200 bucks which is enough to cover a monitor and a replacement keyboard for the wave and many many pcs were either much less powerful or clearly made with gaming in mind sacrificing some processor speed and generally looking well let's just say gamer II do you use Amazon we do we think they're great we've got links to Amazon purchase pages in almost every video description that we create and there's more than just the ability to buy pretty much anything they've also got Amazon Prime which is 99 US dollars annually and gives you access to lots of cool stuff so prime now is free to our delivery or scheduled delivery on over 10,000 items from groceries to electronics prime video is unlimited streaming of movies and TV episodes twitch prime gives you exclusive discounts on physical games and new releases and for twitch TV users who link their account they get ad free viewing and one free subscribe per month and that is all in addition to the whole normal thing which is free two-day or same-day delivery to specific zip codes so check out the link to where to sign 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