Pavilion HDX9003TX

If you're torn between a desktop and a notebook, perhaps a look at HP's new titan, the HP Pavilion HDX9003TX desktop replacement notebook will help you make a decision. With a 20in (1680x1050) screen, a full keyboard and number pad, 7.1 surround sound outputs and a TV tuner card the HDX9003TX will comfortably replace a desktop, notebook and even a television with one fell swoop.

Inside there's some serious hardware, serious enough to make you forget it's a notebook. One of Intel's latest and more powerful CPUs, the T7700 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo CPU with an 800MHz front side bus and a 4MB L2 cache runs the show, along with 2GB of DDR2 RAM and an ATI HD2600XT graphics chip. For storage there's a total of 400GB over two hard drives and the DVD re-writer is a LightScribe drive. This is all very impressive, especially in the benchmarks, but some of the most impressive features are on the outside.

For instance, HP has included an HDMI port, allowing you to output DVDs, downloaded movies or home videos to a TV or home theatre system via a digital video/audio signal. There's also an e-SATA port for high speed external storage devices and the aforementioned 7.1 surround sound outputs (via 3.5mm jacks). Even if you don't have any external speakers, the four internal panel-mounted speakers and subwoofer will keep you happy, and the screen is great to watch movies or TV on. Not only is it large, but it's crisp and bright enough, and the viewing angle is excellent. Mounted into the top of this screen is a VGA webcam for video chat.

The system also includes a comprehensive remote control for use with Windows Media Center or with QMedia, HP's proprietary software. If you're sitting right in front of this machine, you can simply use the equally comprehensive touch-sensitive controls along the top of the keyboard, and the remote clips into a handy concave slot to the left of the keyboard for storage.

At a whopping 6.9kg on its own, plus another 1.5kg with its power supply, the HDX9003TX is not a mobile unit. However, it's still portable, especially around the house. Due to its size and power you won't get much battery life out of it, even on its 9-cell battery. In our DVD rundown test, a worst-case scenario test, it lasted only 73 minutes, but should go longer under normal working conditions.

We saw much better results from our performance benchmarks. In WorldBench 6, the HDX9003TX scored a powerful 87, one of the higher scores seen from a notebook and in gaming tests it also did well, scoring 4202 in 3DMark 2006, 24,044 in 3DMark 2001 SE and managed 13.9 frames per second in the Call of Juarez DirectX 10 demo. In the MP3 encoding tests it took a mere 69 seconds to encode 53 minutes of WAV files to 192Kbps MP3 files when using iTunes, and 109 seconds in Cdex.