Price: $2,496 direct
The HP Z200 small-form-factor (SFF) PC offers workstation-level performance in a surprisingly small package. Sure, you won’t get the myriad expandability options of a tower, but how many of your workers actually need 16TB of hard drive space anyway? The Z200 works best as a workstation for the space-constrained staffer with a heavy multimedia-oriented workload. It’s got many advantages and a few drawbacks, but the main thing that might make potential buyers retract their wallets is the steep price.
The Z200 looks just like the $800 PCs you buy your rank-and-file employees, but at roughly 4 by 13 by 15 inches (HWD), this diminutive workstation hides a good amount of internal power. It supports Intel Core i3, i5, and quad-core Xeon processors and has.....
some expansion room, including a free PCIe x1 and PCIe x4 slot. You also get a media-card reader, FireWire, and a whopping 10 USB ports. Also, this system is bloatware- free, but you do get HP Performance Advisor, a program that lets you and your IT department know what components you possess, poll your system performance, and auto-optimize settings for your workload. This system has EnergyStar 5.0 compliance and EPEAT Gold certification, as well as other eco-friendly features, thus earning our GreenTech Approved seal. In testing, the Z200 zipped through Windows Media Encoder in 36 seconds and the Photoshop CS4 test in 1 minute, 17 seconds (a score that is faster than any of the rankand- file business systems we’ve seen). It also turned in a decent score on our 3D tests, outperforming the Lenovo ThinkStation E20. So, I can recommend the Z200 over the Lenovo E20 only if your desk real estate outweighs the purchase price difference (more than $1,200). —Joel Santo Domingo.
PROs Compact. Powerful. Expandable. HP Performance Advisor. No bloatware.
CONs Only takes half-height expansion cards. No room for extra hard drives. No eSATA or USB 3.0. Expensive.
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