HP Pavilion s3380a Slimline PC

The units impressive light form factor conceals an Intel Core 2 Duo E4500 that runs at 2.2GHz with 2MB of L2 cache, 2GB of RAM, 256MB 8400GS graphics card with HDMI, a 360GB SATA hard drive, 16x dual layer SATA DVD±RW and a TV tuner. Interestingly, there’s no inbuilt Wi-Fi and in this age of wireless connectivity becoming standard in a lot of hardware, it’s disappointing to see it left out.

The front of the s3380a features a 15-in-1 card reader over four slots and can take almost every memory card you can think of, apart from microSD, which isn't really a problem if you have an adapter. This makes viewing your photos and video directly from your camera or video camera trouble-free as the drives automatically appear under My Computer as external devices. The DVD±RW drive is stealthed behind an over-sized plastic panel which feels like it'll eventually fall off after prolonged usage. A mini portable media bay located at the bottom of the case takes care of HP's own range of external hard drive devices if you happen to be the proud owner of such a product. Two USB ports and a headphone port round out the front feature and connectivity set.

The glossy piano black finish on the front panel of the s3380a, like all glossy piano black finishes, is a massive fingerprint and smudge magnet and requires some care to not get dirty.

The rear of the unit features a PS/2 keyboard and PS/2 mouse port (for those still hanging onto these legacy devices and are yet to move over to the much easier to use USB), digital audio out to connect to an external source, four rear USB ports, one Firewire port, audio ports (mic, in and out) and a 10/100 Ethernet port. It's a shame that HP only included a 10/100 Ethernet port as there may be some people out there that want Gigabit LAN connectivity.

The installed graphics card, despite being DirectX 10 compliant, is no gaming god and manages a score of 1613 3DMarks in 3DMark06.