Gaming desktops, especially ones with the new Intel Core i7 CPU, require more room to accommodate the red-hot hardware inside. I've been building PCs for over a decade, and whenever someone says, "I want a gaming PC," I start with a full tower and full-size ATX motherboard to allow extra room for fans, hard drives and air flow.

The PC designers at HP have cooked up quite the engineering masterpiece in the HP Pavilion Elite, fitting everything in a mid-size tower, with a lot of bells and whistles that are hard to find in compact, high performance machines. You won't have to get a new desk or invest in a giant armoire to house the HP Pavilion Elite 9600t, and you won't break the bank either.

The specs of the Pavilion Elite m9600t I reviewed were as follows:

* Mid tower with microATX motherboard
* ATI Radeon 4850 with 1GB memory
* Intel Core i7 920 @ 2.66GHz
* Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit
* 6GB DDR3 RAM
* 750GB 7,200RPM hard drive
* Blu-ray player with DVD+-RW, CD-RW
* WiFi a/g/n
* 7.1 sound card

Look and Feel
I've never put much stock in desktops with custom lighting solutions, liquid cooling, or even a gazillion ports on every panel, so when I saw all the little extras on the top and front of the Pavilion Elite's case I thought it was just overkill. "I'll never use these things. I'm an elite gamer guru and I already have everything I need." To me, desktops are mere boxes to house my elite hardware, nothing more, and gaming PCs with a special holder for your iPod Touch/iPhone? Nobody will find THAT useful.

Well, I admit I was wrong. I grew to like the front panels that conveniently hide the various audio, USB and Firewire ports. I admit that I used the non-slip, indented surface on the top of the case to safely house my MP3 player. If you've ever watched in agonizing slow motion as your $300 mp3 player slid off your desk and hit the floor, you'll appreciate that feature.

There were also two drive bays on the front, one for an HP Personal Media Drive, and a smaller port for an HP Pocket Media Drive. At the time this review was written, an extra $90 will get you a 160GB Pocket Media Drive, and for $180 you can get a 1TB Personal Media Drive. I didn't use either, but thought it was a nice way to make users a little more mindful of backup needs, and again, hats off to HP engineers for including the drive bays in a small case.

Inside the case, I first noticed the gargantuan processor fan. To cool the Intel Core i7 processor in such a small case, HP had to use a slightly larger fan, but it was surprisingly quiet unless I really taxed the system with Crysis and other resource-hogging games. There's also room for extra internal hard drives, another optical drive, and even another video card slot for gaming enthusiasts. We found the one included GPU was more than adequate for gaming and video playback.

Performance
Testing the Elite 9600t in Crysis was easy; the PC never crashed once even when pushing the hardware to its limits. At max resolution and graphic settings, I got an average of 22 frames per second (fps). This was better than I expected, and gameplay was smooth and, of course, the scenery and effects beautiful. With minimum resolution and graphics settings, the Elite 9600t averaged 77 fps.

Another strength of the Pavilion Elite is its performance in multimedia tasks like video and audio ripping. The included Blu-ray player/DVD Supermulti burner always seemed to get DVDs and CDs ripped much faster than anticipated. With my home PC's DVD burner, I generally set it to extract the audio files and walk away for ~20 minutes. Not so for the Pavilion Elite. I was even able to multitask without a hitch while I copied a few of my favorite DVDs to the hard drive.

Summary
It's often difficult to distinguish one manufacturer's gaming/multimedia PC from another's, and it's clear HP took this to heart when designing the Elite 9600t. The end result is a powerhouse desktop PC with a small footprint and similarly small price tag.