Hewlett-Packard's new Pavilion Elite m9100 series of desktop computers is an excellent line of multimedia powerhouses. You can get one with either Intel or AMD inside, but the Intel-powered m9100t offers some additional high-end upgrade options.

These desktop computers feature some of the fastest processors around. The baseline CPU on the $850 system is an Intel Core 2 Duo E6550 with twin processing cores operating at 2.33GHz. If you're serious about performance, you can even step up to Intel's new Core 2 Quad line that features two separate dual-core dies; an upgrade to the 2.4GHz Core 2 Quad Q6600 is a reasonable $150 over baseline.

Even without the processor upgrade, though, these systems are speed demons. That's partly due to the whopping 3GB of 667MHz DDR2 memory that HP includes in the baseline systems. These computers are great for playing games, handling video and any other intensive tasks you can throw at them.

They are also ready to go as digital video recorders (DVRs). The m9100 series ships with a built-in TV tuner and remote, so you can connect your cable signal and watch and record your favorite TV shows on the PC hard drive. Baseline models include only a single tuner, however, so you can only watch or record one show at a time; the upgrade to a dual tuner is $100, which is a bit pricey for such an addition.

The rest of the system is built ready to handle the incoming video. The default operating system on the m9100 series is Windows Vista Home Premium, which comes with all the software needed for recording video. You can even send it to your living room TV via a home network if you have an Xbox 360 or other home media player.

There's nearly a third of a terabyte of storage space on these computers -- the baseline models sport a 320GB 7,200rpm hard drive. If you record a lot of video and install a lot of games, you could fill even this amount of space up fairly quickly, so HP offers some decent storage upgrade options; you can jump to a 500GB hard drive for only $50 over baseline or get two of these large drives for a full terabyte of storage for $250 over baseline.

The optical drive -- a LightScribe SuperMulti DVD-RW drive -- is excellent for multimedia. This drive lets you burn to traditional DVDs as well as dual layer media that let you store up to 8.5GB of data or four hours of high-quality video on a single disk. And since it's a LightScribe drive, you can imprint professional-looking labels onto special LightScribe media. These discs cost a little more than typical recordable media, but it's a great option for those who wish to make their created media look as sharp as possible.

As impressive as this baseline drive is, it's the upgrade options that can really make these models stand out. For $250, you can add Blu-ray and HD DVD playback capabilities to the LightScribe SuperMulti drive, letting you play high definition DVDs on your PC; you can also make the computer part of your home theater system and output the video to your HDTV. And for $400, you get HD-DVD playback and Blu-ray writing capabilities, which allows you to create your own high-definition DVDs.

HP also provides a lot of ways to get video and other files onto these desktop computers. The front of the black tower features a 15-in-1 media card reader, which allows you to swap files and photos from your PDA or digital camera by simply inserting the memory card. There are also two USB 2.0 ports and a FireWire port for hooking up high-speed peripherals such as digital camcorders.

Included in the base price is the powerful GeForce 8400GS graphics card; it offers better performance thanks to its 256MB of dedicated video memory, and it features an HDMI output for connecting your Elite m9000 to an HDTV.

And as far as the missing display goes, HP does offer some excellent bundle prices. For example, you can add a widescreen 19-inch LCD to this desktop computer for only $150, which is a great price for a large display that's perfect for watching HD movies or recorded TV shows.

Even with a couple of upgrades and adding the display, you can still get an HP Pavilion Elite m9100 series computer for less than $1,200, which is a great price for a high-performance multimedia machine.


Pros: Powerful core, excellent multimedia components
Cons: No display at baseline

Warranty
1 year, limited