HP's Pavilion h8-1130a is the fastest name-brand PC we’ve ever tested in PC User, managing to top 100 on our tough UserBench Encode media encoding benchmark. However, to get that speed you have to spend $1,799 and that’s without a monitor. It’s built around Intel’s Core i7-2600 processor, 8GB of RAM and a Pegatron H67-chipset motherboard. Storage features include a 1TB Hitachi hard drive and HP-branded Blu-ray/DVD combo drive. Wireless networking is included, but no digital TV tuner. Unfortunately, the graphics card is only a GeForce GT 530, although it’s enough to get DiRT 2 just short of 50fps at 1,024 x 768-pixel resolution — it’s not brilliant, but it’s a bit better than nothing. Overall, while the HP isn’t great value, it’s about as fast as you’ll find for a non-overclocked consumer desktop for standard app speed and it comes with a one-year onsite warranty.
