HardwareCentral - HP TouchSmart IQ770 Review

HP TouchSmart IQ770 Review

U Can Touch This

February 23, 2007
By Eric Grevstad

The kitchen. The final frontier.

Ever since PCs had 8-bit processors and 64K of RAM, there's been some vendor pitching the idea of a computer on the countertop -- at first for a database of recipes, then in the form of a Web appliance displaying news, weather, and e-mails. Those ideas fell into the sink and down the disposal, but now HP has taken the best shot yet at mixing silicon and Formica: a friendly, one-piece PC with an intriguing touch-screen interface. It's also a TV, personal video recorder, and MP3/CD/DVD player in case you'd rather put it in the family room than the pantry.

It's no impulse buy at $1,800, but the TouchSmart IQ770 is a showplace for Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium -- the large-icon'd, remote-controlled heir to Win XP Media Center Edition for users who'd rather lounge on a sofa 10 feet away than sit in front of the PC at a desk. Beneath its 19-inch widescreen display beats a dual-core CPU, 2GB of memory, a 320GB hard disk, a front-mounted DVD±RW drive, and a TV tuner for viewing or time-shifting both conventional and HD programs (with limitations on the latter; more in a sec).

Instead of squeezing a computer into the back of an LCD monitor as Apple's iMac does, the TouchSmart fits a PC into the base of the height- and tilt-adjustable display, taking about the same footprint as a large laptop (10 by 18.5 inches). An included, double-ended USB and power cable lets the base serve as a cradle for one of HP's Photosmart A510 or A610 photo printers, delivering 4 by 6-inch prints through an opening in the PC's front panel.

Like a laptop, the IQ770 is not built for under-the-hood expansion, though with some surgery you can replace its two 1GB DDR-2/533 memory modules with a pair of 2GB sticks or install a larger hard disk. For the latter, it's easier to take advantage of a bay on the system's right side for one of HP's 80GB or 120GB Pocket Media Drive swappable hard disks ($130 or $180, respectively).

In the Middle of the Road

For the sake of near-silent operation, HP opted for a mobile processor -- AMD's 31-watt Turion 64 X2 TL-52, with two 1.6GHz cores with two times of 512K Level 2 cache. The 320GB, 7,200-rpm Seagate hard disk and Nvidia GeForce Go 7600 graphics controller (with 256MB of dedicated video memory) have slightly better high-performance credentials than the CPU, but you shouldn't expect the TouchSmart to set speed records.

Our test system reported a perfectly adequate rating of 4.6 on Windows Vista's 5.9-point Performance Index. For more ardent benchmarkers, that translated to a FutureMark PCMark05 score of 4,055 (CPU 3,214; memory 2,862; hard disk 5,515; graphics 3,310).

Serious gamers will shop elsewhere, though the TouchSmart did manage 36 and 65 frames per second in our XGA-resolution AquaMark3 and Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory tests, respectively, and an almost-playable 20 fps in the tough Gun Metal 2 benchmark at the screen's full 1,440 by 900-pixel resolution with 4X antialiasing.

Rabbit Ears Redux

Speaking of which, 1,440 by 900 resolution falls short of HDTV's 1080i or 1080p modes, but is enough for 720p high-definition viewing. So the HP, like several other Media Center PCs we've seen lately, is sort of stuck halfway between last year's analog-TV-only and the fully HD-capable systems we hope late 2007 or early 2008 will bring.

One reason is that the slot-loading DVD±RW drive has no HD DVD or Blu-ray movie playback, let alone writing or recording of those high-capacity formats. Another is that there's neither component (YPbPr) nor HDMI or DVI input to show content from a high-definition cable or satellite set-top box, though would-be Ron Howards will find S-Video and IEEE 1394 FireWire inputs.

The TouchSmart also draws a distinction that's suddenly quite popular in the multimedia PC segment: an NTSC cable tuner versus an ATSC over-the-air HDTV tuner. The Hauppauge TV tuner inside the TouchSmart has coaxial inputs for both (plus FM radio), but while standard-definition NTSC TV watchers can enjoy up to 125 cable channels, HDTV reception and recording is limited to what your rooftop antenna can pick up -- assuming you have a rooftop antenna or, failing that, live within a few miles at most of an HD-broadcasting TV station.

We don't, so our enjoyment of Vista Media Center's handsome remote-controlled interface and TiVo-style recording or pausing of live TV was restricted to analog rather than digital channels. Nor does the HP have the CableCard interface that's increasingly replacing separate set-top boxes with circuitry built into TV sets.

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