Desktop PC Review: HP Compaq 6005 Pro

A racing stripe would be nice. Or maybe a hood ornament or custom paint job or a sticker somewhere. Anything to indicate that the black-cased HP Compaq 6005 Pro isn't the generic desktop PC it appears to be -- that it's unabashed overkill for an employee who spends the day e-mailing and spreadsheeting, but is built to keep up with a demanding user of demanding applications. It's a desktop with a shot of Tabasco sauce.

To be sure, HP will happily build you a generic 6005 Pro if you want one; an e-mail and spreadsheet-worthy configuration with an Athlon II X2 processor, 2GB of RAM, and a 160GB hard drive is $589 without a monitor. (Fifty bucks more will get you a similar machine if you prefer Pentium dual-core power; the names 6000 Pro and 6005 Pro indicate Intel and AMD silicon, respectively.)

At $899 without monitor, however, our test unit is a top-of-the-line performer, with a Phenom II X4 B95 processor -- a 3.0GHz quad-core AMD CPU with four 512K Level 2 and one 6MB Level 3 cache -- plus 4GB of DDR3 memory and both a 320GB conventional hard disk and 64GB solid-state drive (SSD) for faster boot times and program launches. If you think that sounds more like an enthusiast's rig than an enterprise client, you're right. But who says you can't get enthusiastic about a client?

Pop the Top

Rather than the available, conventional minitower case, our 6005 Pro came in a small-form-factor case -- a 13 by 15 by 4-inch box that can be used as a monitor stand or stand vertically beside a monitor. Compared to the minitower, it offers fewer drive bays (just one 5.25-inch bay, so just one optical drive will fit) and has room for only half- instead of full-height cards in its expansion slots.

The one PCI, one PCI Express x16, and two PCI Express x1 slots are readily accessible once you open the Compaq's lid, accomplished by pulling a handy latch rather than loosening screws and sliding a panel. Moving some SATA cables and lifting the hinged cage that holds the DVD burner and hard drive lets you access the four memory sockets (two occupied); the SSD is stashed beneath the 240-watt Energy Star power supply.

Four USB 2.0 ports, not the more commonplace two, are conveniently mounted up front, between the power button and microphone and headphone jacks. Six more USB ports are at the rear, along with Ethernet, PS/2 mouse and keyboard, and serial ports and both VGA and DisplayPort connectors -- the HP is ready for dual-monitor operation out of the box with no graphics card required, assuming you have VGA and DisplayPort monitors (or the proper DisplayPort-to-VGA or -DVI adapters) on hand.

The employee with both this quad-core speedster and dual displays is a lucky employee indeed. About the only low-ball components are the vanilla USB keyboard and optical mouse, both featureless but functional.

Speaking of speedster, there's RapidDrive -- HP's term for the combination or concatenation of a 64GB Samsung SSD and 320GB, 7,200-rpm Western Digital hard disk, yoked in a JBOD array to appear as a single 351GB (formatted) C: drive (plus a 5GB recovery partition).

This means that the operating system (32-bit Windows 7 Professional) and applications installed early in the life of the system (like the preloaded 60-day trial of Microsoft Office 2007) fill up the speedy SSD first, with later programs and data files spilling over onto the hard drive.

Since the merger is transparent to the user, there's no fussing with multiple drive letters as there usually is with separate boot and data drives -- just lickety-split performance. The PC booted in a brisk 33 seconds, and both Office and the normally tepid OpenOffice.org started in a snap.

Solid Software

The quad-core CPU helped the 6005 Pro power through other benchmarks, rendering Cinebench R10's sample scene in 90 seconds and posting a score of 8,680 in PCMark Vantage. The AMD 785G chipset's ATI Radeon HD 4200 integrated graphics are less impressive, scoring 1,771 in 3DMark06 and crawling at 3.3 fps (score 83 at 1,280 by 1,024) in the formidable Unigine Heaven 2.0 benchmark.

But though it's not tops for 3D rendering or gaming, we wouldn't hesitate to recommend the HP for image or video editing or other nontrivial tasks. We just wish HP had supplied the 64- instead of 32-bit version of Windows 7 to make the most of the system's 4GB of RAM.

Our test unit did supply some interesting utility software. HP Power Manager lets you enter your working hours (say, 8 to 6 on Monday through Friday) and local electricity cost and tells you how much you'll save by letting the program suspend the PC instead of leaving it running during downtime. The HP ProtectTools administrator console and end-user client offer friendly menus for implementing security functions such as encrypting the hard drive, managing passwords and credentials, and securely deleting files.

The 6005 Pro supports DASH (Desktop and mobile Architecture for System Hardware), an industry standard for secure remote management akin to Intel's vPro. A TPM 1.2 embedded security chip is standard, as is a trial of the McAfee anti-malware suite.

We've already grumbled about the 32-bit OS, and in such a high-performance PC it would have been nice to see USB 3.0 and/or eSATA as well, but otherwise it's hard to find fault with the HP Compaq 6005 Pro if you can swing the price. It's more power than you need for Word and PowerPoint, but that just means you can expect a longer tour of duty.