HP Pavilion Desktop TP01-2060 Review

HP’s Pavilion Desktop line (starting at $549, with a test price of $757) is a household name at big box stores, and for good reason. This family-friendly, affordable desktop has plenty of performance for schoolwork and basic entertainment, has plenty of front-panel ports, and our review unit’s dual storage his drives mean you’ll never run out of space is not. It also runs quietly and comes with a basic keyboard and mouse. Unfortunately, Pavilion stumbles by offering an older (Wi-Fi 5, not 6 or 6E) wireless card, with only one HDMI port. But if multiple monitors and lightning-fast download speeds aren’t a must, Pavilion Desktop is a fair replacement for the Editors’ Choice award-winning Acer Aspire TC.

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Outside: Budget without Regrets

Pavilion is HP’s basic consumer brand, sitting between the company’s cheaper Essential and premium Envy lines. Pavilion desktops come in several styles, including both all-in-ones and traditional towers like the Pavilion desktop shown here (model TP01-2060). The PC comes with most of what you need to run right out of the box, but you’ll need to purchase a monitor and a set of speakers or headphones separately.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

At 13.3 x 6.1 x 12 inches (HWD), the Pavilion is compact enough to sit on your desk, but just as cozy on the floor. 4 rubber feet to prevent slipping. Dell Inspiron desktops are about the same size. The HP Slim Desktop (part of the Essential line) is smaller, but doesn’t have the performance or storage of the Pavilion.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

The bright silver matte finish of the front panel makes the Pavilion easy on the eyes. It won’t impress anyone, but it also won’t regret sticking to your budget. The rest of the case is thin rolled steel. The tower weighs only about 13 pounds, so don’t be surprised if it’s hollow inside.

Like I said, the front port selection is a plus. This array includes four USB Type-A ports, one USB Type-C port, an audio combo jack, and a full-size SD card reader. I’m here. All USB ports meet version 3.2 Gen 1 specification and support 5Gbps transfer, which is fast enough. Our review model doesn’t have an optical drive, but some Pavilion Desktop configurations come with a tray-loading DVD burner.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

On the back, there are 4 retro USB 2.0 ports, 1 Gigabit Ethernet port, 3 audio jacks (line in, line out, mic), HDMI 2.0b and VGA video output. The VGA port doesn’t provide a high quality signal or drive a 4K display, so the Pavilion needs a second HDMI port for modern dual-monitor setups. offers 4K resolution with a smooth 60Hz refresh rate. This is useful for connecting pavilions to family televisions.

Another disappointment of our test unit is its Wi-Fi 5 and Bluetooth 4.2 wireless. It takes about 1 hour. Either way, Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5 have been around since 2019 and should be standard by now. Some Pavilion desktops offer Wi-Fi 6, so check the specs carefully.

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Internal: serviceable and upgradeable

Pavilion Desktop offers considerable upgradability for budget desktops. Remove one Starbit screw on the left panel and slide the panel back to reveal a 11.25 x 8 inch motherboard. This motherboard has two DDR4 memory slots, an M.2 2280 slot for solid state drives and a 2230 slot for an M.2 wireless card.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

Our review unit has a 256 GB SSD in a long M.2 slot and a 1 TB hard drive mounted along the front panel. His second 3.5-inch drive can be mounted in a sideways top cage. No mounting grommets or screws are included, but the SATA and power cables are well laid out.

The motherboard has a PCI Express x16 slot that could theoretically be upgraded with a dedicated graphics card if the card doesn’t need the missing GPU power connector. However, considering the power supply is rated at just 180 watts, adding a discrete GPU may not be wise. The board also has a PCI Express x1 slot for add-in cards.

Active cooling comes from the slim CPU cooler fan, the rear exhaust fan, and a separate fan on the power supply. Avoid putting this tower up against a wall as the exhaust is directed to the rear. I could hear the fan hum during some intense CPU benchmarks, but the noise was unobtrusive.

Pavilion Desktop comes preloaded with Windows 11 Home and a few apps. HP’s Support Assist provides diagnostics, troubleshooting assistance, and a device health dashboard. It also tells you if Windows security features are working.

(Credit: HP)

You also get HP QuickDrop, an app that lets you transfer files between your desktop and your Android or iOS phone or tablet. Apps you’re likely to remove include 30-day McAfee trials and WildTangent games. Many commercial apps like Spotify and Disney Plus are littered on your machine. Purge or store at your discretion.

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8 Cores on Tap: Pavilion Desktop Benchmark

Our HP Pavilion Desktop TP01-2060 features an 8-core, 3.8 GHz (4.6 GHz boost) AMD Ryzen 7 5700G processor, 16 GB of DDR4 RAM, AMD Radeon integrated graphics, 256 GB solid state and 1 TB hard drive above, and 1 unit. -Year warranty. More basic Pavilion desktops can be purchased with 4-core or 6-core AMD or Intel CPUs starting at $549.

As mentioned above, Acer’s Aspire TC is the main competitor. The $559 model we tested, TC-1760-UA92, includes a 12th Gen Intel Core i5 CPU and a 512GB SSD, but no secondary storage drive. What it does have is Wi-Fi 6, a huge improvement over HP’s Wi-Fi 5. Dell Inspiron desktops tend to be more expensive, to the $799 model we saw on Dell.com included a very powerful Core i7-12700 processor.The model we reviewed had a much more modest quad-core Core i3-12100. (Another Core i7-12700 home PC I found online is the $759 Lenovo IdeaCenter 3i.)

We haven’t tested many new budget desktops, so we round out the benchmark charts with a business-grade small form factor tower, the Dell OptiPlex 3090, and an AMD-powered Asus ExpertCenter PN52 mini PC.

Productivity and content creation tests

The first test is UL’s PCMark 10. It simulates a variety of real-world productivity and office workflows to measure overall system performance and also includes primary drive storage his subtests.

The other three benchmarks focus on the CPU using all available cores and threads to assess a PC’s suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon’s Cinebench R23 uses the company’s Cinema 4D engine to render complex scenes, and Primate Labs’ Geekbench 5.4 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, I use the open source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert the 12 minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (shorter is better).

The ultimate productivity test is PugetBench for Photoshop from Puget Systems.(opens in new window), using Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe’s renowned image editor to evaluate PC performance for content creation and multimedia applications. This is an auto-enhancement that performs a variety of common GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks, from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving images to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.

Pavilion’s 6,391 points in PCMark 10 is a resounding victory, well above the 4,000 points that indicate superior productivity for everyday apps. The storage capacity is also a nice point. In the CPU test, the Pavilion is pretty much on par with the Core i5-powered Aspire TC and far better than the Core i3 Dell.

Graphics and game testing

Finally, there is the synthetic 3D test. It includes two DirectX 12 game simulations from UL’s 3DMark benchmark suite: Night Raid (more discreet and suitable for systems with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding and suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs). Also included in this group are two off-screen rendering exercises from the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which we use to measure OpenGL performance.

None of these desktops hold much promise for modern gaming. AMD Radeon integrated graphics in Pavilion and ExpertCenter tend to outperform other Intel silicon, but not by much. This number suggests that the Pavilion is probably only capable of handling basic esports titles. To prove it, I ran the popular Rainbow Six Siege benchmark informally on my HP desktop, and on medium quality settings he got just 42 frames per second at 1080p resolution.

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Verdict: Excellent budget tower if a single screen is enough

When it comes to budget family PC choices, you could end up far worse than HP’s Pavilion desktops. In fact, the only way this could be significantly improved is with our Editors’ Choice Pick Acer Aspire TC with dual HDMI ports and Wi-Fi 6 overhead. If you’re not using dual monitors and don’t plan to invest in a Wi-Fi 6 router, the Pavilion is a great option.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

Our review model shows particularly fast performance thanks to the 8-core Ryzen processor. This Pavilion desktop provides your daily essentials without breaking the bank.