Re-Introducing the HP Phoenix

Less than four months ago we had in for review HP's entry to the gaming desktop market, the Phoenix. We found that it was a compelling product that served a market segment that had gone largely ignored by the major vendors, though the Sandy Bridge-E build had a hard time justifying its cost. Worse, by the time our review went up HP had already basically obsoleted our review unit.

Today we go for a second round with the HP Phoenix, and this time we're taking a look at what HP claims should be a much more compelling model than the one we reviewed before. You'll recall Sandy Bridge-E and NVIDIA's last-generation GeForce GTX 580 drove the price up to a staggering $2,880, putting it easily within striking distance of the boutiques you would normally be buying gaming desktops from. Our review unit today exchanges Sandy Bridge-E for Ivy Bridge, and includes the promised update from Fermi to Tahiti.

It's been well established that Sandy Bridge-E's value proposition is a dubious one, and for gamers it's nigh nonexistent. I've actually even upgraded my personal workstation from a Gulftown i7-990X to an i7-3770K; unless you're doing a lot of serious video editing and doing it frequently, the extra two cores just aren't worth the increased power consumption and expense. Even then, editors routinely posting video to YouTube and Vimeo may find more utility out of Intel's Quick Sync than they would from two extra cores (as I have).

Suffice it to say, nine times out of ten, the market HP is targeting with the Phoenix is going to be best served by an Ivy Bridge quad-core. HP has made the necessary updates and here's what we're looking at for round two:

Right off the bat it's safe to assume the Ivy Bridge-based system is going to outperform the Sandy Bridge-E-based system we reviewed in February in most tasks. We lose two CPU cores and an SSD in the process, but doing so shaves $1,200 off of the price tag. In exchange, our graphics card has been updated to AMD's Radeon HD 7950, and in fact NVIDIA is now off the table entirely for graphics card options in the Phoenix.

That said, the starting configuration is pretty dire. HP only offers the Intel Core i7-3770K in the Ivy Bridge-based Phoenix, which is fine, but the default graphics card is an anemic Radeon HD 7670 with 1GB of DDR3 (basically a rehash of the HD 6670 but with twice the RAM). At a starting price of $1,199 for the Ivy Bridge system, this is pathetic to the point where an end user willing to sacrifice some CPU performance can actually buy a gaming notebook with better performance at the same price.

Here's the real problem: upgrade prices on most of the components are exorbitant bordering on extortionate, Apple-level gouging. The default configuration includes 8GB of DDR3 (10GB with the current sale), and that's fine, but HP wants to charge you $600 to go up to 32GB of DDR3-1333 when you can purchase the same amount of memory at DDR3-1600 speeds at retail for a third of the cost. Even 16GB (4x4GB) is an unreasonable $160, and that's ignoring the fact that HP still equips the system with lowly DDR3-1333 when DDR3-1600 is roughly the same price at retail. It's just cheap.

The graphics card is worse. Going up to a Radeon HD 7770 will cost you $180, and the Radeon HD 7950 is a staggering $430. That's at least a $50 premium over retail on each, and that's ignoring the fact that they're replacing the existing (mediocre) card; an HD 6670 will generally set you back at least $50, so basically you're paying HP $100 over the cost of retail pricing for the GPU upgrades. About the only place they don't gouge you is on the price of hard drives, but SSDs are also overpriced by about $100 apiece.

I went and checked with boutiques to see if they could compete with HP on price here. They do, and then some, provided you're willing to sacrifice the smaller form factor of the Phoenix. iBuyPower's default Gamer Paladin E810 configuration is $1,519 and ships with faster memory, a faster video card, and a better motherboard with support for Lucid Virtu. Switch to the comparably sized LAN Warrior and it actually gets even worse. Bounce over to AVADirect and their Compact Gaming System, same deal. Where are the savings we're supposed to be able to get from going with a major OEM like HP that can drive prices down? Unfortunately, they're not here.

Okay, so the pricing isn't all that compelling. You can put together a system with better features at gaming shops like the above for less money, or you could even go the DIY route and end up spending around $1475 for a similar mATX build with a better motherboard and RAM, or closer to $1400 if you go with less expensive options. Still, paying $200 extra to get a pre-built system isn't the end of the world, if the performance and other elements are there. Let's see if this Phoenix is able to rise again from the ashes of a burned checkbook.

Application and Futuremark Performance

While I found the HP Phoenix fairly compelling on the first go, things are more difficult this time around. The Phoenix gets a small boost from Ivy Bridge, but our review unit is running off a single mechanical hard disk where most other review units we've received have enjoyed SSDs. That's going to cause the PCMark scores to take a hit. Naturally, you can add your own if you'd like, but that's another $200 or so for 240GB+ SSDs.

The other hit is going to be in the overclock, or lack thereof. The Phoenix has no overclock of any kind on the otherwise overclock-friendly i7-3770K, making the liquid-cooling for the CPU feel more for show than anything practical.

Without an SSD or an overclock, the Phoenix h9 flounders to near the bottom of the pack. Yet we know that PCMark skews heavily towards SSDs, so let's see what happens when we shift the focus to more CPU-oriented tasks.

Without any kind of overclock, the Phoenix h9 puts in a very weak showing compared to our other gaming desktops. Note that boutiques charge a very small fee to overclock the systems they build, but that fee results in a tangible performance improvement that was also in some cases even measurable in gaming scenarios.

I want to be more forgiving of the Phoenix h9 in gaming scenarios where it's often competing with multi-GPU solutions, but it has a hard time breaking away from even a single last generation GeForce GTX 580. Keep in mind that the Radeon HD 7950 is as fast as any of the Phoenix models will get, too, due to the thermal constraints of the small chassis. Hopefully real world gaming benchmarks will be kinder....

Gaming Performance

While the HP Phoenix h9 put in a fairly weak showing in our synthetic benchmarks, it's meant to be an affordable gaming machine. Unfortunately, our own Ryan Smith reviewed the comparably priced NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670 and found it to be generally superior to the AMD Radeon HD 7950, and you can actually get the GTX 670 in boutique systems for the same price (or even less) than the 7950 in the Phoenix. We don't have any GTX 670-equipped systems in our charts yet (we're working on getting one), but it won't be too far behind the V3 Avenger with its single GTX 680.

Remember where I mentioned the CPU limitation would manifest itself in gaming situations? It does so here. The 7950 should be generally superior to the GeForce GTX 580, but that's not working out in practice. In almost any situation where the GTX 580 has access to a faster CPU, it makes use of it and ekes out a victory. In gaming situations, the Phoenix h9 simply shouldn't be getting beaten by the older Phoenix, but it is. Okay, sure, it's not as expensive as the previous generation either, but for gaming you could build a comparable system for under $1250 if you make a few reasonable changes to the core hardware and add in overclocking.

The one place the newer h9 can safely exceed its predecessor's limits is in our surround configuration, and that's because the GTX 580 simply doesn't support running more than two screens on its own. Surround performance is generally quite playable, although with Battlefield 3 you'll have to disable anti-aliasing, and Batman: Arkham City is on the cusp of acceptable performance.

Build, Heat, and Power Consumption

We already covered the HP Phoenix chassis in our previous review; the chassis itself hasn't changed at all and features the same modest expandability and thermal envelope. I still quite like the design; it's a little bit gaudy but not overly so, though last time many of you were unimpressed. It's a matter of taste. HP also continues to standardize the Phoenix on a single 80mm closed loop liquid-cooler that's reasonably efficient but not liable to win any awards, and it's definitely a step down from the 92mm configuration in iBuyPower's LAN Warrior.

I took the opportunity this time to check out the overclocking options in the HP Phoenix h9, though. What I found was...more than I expected, but much less than I'd hoped for. There's ratio control, and you can enable the IGP in the BIOS if you're like me and want access to either the extra monitor outputs and/or Quick Sync, but tweaking is extremely limited. When overclocking, you're entirely at the mercy of however HP's system handles voltage, and given how sensitive Ivy Bridge can be you're almost better off either keeping the overclock extremely modest or just foregoing it entirely. This is a service that HP could be providing from the factory, but they don't, and it's to their detriment.

Thankfully there does seem to be a healthy amount of thermal headroom. At stock clocks and voltages, Ivy Bridge runs nice and frosty, and even the Radeon HD 7950 is able to keep temperatures comparatively low. This is one place where HP's Phoenix does excel and threaten boutique builds, though mostly it's because they're not pushing the envelope at all.

Power consumption is the other. The newer Phoenix has outstandingly low idle and load power draw for its performance profile, and I think the boutiques would have a hard time competing with this. In situations where the extra CPU cores aren't needed, the Phoenix h9 nips at the heels of the vastly more expensive Sandy Bridge-E version while drawing a hair over half of the power from the wall.

Conclusion: Good Idea, Tough Sell

When I reviewed the initial launch of the HP Phoenix, I felt like it was a good idea and essentially competitive. True, the Sandy Bridge-E model we reviewed was never going to be that compelling, but the chassis design is solid and the thermals are good. We needed a commodity gaming system, something that consumers could grab off the shelf without going through the hassle of configuring a system from a boutique. Unfortunately, it's not working out that way.

Despite having an opportunity to innovate in an underserved market, HP has opted to do the same old OEM thing: gouge the end consumer on "premium" hardware and price themselves right out of competition. The models available from Best Buy are online only, so there goes that convenience. There are models available at Fry's, but they're the same retail ones Best Buy wants to sell you online, and the price-performance is completely out of whack.

The old adage that there are no such things as bad products, only bad prices...it holds true here. CyberPower and iBuyPower are both making serious inroads into retail and they're not going to be the kind of cushy competition that Alienware is. HP seems to have re-entered this market with the impression that they're going to leverage their buying power to drive down costs while still charging a premium, but that's the same kind of thinking that's been slowly killing Lenovo.

Taken on its own, I like the Phoenix. I like the idea of a commodity gaming system. If HP could hit a reasonable price with it and get it on retail shelves, I think they'd have a very strong contender. The problem is that they haven't and/or won't, and so their retail "gaming machines" continue to use chintzy sub-$150 video cards while intruding boutiques offer better bang for the buck. When you take into account that you have to order online to even start to get a good deal on one of these machines, suddenly you're inhabiting a space where vendors like iBuyPower, CyberPower, AVADirect, Puget Systems, Origin, and more are all willing to compete for your gaming dollar, and they're all willing to give you more power with better customer service.

I want HP to succeed and do well in this market. The Phoenix is a fantastic idea and a solid product, and it's one of the few bright spots of real innovation that HP has demonstrated over the past six months while a revitalized Dell, a continually evolving Toshiba, and a very hungry ASUS have continued to make major inroads on all fronts. But HP needs to stop thinking like they're an old, entrenched company. Releasing a good product at a price like this, it might as well be swept under the rug. Get hungry, HP! If you can get the price on this thing lower, you'll have a killer product on your hands. As it stands, though, it's just not worth the sacrifices just to get an HP label on the front of your gaming system.