The stylish, compact HP Slim Desktop (model S01-aF0020) is a cheap-and-cheerful desktop PC that can serve a wide variety of uses around the house. Need a homework machine for your kids? Fed up with monthly streaming-service subscriptions and want to dust off your movie DVDs? This small desktop, which retails for $379.99 at Amazon, can fill those roles and more, though its tepid AMD Athlon laptop-weight processor and lack of USB Type-C ports disqualifies it as your daily driver. For more power and a better port selection, you’ll want to check out more capable systems in the $400-to-$500 range, such as the Editors’ Choice-award-winning Acer Aspire TC-895-UA91.
Pick It Up With One Hand
The HP Slim Desktop is a mini tower, far smaller than traditionally sized mid-tower PCs. It measures 10.6 by 3.7 by 11.9 inches (HWD), which means you can stash it pretty much anywhere, and it weighs so little (10 pounds) that people with large palms will be able to grip it with one hand to move it wherever it needs to go.
And it can go pretty much anywhere in your house, thanks to a healthy dose of modern styling. The retro-inspired corners are rounded, not squared, and there’s a snazzy, textured geometric pattern on the front panel that looks premium without being flashy. Suffice it to say that the HP Slim Desktop will be equally at home on your desk, next to your Sony PlayStation 5, or hidden away in a crowded closet. Despite its diminutive stature, the HP is still significantly larger than truly tiny mini desktops like Intel’s basic NUC PCs, or the Azulle Access4, which resembles a candy bar.
Inside, the HP Slim Desktop uses a mix of entry-level and premium components that make it well suited to basic computing tasks and not much else. Its AMD Athlon Gold 3150U processor runs at 2.4GHz, consumes little power, and generates very little heat, since it’s intended mostly for use in laptops. The benefit of this efficiency is a small, laptop-style 65-watt AC adapter, not a bulky power brick that you’ll need to find a place to hide. The downside is that performance is far below what we expect from a PC that’s intended for use as a primary system.
The Athlon Gold, equipped with integrated AMD Radeon graphics, is adequate to complete the occasional resource-intensive task and plenty powerful enough to serve as a basic media server or word processing machine for kids. Athlon chips are one step below the Intel Core i3 and AMD Ryzen 3 processors that make up the bottom of the mainstream CPU market; you’ll likely need to spend $400 or more to pick up a desktop with one of those.
While its processor is relatively pedestrian, the HP Slim Desktop’s memory and storage capabilities are relatively robust: 8GB of RAM, plus 256GB of storage space in a speedy PCI Express NVMe solid-state drive. These are specs you’d expect to find on desktops and laptops that cost hundreds more, including the Apple Mac mini. They’re also far more capable than the 4GB of memory in the $319.99 Lenovo IdeaCentre 3 configuration we just tested, or the poky flash-based eMMC storage that the Access4 uses.
If you’re a tinkerer who knows your way around the inside of a desktop, you can easily upgrade the memory and storage when or if you need to. The side of the case pops off easily enough, with a single screw holding it in place. Once the body is open, you have direct access to the motherboard, where you’ll find a vacant M.2 SSD slot and an additional SO-DIMM memory slot (for laptop-style memory modules). There’s also a vacant 3.5-inch drive bay, a rarity in PCs this small, which will let you add an inexpensive and roomy hard drive.
You can’t add a discrete graphics card to the HP Slim Desktop, since it lacks an internal power supply and PCI Express add-in slots. As you’ll see in the performance discussion below, the integrated Radeon graphics processor isn’t suited for running intensive games, and at this price we don’t expect it to be.
One Connection Quibble: No USB-C Ports
One of the key reasons to choose a desktop PC instead of repurposing an old laptop for your next home server or kids’ PC is the wider range of ports typically available on desktops. The HP Slim Desktop does have an adequate quantity of ports, though the variety is a bit lacking. On the front, you’ll find four USB 3.1 Gen 1 Type-A ports, which support 5Gbps maximum transfer speeds. There are two retro USB 2.0 ports at the rear, intended for connecting a wired keyboard and mouse.
Audio connections include a headphone/microphone combo jack on the front, and separate 3.5mm input and output ports on the back. You can connect to an external display using either the HDMI or VGA ports. There’s also a Gigabit Ethernet port on the back, which you’ll want to use if you’re planning to place the desktop near your router. Otherwise, you can connect wirelessly using the built-in 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, not always standard features on desktops in this price range. Unfortunately, there’s no Wi-Fi 6 or 2×2 MIMO support, which means the wireless connection could be less than optimal if you want to use the HP as an always-on home server.
Also missing from the HP Slim Desktop are any USB Type-C ports. Their absence means that you’ll almost certainly need adapters or special cables to connect some modern peripherals. A combination of USB-A and USB-C ports is one of the key reasons to choose a desktop over a laptop. As a consolation prize, you do get an optical drive that can read and write DVD discs, as well as a full-size SD card reader. Depending on your needs, these could outweigh the additional expense and hassle of USB-C adapters.
BYOKM (Bring Your Own Keyboard and Mouse)
We don’t expect to find top-quality keyboards and mice bundled with economy desktops, and the desk set included with the HP doesn’t change our mind. The mouse is cheap-feeling and not ergonomic, with significant give in the buttons before they register a click. The keyboard is also nothing to type home about. It’s devoid of HP branding or any semblance of modern design.
The keyboard does deserve kudos for unique placement of the volume controls and the sleep button, which are sandwiched between the directional arrows and the Delete, End, and Page Down keys. They’re much easier to reach for a quick volume adjustment compared with the traditional placement above the number pad.
The software and services that come with the HP Slim Desktop are also average for the budget desktop category. There’s some noticeable bloatware, including a preinstalled antivirus suite trial and a few Start menu links to sponsored apps and websites like Dropbox. Bloatware is a nuisance for consumers, but it brings in revenue for manufacturers, a key reason why they’re able to keep budget PC prices so low. (You’ll want to schedule a software tidying-up session.) HP supports the Slim Desktop with a standard one-year warranty.
Testing the HP Slim Desktop: Enough Power for Basic Tasks
To put the HP Slim Desktop’s performance capabilities in context, I compared its benchmark results with those of a few competing small desktops including the aforementioned Lenovo IdeaCentre 3, Acer Aspire, and Mac mini. I also listed the HP All-in-One 22, a budget-minded potential alternative to the HP Slim Desktop for users who also need a display and speakers. With the exception of the Mac mini and Aspire, all of these systems have comparable low-powered CPUs.
It’s clear from our PCMark 10 productivity test that none of these systems, apart from the Acer, should be tasked to serve as your main computer if you can help it. A score of 4,000 points or higher indicates excellent performance for the everyday tasks that PCMark measures, including content-creation workflows like word processing, spreadsheet jockeying, web browsing, and videoconferencing. The HP Slim Desktop is more than 800 points short of this mark. (See more about how we test desktops.)
We also run PCMark 8’s storage subtest to assess the speed of a PC’s boot drive. Most modern systems with SSDs do about equally well in this test. PCMark doesn’t run on Macs.
Our cross-platform multimedia content-creation workflows bring the limits of AMD Athlon- and Intel Celeron-based budget PCs into greater focus. To be able to comfortably render 3D images, for example, you’ll have to be prepared to spend a bit more on a competent computer like the Mac mini, whose processor helped it far outpace the others in our Cinebench test (a fully threaded exercise that stresses the CPU rather than the GPU while rendering a complex image).
Cinebench is often a good predictor of our Handbrake video editing trial, another tough, threaded workout that’s highly CPU-dependent and scales well with cores and threads. In it, we put a stopwatch on test systems as they transcode a standard 12-minute clip of 4K video to a 1080p MP4 file. The HP Slim Desktop performed relatively well compared with its Celeron and Athlon rivals, though it was only about half as fast as the Mac mini.
The situation is similar when it comes to photo editing. The HP Slim Desktop took just over four minutes to apply a series of 10 filters and effects to our JPG test image using Adobe Photoshop CC. The Mac mini and the Acer were around twice as quick, while none of the other systems here could even finish applying some of the filters and effects.
By this point, you shouldn’t be surprised to learn the HP Slim Desktop can’t serve as a gaming rig. It muddled through our 3DMark and Superposition gaming simulations, which render and pan through scenes of detailed 3D graphics.
All of the PCs here rely on underpowered integrated graphics solutions that are part of their lower-end CPUs. The 3DMark results speak for themselves when you consider that discrete video cards routinely score in the five figures in the Sky Diver subtest. And even at an undemanding 720p resolution, the Slim Desktop’s score of 17 frames per second (fps) in Superposition is well shy of the 30fps minimum that gamers expect for smooth animation. Note that the Aspire, All-in-One 22 and IdeaCentre 3 could not complete the Superposition test, a common problem on budget systems with bare-bones graphics capabilities, so we didn’t chart that test here. Neither 3DMark nor Superposition runs on Macs.
When Money and Space Are Tight
The HP Slim Desktop is a capable budget PC that can serve pretty much any secondary computing need around the house. A compact, lightweight chassis that’s easy on the eyes means it can be placed practically anywhere, and a small AC adapter increases its versatility even more. It’s a decent media server or kids’ homework station.
The only major downsides holding back the HP Slim Desktop from heavy everyday use are its lack of USB-C ports and the relatively poky processor. To address these issues, you’ll want to step up to one of a host of $400-and-up budget desktops that come with more capable Intel Core i3 or AMD Ryzen 3 CPUs, such as the Editors’ Choice-winning Acer Aspire mentioned up top. Meanwhile, if you’ve got $600 or more to spend and macOS is an option for you, the Mac mini is an obvious candidate.
