Introducing the HP TouchSmart 610

As much as it might pain some of us to hear it, Apple's iMac really did essentially legitimize the all-in-one as an alternative to the typical desktop-and-monitor combination. There have been Windows-based alternatives here and there historically, but it's only been in the past couple of years that the Windows all-in-one market has really started to gain traction. Of course, the fact that system requirements have also reached a point where a large range of CPUs are still sufficiently fast helps.

At present, the iMac's Windows counterparts also offer a functionality that Apple has yet to duplicate: touch interface. HP adds an additional wrinkle with the TouchSmart 610: a hinge that allows you to slide the unit down and use it "kiosk style". That hinge, along with the latest Intel hardware and a surprisingly high quality screen, suggests a machine intended for myriad uses...not just an all-in-one computer, but an all-markets-in-one appliance. Find out how it performs as we put the TouchSmart 610 to the test.

All the major players have a healthy number of all-in-one systems on the market today, enough so that big box retailers set aside floor space just for them. These systems frequently boast touchscreens, and those screens are almost always sizable. While Apple may have led the market a bit with the iMac, it's the PC vendors who have been experimenting the most with this form factor. The HP TouchSmart 610 is the first of these systems we'll be testing, but we have units from Dell and Toshiba on the way as well. For now, this is what HP's premium all-in-one has to offer:

There's a lot going on with the HP TouchSmart 610 Quad Edition. For starters, in its 23" shell HP has outfitted an Intel Core i7-2600 standard, period, and strapped to that four SO-DIMM (read: laptop memory) slots, two of which come equipped with 4GB of DDR3-1333, leaving two more free. The screen itself is most definitely not a TN panel, either. This 23" beast appears to be a 1080p PLS panel (or similar technology) from Samsung, as it has stellar viewing angles and deep, inky blacks. There's none of the shimmer I'm used to seeing from blacks on an IPS panel. Rounding things out is a healthy selection of networking connectivity and a slot-loading blu-ray writer.

Which is why it's unfortunate that HP loses their way in two big areas. The GPU that the TouchSmart 610 comes with by default is the anemic AMD Radeon HD 6450A, but ours (according to the Catalyst Control Center) has the Radeon HD 5570, an upgrade that as of this writing is free of charge. The problem is HP's graphics options for this all-in-one are a mess. Broken down, there's also the Radeon HD 6550A, which is a $30 upgrade that apparently has the exact same specs as our 5570. If you go the NVIDIA route, you can pay $10 more for a GeForce GT 425M (not recommended), an inexplicable $30 for a GeForce G210 (seriously?), and a whopping $50 to add an extra 1GB of video memory to that GT 425M for a total of utterly worthless 2GB.

I'm really hoping what we have is actually the Radeon HD 6550A, since our review unit boasts 2GB of DDR3 video memory while the 5570 offered only comes with 1GB. Either way it's pretty dire: a low 550MHz clock speed on the 400 shaders, and just 1.6GHz on the DDR3 strapped to a 128-bit memory bus. If the 5570 isn't going to cost you anything, go with that; a 5570 offers the same number of shaders (and same architecture, really) by default, and while you lose a gig of video memory, you should theoretically gain 100MHz on the core, making it essentially the fastest graphics option on the 610. Phew.

The other place HP drops the ball is the "free upgrade" to the 1.5TB Western Digital Caviar Green. For mass storage this drive is fine, but as a system drive it's a dog that hamstrings the entire user experience. Given that we only have one hard drive bay, it makes sense to opt for the 1TB 7200-RPM hard drive instead.

Application and Futuremark Performance

While the Intel Core i7-2600 is one of the fastest processors currently available, HP has hamstrung it in our review unit with a slow hard drive. As a result it's unreasonable to expect too strong a showing from the PCMarks. Likewise, the Radeon HD 6550A (or is it an HD 5570?) is pretty middling. In a notebook it would be fine, but here it has to drive a 1080p screen.

It isn't until we get out of PCMark that the TouchSmart 610's i7-2600 starts to sing. The Western Digital Caviar Green isn't a bad hard drive...for it's intended purpose. It's hardware that was never intended to be a system drive, and this is why. The user experience on the 610 suffers drastically for it. The CPU is plenty fast, and while there are overclocked systems that easily surpass it, every day applications rarely need this much computational power.

Meanwhile, the TouchSmart 610's Radeon HD 5570 (or is that 6550A?) keeps pace with the NVIDIA Quadro 600s in our workstations, basically glorified and underclocked GeForce GT 430s. That's damning to say the least. This GPU is about as good as the TouchSmart 610 gets, proving unfortunately that while the all-in-one manufacturers can throw their lot in with desktop-class CPUs, graphics are another affair entirely. AMD is theoretically trying to make inroads by producing all-in-one-specific GPUs, but if all they're going to do is just rebrand mobile parts I'd just as soon they not bother. All-in-ones continue to be stuck in mobile GPU limbo with desktop-class screens.

By comparison, Apple offers faster GPUs even in their 21.5" iMac; it comes with the HD 6750M or HD 6770M, while the 27" unit offers the HD 6770M or the 6970M. The 6970M in particularly is a viable gaming GPU for a 1080p display (though it would struggle at the native 2560x1440 resolution of the 27" iMac). As for the HD 6750M/6770M, you get 480 shader cores running at 600/725MHz, and more importantly you get 1600MHz GDDR5 memory, which nets you twice the bandwidth at the same clock speed relative to DDR3. HP would certainly benefit from ditching the overload of GPU "upgrades" and sticking to just a couple offerings that clearly scale in performance.

Gaming Performance

Reflecting the slower nature of all-in-one graphics, I've elected not to run our "Ultra" testing suite on the HP TouchSmart 610 and odds are I won't for any future all-in-ones. The hardware is simply too slow, because as you'll see by these "High" settings, 1080p is just too much work for a midrange mobile-class graphics part.

Disappointment sets in. To produce a gaming workload that would be at least a little more reasonable, I'll be testing all-in-ones at the "Medium" preset we use for notebooks (except employing DirectX 11 in all cases). At medium settings things improve a little, as DiRT 2, Left 4 Dead 2, STALKER: Call of Pripyat, and StarCraft II all break the 30fps mark. Really the bare minimum for a 1080p screen is a GTX 460M/560M, which is based on the desktop GeForce GTS 450 (a stand-in for which you can see in the slower Quadro 2000), or on the AMD side we'd want the HD 6850M or above.

Screen Quality

While gaming takes a backseat with the HP TouchSmart 610, the screen is frankly stellar. Those of you used to (and sick of) mediocre TN panels will be happy to see what appears to be Samsung's new Super PLS panel in the TouchSmart 610. That said, there are a couple of trade-offs, but before we get to those let's run the numbers. We've included results from some of our 23" and 24" standalone LCDs for comparison.

The 610's screen offers a stunning 3100:1 native contrast ratio, derived from 248 nits of brightness at white and a gorgeous 0.08 nits at full black. Average delta-E after calibration is good, too, at 1.67 (under what we consider to be the 2.00 maximum), while the color gamut is a less agreeable 64% of AdobeRGB. Ultimately this screen should be adequate for color-sensitive work, but stellar for non-gaming tasks.

I did say non-gaming, though, didn't I? Unfortunately, the 610's panel suffers from noticeable smearing and ghosting problems in motion. Samsung's PVA panels have historically been pretty inadequate in motion-oriented tasks, and those problems look to continue with PLS here. The anemic graphics were going to ensure a mediocre gaming experience to begin with, but the panel really does it in.

That said, viewing angles are still terrific. Shifting is minimal, and I suspect HP went with this type of panel due specifically to the sliding hinge. A TN panel would be basically impossible to use, and I've found myself underwhelmed by the low and high angle performance of my IPS-based ZR24w (that said, straight on it's just fantastic for games). PLS if nothing else looks to offer fantastic viewing angles.

User Experience

The build quality of the HP TouchSmart 610 is definitely there and befitting an all-in-one that was pretty clearly designed to bridge both business and consumer markets. HP leverages Beats Audio for the speakers, and while the technology has been underwhelming in notebooks thus far, the TouchSmart 610 fares a lot better due to the increased chassis size.

Where HP specifically falls short is in connectivity; the lack of USB 3.0 in a desktop (and an all-in-one is still a desktop) at this price is inexcusable. The HDMI input is great, but if you had to choose between being able to plug in a coaxial cable from the wall to an OTA ATSC tuner or USB 3.0 connectivity, which one do you think you'd be more likely to use? My ATI TV Wonders are sitting in static bags right now because cable out here requires an external box to get high definition, and why would I watch standard definition on a 1080p screen? There are no allowances for high speed data transfer in the 610; gigabit ethernet is as good as it gets.

And then there's the interface. HP's wireless keyboard and mouse are adequate, but feel on the cheap side. The wireless keyboard is chiclet style and clearly modeled after Apple's, but while Apple uses aluminum the HP's is all plastic. The glossy surface on the mouse seems equally silly, but bottom line is that they'll get the job done and they don't seem to be totally bargain basement.

Shifting the TouchSmart 610 to "kiosk style" is easy enough, and I can definitely see what HP was going for. Yet the problems with this interface are twofold: one of them is something HP can correct while the other is something much more fundamental and thus not specific to HP but endemic to all touchscreen all-in-ones.

With the kiosk mode, HP really should've implemented some kind of hardware detection to make the software keyboard pop up with more regularity. I ran into situations where I needed the software keyboard and it just wasn't available; this is something that should be a fairly simple fix, and it would go a long way towards legitimizing this alternative input style. Doing so would give HP a feature its competition just plain doesn't have.

The other issue is that touchscreen interfacing on a desktop is just not ready for prime time, at least in this reviewer's opinion. HP's TouchSmart software is a valiant effort, but it runs afoul of some very basic issues. The nature of the texture of the screen makes any kind of sliding motion fairly uncomfortable; on a small smartphone screen this problem is mitigated somewhat by the short travel, but on a larger screen it's immediately apparent.

HP includes a lot of cute applications, basically widgets, and I suspect for some users they'll be alright, but you still have to actually launch TouchSmart as an application in its own right, and on the slow hard drive that can take a while; I measured a good ten to fifteen seconds on the first load. A copy of R.U.S.E. is also included, a strategy game which supposedly leverages multi-touch technology. I played around with it a bit but never found any situation where a mouse and keyboard wouldn't have been a substantially improved experience.

Finally, Windows 7 just sucks for touch. Touchscreen support feels grafted on at the operating system level and there's very little that any vendor can do to fix this fundamental problem. Windows 8 should at least alleviate this with the Metro interface, though hopefully Microsoft doesn't rely too heavily on sliding gestures given my above complaints about the experience on this HP screen.

Heat and Power Consumption

Thankfully the TouchSmart 610 is frugal at the wall, and that helps make it frugal thermally. The fan noise was never particularly offensive or obtrusive, and for HP's effort, check out these thermals:

The CPU remains fairly frosty, and of course the Radeon HD 5570 never has to work too hard because it's barely doing anything. And the power consumption I mentioned?

This fight would seem less fair if the TouchSmart 610 didn't also have to worry about powering a monitor along with everything else. So while it idles a little higher than the vastly more powerful Puget Serenity, it also has to run a 23" 1080p screen. With that in mind, power consumption seems quite good and certainly within the spec of the included 180-watt external power supply.

Conclusion: Good Start, But Needs Refinement

HP's TouchSmart 610 is the first all-in-one I've personally reviewed, so bear with me here. The form factor makes this an unusual type of product that may force an individual to seriously think about how they use their computers. My frame of reference? My grandmother has an all-in-one (on my recommendation, actually), and my mother actually loves touch interfaces on her computers. It's not for me, but it's definitely for certain users, and I suspect they're people who just want a simple system they can set up and enjoy.

So how does the TouchSmart 610 fare in that regard? Simplicity is key and unfortunately it's a spectacular failure on HP's site in that regard. The configuration options on the hard drive are actually counterintuitive (why not just a 1.5TB or 2TB 7200-RPM hard drive?), and the graphics options are eye-crossingly convoluted. Offering last generation parts really doesn't help, in fact the only current generation parts are the Radeon HD 6450A and 6550A, the latter of which at least almost makes a case for rebranding since at least you have some idea of where it stands in relation to its peers.

Thankfully, all-in-ones are very simple to set up and use, but again I can see this hard drive just murdering the user experience and I'm beginning to seriously believe that for a touch interface to work and feel truly responsive in Windows 7, an SSD is that much more vital--SSD caching at the very least would be a great addition. There's space inside the TouchSmart 610 for an mSATA SSD, and at $1,399 that space really should be employed. Ignoring my gripes with touchscreen technology in general, I feel like HP's TouchSmart is a good start but again marred by both the storage bottleneck and by Microsoft's lackadaisical touch implementation. However you feel about Metro in Windows 8, touchscreen all-in-ones desperately need it.

For the asking price, the 610 feels unbalanced. I think in an enterprise market or deployed commercially, especially with that kiosk style slide, the price makes more sense (and you do get a two-year warranty standard as opposed to the usual one) and the 610 becomes compelling almost entirely by virtue of being the only touchscreen all-in-one that really does that. It doesn't exactly feel cheap physically, either, and it runs cool enough. Under those circumstances, I can definitely see someone picking it up.

On the other hand, John Q. Public is probably going to be better served somewhere south of the TouchSmart 610 in HP's line. The TouchSmart 520xt loses the cute hinge and a bit of CPU horsepower, but offers cleaner graphics options and better hard drive choices. Starting at $999 it may be a superior choice, but we don't know anything about the screen quality. If a good screen is important to you, there's the 610xt, which sports the hinge and thus likely the screen while being cheaper than the 610 Quad Edition we reviewed here (as it also starts at $999), but you have to field the confusing configuration options in the process.

I do sincerely think there's a future for all-in-ones, and the HP TouchSmart 610 is certainly a good one with some innovative thinking behind it. If that's the sort of thing you or someone you love is looking for, and you know the trade-offs, the 610 could be a good choice.