.If you are in the market for a home office or business PC then you are probably struggling to choose from hundreds if not thousands of business machines in this market. Buying a PC has become more and more difficult over the years mainly due to the increase in the number of players in the market and lack of accurate and unbiased reviews based on personal experience for desktops in this segment. A lot of tech heads would like to peddle the notion that the desktop PC market is dead or in the process of dying out but this is far from the truth. The fact remains that several businesses including small and medium enterprises, big corporations and government agencies still need fast reliable and secure desktops to drive their day to day business needs.
HP still remains one of the biggest players in the OEM PC segment besides having to diversify its product line up to keep up with changing trends. This means the good old desktop PC also gets to receive innovative and cutting edge updates as this company evolves. Modern desktop towers like this HP ENVY 750-420 are sophisticated, smart, compact and stylishly built machines that are nothing like desktops PCs of old.
Apart from the stylish design, the HP ENVY 750-420 Desktop also promises the performance to match as it is rocking a fast 6th generation intel i7 processor, AMD Radeon HD R7 Graphics, 256GB flash storage and 8GB of physical memory. Find out more about it here
Pros
- Stylish and professional design
- Amazing build quality
- Upgradability
- Wireless connectivity
- Ample storage plus fast SSD storage
- Dedicated graphics
Cons
- Comes with windows 10 home
Stylish design, fast processor, dedicated graphics, SSD AND HDD storage, wireless connectivity and stunning build quality-all these factors make the HP ENVY 750-420 Desktop one of the best-equipped productivity desktop PC we’ve ever reviewed.
The HP 750-420 Desktop receives a solid 5-star rating from us for users in the market for a versatile and highly capable office machine in 2017. This is also in agreement with most of the reviewers on Amazon as they all give this PC over 4 stars.
Update 20 the Aug 2019: The HP 750-420 Desktop is no longer available on Amazon. So we recommend another of our favorite desktops, the Acer Aspire TC-885-ACCFLi5 Desktop. It packs an 8th Gen Intel Core i5-8400 processor, 8GB DDR4 + 16GB Optane Memory, and 2TB HDD for storage. These are updated features that give this system more power to handle home-office productivity and even gaming. If you’re one to tinker with your system, you’ll find this PC favorable for upgrades. Throw in a graphics card and it should be capable of handling AAA titles with aplomb or do some photo editing and video rendering. We’ve reviewed it here.
HP ENVY 750-420 Specs
| Processor | 6th-generation Intel Core i7-6700 Quad-core | Intel H170 Express Chipset | 8MB Cache | 3.4 – 4.0GHz |
| RAM | 8GB DDR4 RAM |DDR4-2133 |
| Internal Storage | 256GB SSD SATA Storage + 1TB 7200RPM HDD |
| Graphics | AMD Radeon HD R7 450 |
| Input devices | Standard Keyboard and mouse |
| Connectivity | Gigabit Dual-Band 802.11AC Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.2 |
| Ports |
|
| CD/DVD Drive | Ultra Slim Tray SuperMulti DVD Burner drive |
| Operating System | Windows 10 Home | 64 bit |
| Expansion Slot |
|
| Audio | High Definition (Azalia) 5.1 channel audio support |
| Power supply | 500 W external power adapter (100V-240V) |
| Dimensions | 15.70 x 6.5 x 15.95 inches |
| Weight | 21.72 lbs |
| Warranty | HP 1-month peace of Mind-Smart Friend Tech support +1-year warranty |
Design and Features
The brushed aluminum finish is hands down, the most striking design feature on this HP 750-420. At first glance, one can’t help but appreciate the sheer elegance and sophisticated looks of this tower PC. HP promised an elegant and premium looking PC and they really killed it in terms of design aesthetics and overall visual appeal. The front panel looks stunning in a silver brushed aluminum coating that is devoid of any buttons, ports or signage except the new simplistic and modern looking HP logo at the top. It’s also completely averse to fingerprints and smudges.
The HP 750-420 looks good on an office desk as it makes the setup look clean and elegant in addition to complementing any minimalistic professional desk setup. Its slim 15.70 x 6.5 15.95 inches’ design allows it to easily fit on any decently sized office desk.
Other notable features include a pre-installed and licensed copy of windows 10 home and a few graphics editing software.
The HP ENVY 750-420 Desktop also has a Blue-Ray optical drive which you can use to read and write optical disks-a great feature as most business applications still come in CD installers.
Ports
The HP ENVY 750-420 comes with a decent selection of ports to accommodate as many peripherals as possible in a typical office setup. It has 2 easily accessible USB 3.0 ports, a USB type C port at the top as well as a mic/headphone jack. Other ports are located at the back including 2 USB 2.0 ports 2 USB 3.0 ports, and an Ethernet port. There is a 5.1 channel audio line in/out port at the back too for users who would like to connect external speakers to the HP 750-420. The presence of a 7 in 1 SD card reader is a nice addition for creative professionals out who would like to load their media from camera equipment.
Connectivity on the HP 750-420 is well taken care of as it comes with both wireless and wired connectivity. For wireless, it has inbuilt 802.11 ac connectivity that is fully backward compatible with older versions like b, g, and a standard. It also has Bluetooth 4.2 connectivity as well as gigabit Ethernet connectivity. All these connectivity options further validate the HP ENVY 750-420 Desktop as a perfect business and home office machine.
Performance
This PC is powered by an intel core i7-6700 processor based on Intel’s Skylake architecture. This is a quad-core CPU with a base clock speed of 3.4 GHz equipped with intel’s Turbo boost technology revision 2. It’s one of the most popular flagships in the intel’s 6th generation release. This CPU is favored by power users such as creative professionals working on CPU intensive applications like video and graphics editing software. The folks over at Futuremark gave it a solid 5-star performance rating and 10140 3D mark CPU score-an an impressive figure for a chip at this price point.
This PC also comes with dedicated graphics as it has an AMD Radeon R7 450 graphics unit installed. This is a great addition considering the HP ENVY 750-420 isn’t really made for gamers. The GPU really improves graphics performance for creative applications like Maya, Adobe cc and Blender 3D. It makes rendering buttery smooth and swift. Other performance components include 8GB DDR4 (2133MHz) physical memory that can be expanded to 16GB on the extra DIMM slot on the motherboard. The HP 750-420 Desktop also comes with an ultra-fast (6Gb/s) 256 GB SSD and a 1 TB HDD (7200RPM) mounted on a serial ATA-600 interface.
We have no complaints with regard to performance on the HP ENVY 750-420 Desktop PC. This is a solidly equipped PC that breezes through all types of workloads without breaking a sweat. Editing images on Adobe Photoshop and creating animations in blender and Maya is a buttery smooth experience. General productivity on the HP 750-420 Desktop is stress-free as we can run multiple applications like office 365 and several tabs in our browser without any performance hitches or degradation.
Overall, this is a great general-purpose PC that does its job well.
Conclusion
If you are in the market for a great looking desktop that also packs enough power to handle your day to day tasks, the HP ENVY 750-420 is a great option that should be on top of your wishlist. It’s also reasonably priced at just under $850 on Amazon at the time of publishing this review.
Update 20 the Aug 2019: The HP 750-420 Desktop is no longer available on Amazon. So we recommend another of our favorite desktops, the Acer Aspire TC-885-ACCFLi5 Desktop. It packs an 8th Gen Intel Core i5-8400 processor, 8GB DDR4 + 16GB Optane Memory, and 2TB HDD for storage. These are updated features that give this system more power to handle home-office productivity and even gaming. If you’re one to tinker with your system, you’ll find this PC favorable for upgrades. Throw in a graphics card and it should be capable of handling AAA titles with aplomb or do some photo editing and video rendering.
