HP Envy 34 All-in-One

This thoroughly impressive all-in-one offers a convenient way to bring computing muscle to your desktop

- TIM DANTON & TONY POLANCO

SCORE

PRICE Core i7, £1,917 (£2,300 inc VAT) from hp.co.uk

The HP Envy 34 is a very different all-in-one to the Huawei MateStation X we reviewed last month (see issue 334, p46). The Huawei is a stylish machine built to elicit desire. The Envy 34 has those of a more stoic disposition in mind; put aside your emotions, HP's designers seem to whisper, and instead let rationality take over. For this is an eminently practical device. It's brilliant, perhaps even elegant, but also rather dull.

Dull to look at, at least. Inside is a beast of a system, based around an 11th generation Intel Core i7 and GeForce RTX 3060 graphics. That's the mobile rather than desktop version of Nvidia's chip, but as we shall see it still packs a gaming punch.

And you can push it right up to a Core i9 with 32GB of RAM, GeForce RTX 3080 graphics and 4TB of storage. Looks can be deceiving.

Grey is the word

It's curious why HP has played it so safe in terms of design, especially when the Envy range is targeted at home rather than business users. Maybe it had an excess of grey metal that it needed to use up. The good news is that the slim bezels (around 9mm at the top and sides) mean that your view will be dominated by the screen day to day.

Its simple square stand and cylindrical shaft are equally utilitarian, putting function above form. For example, it's easy to adjust the Envy 34's height or tilt its screen vertically. The monitor, which contains all the computing components, smoothly glides along when you raise or lower it and stays in place once you've found an optimal height. There isn't a huge amount of travel, 60mm in total, but that should be enough.