by John Morris @ 2:06 pm
June 30th, 2009

Laptops have long since overtaken their desk-bound brethren in terms of revenues, and more recently unit sales. In the first quarter, desktop unit sales dropped 23 percent, while notebook sales actually increased 10 percent compared with the same period last year, according to iSuppli.

Gizmodo even penned an obituary for the desktop this week. But rumors of the desktop’s demise are premature. Take a closer look at iSuppli’s numbers: Desktops still accounted for 47 percent of all PCs sold worldwide–more than 30 million units–in the first quarter. Desktops are still big business. Over the past week or so, PC makers have been rolling out their Back to School boxes.

The laptops and netbooks get more coverage, but these new desktops are still worth a look, especially to see the sort of features you can get in systems ranging from $300 to $900. HP has announced several new models. As usual, all of the HP-branded desktops have an AMD-based configuration at the low-end as well as slightly high-priced configurations with Intel processors.

The Slimline s5000 is a small form factor desktop that currently starts at $290 (s5100z) with a 2.8GHz AMD Athlon LE-1660 single-core processor, 2GB of memory, Nvidia GeForce 6150 integrated graphics, and a 320GB hard drive. The $370 s5110t has a 2.50GHz Pentium E5200 dual-core processor, 3GB, and a 320GB hard drive; the $450 s5150t has a 2.60GHz Pentium E5300, 4GB, and a 500GB hard drive.