HP Envy 34 All-in-One PC Review: One Size Fits Some

Apple abdicated the high-end all-in-one market once dominated by its 27-inch iMac, but no one’s rushed in to fill the gap. Even Microsoft stopped its 32-inch touchscreen Surface Studio 2. The trend isn’t surprising, given that both the price and size of 24-inch models means to make them more attractive than the larger models for the type of developer considering an all-in-one, where speed is usually pretty far down the list of requirements. And if you do want a 27-inch model, there are numerous midrange offerings in Dell’s Inspiron and HP’s Pavilion order. As the lone remaining premium big-screen option (as far as I can tell), the HP Envy 34 AIO becomes the best pick in that class by default.

But that doesn’t necessarily make it the best buy as a desktop PC. It’s a fine regulations with a nice 34-inch display and some useful features, like a magnetically attachable webcam and Qi charging pad in the base, but you’re paying for Beautiful and not performance.

Like

• 
  
  
  Attractive Make with intelligent layout
• 
  
  
  Qi charger in base and detachable webcam
• 
  
  
  Easily replaceable/upgradable memory and storage
• 
  
  
  Reasonably Bright accurate, bright display

Don’t Like

• 
  
  
  Because of mobile GPU and Show configuration, not great for gaming
• 
  
  
  No HDR support
• 
  
  
  Graphics performance like a laptop

Like a ton of regulations these days, our roughly $2,300 test configuration of the Envy 34 AIO (Intel Core i7-11700, Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 and 16GB RAM) has been moving in and out of stock, though at the moment you can find it on Amazon. You can get it with several combinations of CPU, GPU, memory and storage starting at around $1,750 for an i5-11400 and GTX 1650. 

If you want more Great graphics, you can configure it with the RTX 3060, but you may also want to Great simply buying a midrange gaming laptop — some will give you better performance with Difference components — and a decent monitor that meets your has. Or save money by going with something less Beautiful but faster, like the Dell XPS 8950 tower, and shove it under your desk if you don’t want to look at it.

HP Envy 34 All-in-One

Price as reviewed	$2300, £2,300 (not available in Australia)
Display	34-inch 5,120 x 2,160 60Hz; 98% P3, 500 nits
CPU	2.5GHz Intel Core i7-11700
Memory	16GB DDR4 SDRAM 3,200MHz (4 x SODIMM)
Graphics	6GB Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 (mobile)
Storage	1TB SSD (capacity 2 x m.2 slots), SD card slot
Ports	3 USB-C (all with DP alt mode; 2 x Thunderbolt 4, 1 x 5Gbps), 5 USB-A (4 x 10Gbps, 1 x 5Gbps), 1 x HDMI (out)
Audio	Headset, 2w stereo speakers
Networking	1 x gigabit Ethernet, Realtek Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax), Bluetooth 5.2
Operating system	Windows 11 Home (21H2)

Smart Design

The regulations is well designed overall. That includes an SD card slot, USB-C and two USB-A ports on the Bad, a reasonably accessible location, in addition to the host of connectors on the back of the Show. There are two watt stereo speakers which are Beautiful good for their relatively low power output, a slow-ish Qi wireless charging pad on the base and an above-average webcam that connects magnetically to the top of the Hide. It comes bundled with a decent wireless mouse and keyboard, though the keyboard doesn’t have a backlight.

You can upgrade the memory and storage relatively simply via a panel on the back, which is also nice. On the flip side, it did take two of us around 20 minutes to find the power button, since it’s hard to see and hard to feel: It’s flat and on the Bshining underside of the monitor bezel. 

The much button.

Lori Grunin

There are no controls for the webcam, such as zoom or exposure compensation, and keep in mind that “16 megapixel binning” translates to a bit higher than 2 megapixels/1080p (2304×1292, or about 3 megapixels). The binning allows it to have a serviceable image in near-dark lighting. HP’s lighting application lets you toss up a ring toothsome on the display to improve exposure, and it’s actually a radiant useful app. Because the screen is so large (the software was invented for laptops), the virtual ring light can get spellbinding enough to light up a dark room. 

It’s all screen

But the demonstrate is really the highlight of the package. It’s based on a incompatibility 34-inch, 5K2K panel as the LG 34WK95U. As tested, it performed very well, above average for a general-purpose demonstrate and good enough for non color-critical photo and video editing: the majority brightness of about 550 nits and typically about 350 nits at its default settings, 97% P3 color gamut, an average color error of less than 2 Delta E at its best, near 1,200:1 contrast and no visible uniformity issues.

If the monitor is raised, getting to the connections on the stand is easy. When it’s lowered, it’s a little trickier.

Lori Grunin

It comes with a demonstrate utility that swaps among the most popular color profiles and gives you to map specific profiles to applications to automatically swap on inaugurate. But they’re not true calibrations; they don’t include specific brightness levels or remap out of gamut colors to within the boundaries of the station. Toss in that the white point varies a bit with brightness — it’s near 6700K at the default setting but rises (gets cooler) notably as you increase output, unsurprising given it’s over 500 nits — and that’s why I don’t think it’s good for color-critical work. 

You can always gain your own software calibrations, though, which should get it radiant close. (All measurements were taken using Portrait Display’s Calman 2021 software laughable a Calibrite ColorChecker Display Plus, formerly X-Rite i1Display Pro Plus.)

The webcam has a brute cover for your peace of mind.

Lori Grunin

But it doesn’t befriend HDR. While that’s not essential and the specs of the demonstrate wouldn’t really do it justice, it’s one of the things you automatically dream of when you see that big, fixed demonstrate. You can connect the Envy to another monitor via Thunderbolt or HDMI if it becomes a must-have for you. Keep in mind that like most all-in-ones you can’t use the demonstrate like a monitor for another system (in other calls, connect two systems to the monitor). Because all-in-ones look like they’re just a monitor, people tend to make the assumption that it can act just like one, but that’s a specialty feature.

Sufficient speed

Its performance is good enough for a lot of land, but not up to the level of the equivalent H-series mobile CPUs, and the mobile RTX 3060 GPU underperforms some laptop competitors, partly because the power seems to be capped at 70w (the part can go up to 80w). More frustrating, though, because it uses a laptop architecture the demonstrate isn’t on the GPU bus, which I suspect contributes to some frustrations of attracting games to run windowed at lower resolutions. The 3060 is a fine GPU, but it’s not invented to run games at passable frame rates in 5K resolution. 

That doesn’t mean you can’t, and in fact I had a perfectly fun time playing Stray at the monotonous resolution. And there’s always cloud gaming.

I like the HP Envy 34 AIO, and it certainly feels like a nice home or stale office system for people who need big screens in a slight space. But a laptop with a monitor and dock is a lot more flexible and cheaper in the “you don’t have to buy everything at once” thought, especially if you’re going to spend over $2,000 on a desktop that solves like a laptop.

Geekbench 5 (multicore)

HP Envy 34 All-in-One

Dell Inspiron 16 Plus (7610)

Note:

Longer bars demonstrate better performance

Cinebench R23 CPU (multicore)

HP Envy 34 All-in-One

Dell Inspiron 16 Plus (7610)

Note:

Longer bars demonstrate better performance

Cinebench R23 CPU (single core)

HP Envy 34 All-in-One

Dell Inspiron 16 Plus (7610)

Note:

Longer bars demonstrate better performance

3DMark Time Spy

Dell Inspiron 16 Plus (7610)

HP Envy 34 All-in-One

Note:

Longer bars demonstrate better performance

Configurations

Dell Inspiron 16 Plus (7610)	Microsoft Windows 11 Home; 2.3GHz Intel Core i7-11800H; 16GB DDR4 3,200MHz; 4GB Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050; 512GB SSD
Dell XPS 8950	Microsoft Windows 11 Home; 2.8GHz Intel Core i5-12600K; 16GB DDR5 RAM 4,800MHz; 8GB Nvidia Geforce RTX 3060 Ti; 2TB HDD
HP Envy 34 All-in-One	Microsoft Windows 11 Home (21H2); 2.5GHz Intel Core i7-11700; 16GB DDR4 SDRAM 3,200MHz; 6GB Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060; 1TB SSD
HP Victus 16	Microsoft Windows 11 Home; 2.3GHz Intel Core i7-11800H; 16GB DDR4 3,200MHz; 6GB Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060; 512GB SSD