Talk about a great view. The HP Envy Curved 34-A051 Signature Edition (starts at $1,649; $1,949 as tested) is an all-in-one desktop with a 34-inch, ultra-wide curved screen that features a 21:9 aspect ratio. It's one of the widest all-in-one systems we've seen so far, and offers an unprecedented amount of on-screen real estate for your Web browsing, game playing, and general computing needs. It's like having a pair of monitors on your desk, but permanently bonded together, with no seam in between. It's a significantly larger screen than even the 4K-equipped Asus Zen AiO Pro Z240IC( at Amazon), on our our top picks. It has the power, the technology, and the wow factor to become our Editors' Choice for high-end all-in-one desktops.
Design and Features
The Envy Curved 34( at Amazon) looks like a prop from the rebooted Star Trek movies. It has a matte black front panel, a bright white rear panel, and its chrome, double-footed base gives the system a cantilevered appearance. Speaker grilles on the sides of the screen make the system look more like an HDTV than a PC. The components are built into the body of the display. There's plenty of room inside, as the system measures 36.58 by 18.37 by 6.63 inches (HWD), and weighs 29.8 pounds.
The chrome feet that support the screen have integrated hinges, which let you tilt the display backward or forward over a 25-degree range. The system comes with a wireless keyboard and mouse. They're simple, and quite usable, but the keyboard feels a little flimsy for such a high-price system, especially when compared with the Apple Magic Keyboard($99.00 at Amazon) that comes with the latest Apple iMac 21.5-inch with 4K Retina Display( at Amazon) and the Apple iMac 27-inch with 5K Retina Display( at Amazon).
The screen is a thing of beauty. It measures 34 inches (diagonally) and has a WQHD (3,440-by-1,440) resolution, which is larger than the 1080p displays you usually find in all-in-one desktops like the MSI Gaming 24GE 2QE-014US($0.00 at Amazon). Websites may look strange when you first open a browser like Microsoft Edge, as there's a lot of extra white space to the left and right of the page of text you're reading. The benefit of the wide screen is that you can place four websites in four windows side by side or even tiled in the four corners of the screen, and still be able to read all four sites simultaneously. You can also, for instance, work in a window that you snap (i.e., drag a window to the edge of the screen, and it snaps open to fill part or all of the display) to the right in your photo-editing program using the Snap feature built into Windows 10($139.00 at Microsoft)), while snapping another window with a web development program to the left. The screen's Landscape orientation is also good for viewing wide spreadsheets with lots of little numbers in little boxes. It may take you a little while to get accustomed to the curved design, since your eyes are used to looking at a straight-sided display. Once you do adapt, however, the sheer breadth of the screen fills your field of vision quite well.
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Images are sharp, and colors are spot-on, because the Envy Curved 34's screen is certified for Technicolor. That means the display is tested and calibrated to match the panels used by Hollywood film editors and game developers, so that images are as accurate when they're being displayed as they were when they were created. So, for instance, when you're looking at the eyeballs of the Rathtar creatures while watching Star Wars: The Force Awakens, they are, in fact, puce. Ideally, the Envy Curved 34 is an awesome way to watch movies because its 21:9 screen matches that of CinemaScope widescreen movies like the Star Wars series and the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
However, while the ultra-wide display could mean watching many more movies without those annoying black bars above and below the screen (often referred to as letterboxing), most streaming services don't account for screens wider than 16:9. So while watching a CinemaScope movie on a service like Netflix or Disney Movies Anywhere on the Envy Curved 34, you'll see extraneous black bars to the sides and the top and bottom. Some videos on Amazon Prime Video and YouTube will take this into account and display video correctly, but those are very rare. The majority of videos online are mastered for 16:9 and 1080p HD displays, and the black bars are hard-coded into the video streams, so this will continue to be a problem until all the videos on the Internet are optimized for different screens. There are Chrome plug-ins that will zoom into the picture and eliminate the black bars entirely, but that comes at the cost of some of the video's resolution. I hope that the video streaming services adapt like they did when 16:9 became the standard, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
There's a 1080p HD Intel RealSense 3D camera above the screen, with a 2-megapixel sensor, and it's sufficient for quick snapshots. It can record videos with green screen-free virtual backgrounds, it works with Windows Hello logins, and it has better gesture control than the 2D camera on the Lenovo B50 for motion-controlled programs like the Madagascar: Move It! game available on Intel's website. RealSense 3D is one of those technologies looking for a problem to solve, but it's still neat.
Like most all-in-one desktops, the Envy Curved 34 is sealed, so you can't open it up and replace components or upgrade it. Sure, there are online videos showing people cracking the case with a screwdriver and a plastic card, but unless you're an advanced tinkerer, you're better off bringing the desktop to an authorized service center for any repairs and upgrades. Not that you'll need the latter, since the system comes with 12GB of DDR4 system memory, and two drives: a 128GB M.2 PCIe-based solid-state drive (SSD) as the boot drive (C:), and a 1TB, 5,400rpm SATA hard drive for data (D:). Even better, the Envy Curved 34 is a Signature Edition, which means that it has been cleaned up by the folks at the Microsoft Store, so it doesn't have any bloatware pre-installed.
There are ample ports for connecting external peripherals. The back panel has the AC adapter jack, an Ethernet port, an HDMI-in port, an HDMI-out port, two USB 2.0 ports, and two USB 3.0 ports. I give props to HP for the HDMI-in port, which you can use to hook up an external Blu-ray player or a game console. Underneath the face of the screen are two more USB 3.0 ports and an SD-card reader. I prefer the auxiliary-port placement on the MSI Gaming 24GE 2QE-014US, which has two USB 3.0 ports and an SD-card reader on the left side of the panel, where it's easier to see which port is which. Also underneath the screen, on the left side, is the headset jack.
The six built-in Bang and Olufsen speakers sound great. Audio quality is very good, with enough volume to fill your home office. Wireless connections are handled by dual-band 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0. The system comes with a standard one-year warranty on labor and parts.
Performance
The Envy Curved 34-A051 is equipped with a sixth-generation Intel Core i7-6700T processor running at 2.8GHz and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 960A graphics processor. The Nvidia GTX 960A is soldered to the motherboard, so it's not upgradeable like it would be on a tower desktop PC. But as we'll see below, it doesn't really matter for most users.
The Envy Curved 34-A051 returned an excellent score of 3,233 points in the PCMark 8 Work Conventional test. That's just behind the HP Sprout($280.00 at eBay) (3,381), with its smaller, lower-resolution 1080p HD screen, and the MSI Gaming 24GE 2QE-014US (3,423), and way ahead of the Asus Zen AiO Pro Z240IC (2,932). In the Handbrake video-encoding test, the Envy Curved 34-A051 placed first with a short time of 1 minute 4 seconds, and it also topped the Cinebench test at 707 points. It scored 3:24 in the Photoshop test, compared with 3:18 for the HP Sprout, but that's still an excellent time and more than adequate for photo editing while you're multitasking on the Envy Curved's huge screen. The Asus Zen AiO Pro scored in the same ballpark in the Handbrake (1:07) and Photoshop (3:19) tests, and a bit behind in the CineBench test (675).
Thanks to its Intel Core i7 processor and gaming-quality Nvidia GTX 960A graphics, you can easily play games on the Envy Curved 34-A051 at moderate-quality settings. It returned butter-smooth frame rates in the Heaven (76 frames or fps) and Valley (94fps) tests at medium-quality settings. When pushed to the ultra-quality settings, the scores weren't quite as smooth (25fps in Heaven; 19fps in Valley), but they show that the system should be able to play titles at 1080p HD settings with a little tweaking. By extension, less taxing games like Diablo III, League of Legends, and Minecraft should be playable at WQHD resolution at low- to medium-quality settings.
The Envy Curved 34 led the scores in the 3DMark Cloud Gate test (18,324 points) and scored 2,006 points in the 3DMark Fire Strike Extreme, just behind the Asus Zen AiO Pro Z2401C (2,024 points). Its performance is similar to that of the MSI Gaming 24GE 2QE-014US on both 3DMark tests (15,920 in Cloud Strike; 1,941 in Fire Strike Extreme), as well as similarly playable frame rates on the Heaven and Valley tests. That's impressive, since we consider the MSI Gaming 24GE to be one of the first all-in-ones that's also a true gaming desktop. You can easily play 3D games on the system with a bit of tweaking, and it's certainly one of the best-performing all-in-one desktops in terms of gaming.
Conclusion
The HP Envy Curved 34-A051 Signature Edition is a system that eclipses the wow factor of the Apple iMac 27-inch with 5K Retina Display, as well as the Asus Zen AiO Pro Z240IC. It costs a pretty penny, but it offers a lot of power, storage, and features for the price. Sure, we can nitpick about viewing videos, but we hope that the online streaming services will be able to adapt to the Envy Curved 34-A051's 21:9 aspect ratio, just as they adapted to 1080p, 16:9 video streams a decade ago. The Envy Curved 34-A051 is more comfortable for multitasking than a traditional desktop with a dual-monitor setup, and it has the power to blaze through tasks, quickly. Plus, that 34-inch curved screen is just gorgeous. That's a recipe for success, and it's our Editors' Choice for high-end all-in-one desktop PCs.
The HP Envy Curved 34-A051 Signature Edition is a powerful, high-end all-in-one PC with a 34-inch curved display that gives you an unprecedented amount of workspace for your Web browsing, game playing, and general computing needs.
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