Enter the Dragon! With a 20 inch widescreen, HD DVD drive and HDTV tuner, HP’s Pavilion HDX has supersized the desktop replacement into a fire-breathing, multimedia beast.

Upside: Like its competitors, HP has seen its 17-inch widescreen notebooks displace the desktop PC in an increasing number of homes--especially on the back of the broadband boom and the growth in wireless networking.

Now HP has crossed the 17-inch line and created the Pavilion HDX Dragon: A desktop slayer with a staggering 20.1-inch widescreen panel rated for true 1080p HD resolution.

The rest of the specifications make for a suitably fire-breathing system: Intel's fastest Core 2 Duo, 4GB of RAM, 400GB of storage, etc. You know the drill. Just work your way down the checklist and tick every box. Now, repeat for all things multimedia: A combo analogue and digital high-def TV tuner is standard; as is an HD-DVD drive, although the burning is restricted to standard dual-layer DVDs. Complement the four inbuilt Altec Lansing speakers with a sub-woofer--albeit one of HP's own design. Then, use the system's expansive footprint to include a surprisingly slim remote control unit which docks into the keyboard.

Where the Dragon really becomes more than just a high-spec home theatre PC is the unique dual-hinge design which uses a long arm to anchor the screen to the main chassis. The massive display panel opens up in the same way as a conventional notebook, and at full extension it almost exactly hits the sweet spot for comfortable viewing--where you're looking straight at the screen rather than craning your neck down.

Once opened, the screen can be swivelled somewhat like a desktop monitor to fine tune the viewing angle--tilted up or down, as well as forward or back.

Downside: You may as well leave the HDX open in all its glory, and not just to show off why on earth you paid an expected US$5,000 (S$7,583.50) for a PC. The large heavy panel takes two carefully-positioned hands to spring it open and those hands readily leave prints and smudges on the high-gloss piano black surface.

You should also keep Vista running and set to drop into sleep mode when not in use, because HP's QuickPlay music and movie player is now a part of the operating system, and is no longer an "instant on" embedded program which loads before Windows.

And while the HDX Dragon is officially a portable PC, don't think about moving it anywhere further than the other end of your house. It's not as much for the 7kg weight as the battery life, which is unlikely to reach two hours in full entertainment mode. So much for watching Lord of the Rings again.

Outlook: The Pavilion HDX will reach Asia Pacific in August. Final pricing is yet to be set but based on a starting price of US$2,999 (S$4,548.58) for the most basic configuration, local sticker shock is likely to be north of US$5,000 (S$7,583.50).