I've had this computer since December of 2008. It is a dependable work horse, I am not easy on my computers but this HP has been more than able to withstand my abuse! It came with the typical crap HP , but even then it was consistently fast and powerful. My computers are my toys so I upped the ram to 4 gig and installed an nVidia 9400. The case is fairly small. so you can't go overboard with add-on internals. I did up the psu to a 550 watt unit. The last addition was a slot fan, but again, it never hiccupped in its stock profile. I have run a disk defrag, a spyware scan, and a virus scan at the same time as I surfed so let that give you an idea of the quality of this machine. Honestly, it is so fast and dependable that it is just not feasible for me to go to a "tri", or quad! I am and will always be an XP fan, but with the power of this machine, Vista Premium is quick and smooth. While the case is smallish it has a built in card reader, 2 5.5 inch bays (one in use) and under a small door are 2 usb 2.0 jacks,with mini-jacks for a mic and headphones with a fire wire port. There is the optional HP portable hard drive bay also on the case front. The on/off button is found on the top right corner of the case and is lit up with a cool blue led when in use.
The cases rear panel come with enough jacks of various kinds to satisfy almost anyone. There is no eSata port f.y.i. There are 5 usb jacks, a phone/fax modem, an ethernet jack, ps2 jacks for mouse and keyboard, and mini-jacks for the 5.1 native onboard sound card. There is a "see-saw" on off power switch in the upper left hand corner with the power cord jack.
Internal ventilation is provided by the psu fan (inward and down), the AMD x 2 6000 (3 gig.) has its own more than sufficient fan, and an 80mm. mounted on the rear panel. You might want to add additional ventilation should you install a video card, but that isn't a necessity. The motherboard (ASUS) is an NARRA3-00 (HP part number) is more than adequate , and, while proprietary, doesn't require a rocket scientist to work with. The onboard sound is by Realtek, also more than adequate. Three system devices that caught my eye during an Everest scan are (1) AMD DRAM and HyperTransport Trace Mode Configuration (2) AMD HyperTransport Configuration and (3) NVIDIA nForce PCI System Management. My point in pointing this out is to say that will this configuration is no longer state of the art, it remains very satisfactory, and will surprise many people today. Fast is fast - I can't recognize the difference between 100 and 1500 nano-seconds - and this HP computer was fast when I bought it and it is fast as I write this.
The stock 360 gig hard drive has proven to be a nice size. It is fast and quiet. Even with my over-kill of software, I'm not even close to the 50% limit that I use to determine when I need additional storage.
Before ending, in addition to the 4 gig of ram installed, I also have a 4 gig thumb drive designated for readyboost. But I have been toying with using another thumb drive (2 gig) to store my most used executables. The result has been a signicant increase in the speed these program load. The browser are almost instantaneous! I was toying with buying a solid state hard drive, but as I said fast is fast, and this has made that purchase no longer feasible. My HP a6414f is everything I could ask for. It has proven to be a very stable platform for me to experiment on - again with nary a hiccup, BSOD's are something that happen to other systems.

I wish I could always get this "bang for the buck" with every purchase I make.

IMHO it's a 10 out of 10!