New York - In a market dominated by tablet PCs, smartphones and laptops Hewlett-Packard is not giving up on the desktop PC.

In fact, HP is putting a little extra emphasis on this once leading category.

Randall Martin, HP's chief design strategist, desktop PCs, said the company is placing a great deal of effort on product design along with research and development.

"We are not abandoning our bread and butter Pavilion towers. These are still a huge portion of the market," he said.

For the first time in two years HP has refreshed the appearance of the three main chassis designs in its tower line.

Randall said his team takes a much different direction in designing desktops that what happens on the mobile computing side of the business.

"Personal electronics can have bold colors as people want to make a personal statement about themselves, but we want these [desktops] to compliment the home," Randall said.

The guiding design principle for the 2011 refresh was "Refined, Elegant, Sophisticated" and the end result was a three-color with either blue or red LED highlights. Like previous models the towers have pull down doors to reveal USB and other ports and fold out doors to expose the drives," Randall said.

The entry-level Pavilion p7 series, starting price $299, can come with either Intel or AMD processors.

The Slimline e5 series, $329 starting price and available on June 15, will also have Intel and AMD processor options.

The flagship Pavilion HPE h8 series is the workhorse of the new offering. Consumers can configure it with either Intel or an AMD processor, NVIDIA or ATI graphics.

It will ship on May 18 with a $599 price tag.