The ProDesk and EliteDesk series of mini PCs from HP are pretty awesome if you want something tiny but very upgradeable. Most units in the series have socketed processors, and two M.2 ports for SSDs plus one SATA port with a drive cage for 2.5" drives. Here’s the service manual for this series:
500 dollars for a 4 year old power limited CPU on an HP motherboard that won’t support 11th gen or even drive a full powered i7? Oh yeah and no GPU and PSU that won’t support one? Pass!
Your only upgrade path here is storage.
Why would you expect a discrete GPU on a mini system like this? If you need a full GPU this isn’t on your radar to begin with so why even mention it?
These are great office PCs because that’s what they are meant for. Slap it on the back of a monitor or tuck it under a monitor stand. That’s what we do with these when we buy them for our shipping and logistics workstations. Power efficient, tiny, powerful enough to run resource hogs like Quickbooks Enterprise Desktop, and the same price as a mini-tower version with the same specs.
I’ll never understand the “stop liking what I don’t like!” crowd. It’s not all about you and your needs, dude.
That extends to those who absolutely insist that a DIY is better than a prebuilt because “it can be upgraded”, right? Nevermind that when purchased for the purpose, computers aren’t likely going to need an upgrade in at least a few years. By that time, it’s going to be completely different components and all newer tech anyway.
At my work, nearly all are prebuilts with memory and/or storage upgrades as necessary. There are only two workstations that I built in-house – and that was during the height of the pandemic and not wanting to wait weeks or months for them. FWIW, the GPU was purchased from Dell’s parts division because they didn’t price gouged.
(Note that I am not staff. I just volunteer to help out on the forums.)
Same! Our POS machine (we have a storefront open to the public but we mostly sell online) was a custom built by me but only because we needed specific hardware and ports available. All our others are prebuilt with many of them refurbs like this HP. I usually replace the crappy no name SSD but otherwise they are more than good enough for our purposes.
These are not just great office PCs either - They are more than capable to easily help control larger external storage arrays, or run HTPC applications, or work as several VMs within network management and control… It’s really very versatile, and I would have loved to have something this powerful and small for this price a year or two ago. But we had to settle for earlier gen Intel chips (8th, rather than 10th).
The only places that this mighty-mini-PC will readily fall short are intensive and extended CPU operations that require very heavily multi-threaded workloads (physics simulations, or the most demanding CAD renders), or those that would need a discrete GPU (gaming, or video editing and encode that doesn’t fall within the fixed function Intel HD realm). And truthfully, this still has the CPU power to keep up with some of the better DIY full builds from maybe four years back, or so, for many tasks. But people who want that should know better than to try to shoehorn a micro system into a role for which it wasn’t built… Easy comparison is that if you’re shopping for a truck to be able to tow things, you don’t snub a Corolla, because it can barely tow a small U-Haul trailer. Should be obvious that compact sedan =/= truck =/= minivan =/= armored vehicle
But however you dice it, this is actually a well spec’d machine, with reasonable expansion options for the form factor. And that price would be tempting if I hadn’t recently filled that need with a less capable, but less expensive model.