Hello and welcome to another AIC video.
As usual, Life has gotten in the way of me doing anything actually productive, so I’ve had these HP minidesks for quite some time and i’m just now getting around to reviewing them. I pucked them up for a project and really wanted to test them out before putting anything important on them.
First things first – Specs.
These are a G2, and they have a core i5 6600T processor, and they originally came with 8 gigs of ram and a 128gig samsung SSD. the SSD is actually pretty quick and i upgraded the ram to 16 gigs. I got them used off ebay as a lease return, and I paid $185 for them, the seller I bought from has them for $190, but drops the price per unit a bit as you buy more. I’ll put a link to their store in the description down below. One thing to note, they were FILTHY. Like SUPER dirty. I had to clean them when I got them, one of them had a bad fan, and the seller replaced it immediately.
The CPU is 35watts, which is pretty low on the power scale, but it is socketed! There is a 35watt core i7, it is is a 6700T but from reading online, it is not much faster, between 3 and 10% depending on workload, but goes for $150+ on ebay, so I don’t think it’s worth the upgrade, for the cost of this unit and that core i7, you could get one with a newer gen core i7 already on board. There is the standard 6700 – which is a 65 watt part, and a 6700k wich is a 91 watt part…. I seriously doubt this cooler is up to the task of keeping either of those two from thermal throttling. But it handles the 65watt part just fine, I was doing some hard core processing on these, basically had them running for a couple of weeks straight, and they barely hit 80 degrees. Since I now have a 4k TV, all the videos I ripped years ago at low quality look like crap, so I was going back and re ripping my blu rays. It is a socket 1151, which is the same for skylake, which this processor is and Kaybee lake… I don’t know if a kaybee lake processor will work on this system, I don’t have one to test, so if somebody has a 7700T and wants to send it my way… Feel free!
A few things on that note, They are pretty quiet, even when being pushed, They never got barely warm, like I said not over 80 degrees, but they are not fast. They are just 4 core, 4 thread, which IS better than previous versions which were just dual core with hyperthreading. 4 real cores trumps 2 cores. But my ryzen 2600x outclassed them, and could finish 2-3 movies easily in the time it took them to do one, their strength was in numbers, with 3 of them running, they made short work of my files.
Of course, The first thing I did when I bought these was to open them up, so lets take a look at the guts now and see what can be upgraded.
Remove fan – it uses 260 pin so-dimm memory, which maxes out at 32 gigs each, so you can up to 64 gigs of ram in this thing. I’ve upgraded mine to just 16 gigs.
You can see here the CPU is socketed, as I said before, I will be repasting these, but I don’t expect to gain much performance, they were not overheating/thermal throttling.
The 2.5” drive is here, and under it, it has a place for a wireless card, and a m.2 slot, I believe this is nvme, the support website listed a couple of options for m.2 nvme drives, so you can put a stonking fast storage in here and have a 2.5” hard drive or SSD for large file storage.
And I believe this slot is for a wireless card. But since it didn’t come with one, I don’t see where you would attach the antenna. You would probably be best with a USB one.
Speaking of USB, look at the expansion on this tiny little guy, it has 5 USB 3 ports and a USB type C port on the front, Display port, VGA, Serial, and gigabit Ethernet. You know a computer means “business” when it has a serial port. This is perfect if you have any legacy hardware that you have to connect to a computer. I have some old palm pilots that still have serial cables I had to get a USB adapter for. A lot of older equipment that these would be perfect to replace ailing computers on.
Now that we’ve looked at the hardware a bit, lets take a look at the software side of things. First of all I obviously got these used, so my out of the box is a bit different than when they were new. The sellers did a clean install of windows, and included a few nice things like open office, and chrome, windows was activated on all of them, and they had all their drivers installed. That says a lot more about the seller/refurbisher than it does the computer itself, and the guys I bought these from really sold a nice package. The only complaint I would have, is a few seconds with a can of air to clean some of the dust out would have been nice, but was easy enough to do myself.
Here are some benchmark numbers, I’ll throw them on my list, I’ll like that in the description for comparison. It’s faster than a 5th gen core i processor and slower than a 8th gen… I don’t have any 7th gens to compare it to. But the results are not surprising, but what does that mean for us?
First and foremost, lets do some gaming. I only have a 128gb ssd on here, so Lets first try out fall guys, then minecraft, then shadow of the tomb raider.