For daily use I had switched to HP mini PCs because of their low power consumption. But if I ran the machine only from time to time, then the power consumption is not the main concern. And both my HP ProDesk 600 G4 mini i5-8500T and HP Pro Mini 400 G9 have vPro, not just WOL (Wake On Lan). Can I have something that also fits one or two GPUs for faster inference on LLMs?
Looking through Chotot I found a few options, and the price of an industry build PC in the secondary market beats anything I can build myself. I get updates for BIOS way longer, and have the professional features like vPro integrated, because system admins in companies don’t walk from desk to desk to manage all the clients there. Again looking for the 8th generation to have Windows 11 support, I found an i7-8700 machine from HP. The 800 series has more options than the smaller 600 and 400 series, sometimes only labeled ProDesk. We go EliteDesk!
CPU i7-8700 8C/12T
The cooling block and fan are surpisingly small inside the machine. I have some experience with HP computers. Since 2018 I owned a ___ Z600 HP workstation with dual Xeon as my daily workhorse. Despite a power draw of 180 Watt when idle this machine was quiet. Now the Elitedesk is not inteded to be a workstation, but for office workers. And indeed, in idle on Windows 11 it only draws 11 Watt! The powerful i7 CPU can throttle down and use very little power, therefore needs little cooling, and the fan can stay quiet. What a useful combination!
2025-01-09 RAM upgrade to 40 GB
On Shopee I ordered two 16 GB Micron DDR4 2666 MHz modules for 501,500 VND each. That’s 19.38 USD. Price one year later on 2026-02-10: Ebay 216 USD, Amazon 169 USD.