HP Elitedesk SFF G4

J Sigmo

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By the way: We also got one of the three PCs discussed in this thread going last night, with one of the NVMe drives in it for another guy. Two things:

When we fired it up, some HP stuff came up, saying that no boot drive could be found, and offering to automatically download everything and restore the system. So we gave that a try. It download Win10 and everything seemed to work fine through the setup, until we got to trying to set it up on our network. At that point, the NIC wouldn't work, and it turned out there was no driver for that device.

This seemed odd since it had just downloaded all of Win10! Nonetheless, we could not figure out how to work around this catch 22 of having no way to download a driver for the NIC without a working NIC to allow us to download said driver.

I'm sure we could have found a driver and used a thumb drive or whatever to get it into that PC, but since we already had a thumb drive loaded up with a bootable Win10 installer (which we'd used to set up a different PC a few hours earlier), I deleted all of the partitions the first attempt had created on the drive, and then we restarted booting from the thumb drive. That worked just fine.

Second:

We took that machine to my friend's house, and using a Display Port to HDMI adapter cable, hooked it up to his Samsung QLED TV. Man! In 4K, that setup is phenomenal. What an amazing display.

Stupidly, though, I didn't think to bring a smaller display from work so we could find out if we could run one 4K along with one 1080P monitors both at the same time. That's what we want to try to do at work with one of these PCs.

But this really is a stunning display. We had some screen captures of the MMI displays we'll be using, and every single pixel looked perfect with four 1080P screens showing on that one 4K display. That will make for a really nice display to let us see a ton of plant operation info all at once without needing to switch between windows.

And for this guy at home, this may end up being a great media server setup depending on what he ends up wanting.

I know these little PCs would make a heck of a Blue Iris machine!
 

TL1096r

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Great info. I was looking for a SFF and why I skipped out on buying bigger desktops. This looks to be great for a BI machine. I will keep an eye out.
 

TL1096r

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I am going to add another NIC card. Does anyone have experience with what fits in this machine?
 

J Sigmo

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I am going to add another NIC card. Does anyone have experience with what fits in this machine?
I put one of these:

https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B007MWYCG2/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o06_s01?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Into the one we're using at work as a "Human Machine Interface" system for our main plant control system. It seems to be working fine, but I can't speak to how fast it is or how reliable it will be in the long term. This control system only talks "100 Base T" speed.

The card comes with both low profile and normal size mounting plates. I used the short one for this SFF machine, and it fit just fine. I put it in the slowest of the four PCI bus positions because I can't imagine a NIC taxing what even the slowest of PCI slots is capable of.


By the way: We are running not only a 4K TV as the main MMI display, but also one 1080P monitor for the desktop where this PC sits. It seems to run fine. The 4K display runs at 29hz refresh rate, but our MMI displays don't change THAT fast! It looks excellent.

And I did fire up a bit of TV from HULU on a browser, and it looked fine to me. I couldn't see any motion artifacts, but this wasn't sports or the like, and I haven't tried it for gaming, etc. I suspect you'd want to get a separate fancy fire-breathing video card if you're going to do gaming or watching fast sports or the like. But for us, the built-in graphics does very well for our purposes.
 

grumpywilson

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So I got the correct screws for the hard drive and have it mounted finally. Thanks to @fenderman for helping me with finding the correct screws.

My next problem is that I can't figure out how to get into the BIOS to retrieve the windows key. I can get to the uefi diag screen but that only has four options to choose from. Other than that I'm stuck on how to get to the windows key. Does anybody have some advice on what to do?
 

fenderman

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So I got the correct screws for the hard drive and have it mounted finally. Thanks to @fenderman for helping me with finding the correct screws.

My next problem is that I can't figure out how to get into the BIOS to retrieve the windows key. I can get to the uefi diag screen but that only has four options to choose from. Other than that I'm stuck on how to get to the windows key. Does anybody have some advice on what to do?
You dont need the key. MS stores unique info about the system and will activate windows 10 pro. Just use the MS media creation tool.
 

grumpywilson

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Well, windows is installed. Seems like it's running fine. Just trying to make everything fit on the screen. The bottom task bar is half cut off and actually so is everything on all the sides. Just have to find the setting to shrink it a little.
 

fenderman

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Well, windows is installed. Seems like it's running fine. Just trying to make everything fit on the screen. The bottom task bar is half cut off and actually so is everything on all the sides. Just have to find the setting to shrink it a little.
Are you displaying on a monitor or a TV?
 

iseeker

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Thanks for the update!

I got the three PCs that I ordered today, several days early. The packing was nothing short of superb! And they gave us 12 of the proper bumper screw things for mounting "normal" drives, so that was thoughtful. The PCs are in amazingly clean and perfect condition. All but one have a Windows 10 sticker on them, but I'm betting the one without the sticker will still validate just fine when we load up the OS.

Excellent seller, IMO.

I tried a 2-56 screw, and it was too large. But I've got an assortment of metric screws, and it includes #2s of various lengths, so I just tried one, and it does fit! So that's great. I already got a couple of the NVMe drives, so I think I'll be loading the OS and playing with them this evening.

Thanks again for all of your help. I think these are going to be pretty zippy little computers for what we've got in mind.
Do you have a link to the pc's you purchased? or the ebay seller?
 

grumpywilson

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Are you displaying on a monitor or a TV?
I'm displaying on at TV. Figured out the settings for the picture. The TV was the issue. Now I have to get a router And a Poe switch. Hard to find time between work and a newborn to find any time to start running wire runs. I'll get there one day.
 

COtto1984

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Found HP EliteDesk 800 G4 SFF with Intel Core i5 8500 3.0GHz, 8GB Ram, 240GB SSD with warranty for $500. Is that a good deal or should I wait it out?
 

TL1096r

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Found HP EliteDesk 800 G4 SFF with Intel Core i5 8500 3.0GHz, 8GB Ram, 240GB SSD with warranty for $500. Is that a good deal or should I wait it out?
Normally $390-425 if you really wait. The i7-8700 can be purchased for $600 at auction if you are willing to spend $500 another $100 for the i7 is worth it.

also check out Dell optiplex 7060 i5-8500 - it has less storage but a bit smaller and a nice machine too.
 

iseeker

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Found HP EliteDesk 800 G4 SFF with Intel Core i5 8500 3.0GHz, 8GB Ram, 240GB SSD with warranty for $500. Is that a good deal or should I wait it out?
Been watching for 2 weeks and prices haven’t sniffed $400. I know people have seen in past
 

TL1096r

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I ended up out the door at $450 on above referenced unit.
Yes it is good. Normally $400 with no disks.

Been watching for 2 weeks and prices haven’t sniffed $400. I know people have seen in past
I just saw one today go for $356: hp elitedesk g4 - i5 / 240GB SSD. Try setting up ebay alerts and might be able to get one for a good price.
 
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