HP Elite 8200 SFF Upgrades - What more can I do . . . what's it worth?

[Bmeupscot]

Hi Forum and Happy New Year to all!!!

I've been upgrading my HP Elite 8200 SFF Desktop that I bought about a year ago and I've gone to various sites like PCPartPicker to try to determine what it's worth and if I'm making good upgrade choices. The limitations of the HP proprietary MB and the SFF nature of the case limit certain options plus the fact that I don't have a lot of money to spend. I guess that I feel frustrated because when I run diagnostics like NovaBench, GeekBench and UserBench Mark I feel like I'm standing still because, according to their criteria, I'm still only slightly better than their 50% marks. I'm running Windows 10 Pro with all the updates.

The HP was a refurb and came with the Windows 10 Pro, Intel i5-2400 Quad 3.10GHz, HP 1495 Sandy Bridge/Q67 Northbridge MB and an HGST HTS541010A9E680 1TB 5400RPM SATA HDD. Because of the proprietary HP SFF case I can't replace the PSW.

Here's what I've add/replaced so far:

Intel Core i7-2600 Quad-Core 3.4GHz CPU Processor SR00B
Crucial MX300 525GB SATA 2.5" Inch Internal Solid State Drive CT525MX300SSD1 (for OS)
Seagate FireCuda Gaming SSHD 2TB SATA 6.0Gb 2.5" ST2000LX001 (for storage)
AMD Radeon HD 7470 1GB PCI-E Low Profile Graphics Video Card 0WH7F 0NXFD5
eMMcRAM 16GB KIT 4x4GB PC3-12800 DDR3-1600
USB 3.0 Internal 3.5" Front Panel 48-in-1 Multi-Card Reader/Writer w/ USB3 Port
HP 2 Port USB 3.0 PCIe x1 Expansion Card Low Profile 607782
Type-C Hub Speed USB-C to 4 Port USB 3.0 Converter (for my other peripherals)

So . . . what suggestions do any of you have and do you have an estimate of what the system's worth now ( . . . in case I want to upgrade to a newer system and put this one up for resale).

Thanks in advance and again, Happy New Year!!!

 

[jankerson]

It's never going to be a great PC no matter what you do, that's an office machine so they are what they are.

As far as worth goes it's an SFF so it's never going to worth much, you basically threw good money into bad. Seems a lot of people make that mistake and get taken in by the low price, well the price is low for a reason. The horrible information on YT makes things even worse with certain channels feeding the mistakes of buying those things. They give people the misconception they can spend close to nothing and get something out of it. It just doesn't work that way in the real world, not really.

I always recommend people stay far away from those reburb machines because they are really nothing more than dumpster material once the companies upgrade to newer machines.

My advice would be to save up and build a new computer.

The money you spent on that thing could have been put towards a new build.

 

[Bmeupscot]

It's never going to be a great PC no matter what you do, that's an office machine so they are what they are.

As far as worth goes it's an SFF so it's never going to worth much, you basically threw good money into bad. Seems a lot of people make that mistake and get taken in by the low price, well the price is low for a reason. The horrible information on YT makes things even worse with certain channels feeding the mistakes of buying those things. They give people the misconception they can spend close to nothing and get something out of it. It just doesn't work that way in the real world, not really.

I always recommend people stay far away from those reburb machines because they are really nothing more than dumpster material once the companies upgrade to newer machines.

My advice would be to save up and build a new computer.

The money you spent on that thing could have been put towards a new build.

 

[Bmeupscot]

Hi jankerson,

Thanks for the timely info and prompt response. I suspected a lot of what you illuminated but to see it first hand speaks volumes. Just for the record it's really not a bad machine now. The response time is markedly improved over when it was purchased. Do I expect it to compete with "state-of-the-art brand new"? Absolutely not. For my purposes and the work I do to support my wife's teaching residencies it's quite sufficient. I'm not a gamer so that particular functionality isn't critical. I do a lot of graphic work for her, picture and video editing and now it certainly seems up to the tasks. At the very least, when I do upgrade to a new system, I can most probably use the SSD and SSHD if the situation warrants.

Appreciate your considered input.

Bmeupscot

 

[steveob42]

FWIW I have 5 of them, one in every bedroom, and wired the house for gigabit. at $60 apiece for i5, it is hard to beat at scale, nobody is complaining about performance.

But they are a "buy it cheap, fix it cheap, drive it into the ground" machine. Not really an "investment". Well I don't really know of any computer hardware that I would consider an investment, except some really old junk, go figure.

I did soup mine up a little, spent like $40 on a gt710 plus 16gb ram, and it can do 60fps @1080 on low settings. SSD is a must no matter what you get. But I skipped usb 3 and just brought out the other 3 sata cable and power and mix and match and shove them back in the hole, and make sure they are in sleep mode when not in use. With all the storage and ram and decent processor and always on it makes a great development machine/server and does ok as a game potato. Even has hardware raid (though prolly no trim), but I haven't messed with it.

I added a $5 thrift store ups and a large spare battery wire nutted to it, and it is always available wherever I am or whatever the state of the house power.

got another one set up similarly for someone working on cad, no complaints.

It is kind of neat that they have a technical reference for it, I went with the 710 so as not to overload the 1x16 pci bus FYI.
http://h10032.www1.hp.com/ctg/Manual/c02778024.pdf

Your setup is worth more as parts probably though. I don't know what they are saying on YT, but I'm pretty happy with the price/performance of my second hand fleet, as I expect it will be worth next to nothing anyway by the time we need to replace it, and didn't cost that much to begin with. If folks are coming from those low end laptops, as I was (hey, a computer is a computer, right?) it is a huge upgrade, at a fraction of the price, even if you add an ssd to the laptop first.

 

[keithnh]

Have 2 HP SFF Core2quad machines and was wondering what I could do to maximize their potential. I like the size and they dont seem to be too slow at this point if I can soup them up in a standard way to modernize a bit I would like to. They both have Light Scribe DVD writers, am not sure ram and hard drive.