HP Elite Mini 800 A12GLUT Black 2023 Review

A capable little office PC that fits almost anywhere and runs quietly, but the 256GB SSD is a joke and integrated graphics lock out any serious work beyond spreadsheets. Buy it only if you can snag the $1,099 price and don't mind immediately adding storage. Otherwise, the Mac mini M4 is a smarter buy.

HP's Elite Mini 800 G9 is a tiny desktop that tries to be the ultimate office space saver. It's barely wider than a soda can and it stays practically silent, which is exactly what you want in a cubicle or a home desk where noise is a no-go. But the spec sheet has one glaring red flag: a 256GB SSD that feels like it wandered in from a laptop from 2015. That's going to be a problem the moment you start installing apps or saving files.

It's powered by a 14th-gen Intel Core i5 with 16GB of DDR5 RAM, so it handles spreadsheets, video calls, and a pile of browser tabs without breaking a sweat. It also throws in a healthy port selection, including Thunderbolt and Wi-Fi 6E, which is more than you'd expect from a box this small. But the integrated graphics mean this is strictly a work machine, and even then, you'll probably need to tack on an external drive or cloud subscription sooner than you'd like.

The Core i5-14500T is a 14-core efficiency-focused chip that does exactly what it's supposed to: chew through office apps, virtual meetings, and multitasking without making a racket. In our database, it's pretty middle-of-the-pack for raw processing power, which is fine for the target audience. The 16GB of DDR5 is snappy and keeps things smooth, though the integrated UHD 770 graphics are a letdown. They'll push a 4K display for videos and basic visuals but fall apart the moment you try gaming or any GPU-heavy creative work, landing in the bottom third of our graphics rankings. The real bottleneck, though, is that 256GB SSD. It's tiny, it's slow to fill, and it sits in the 13th percentile for storage capacity, making it one of the weakest spots we've seen on any modern desktop.

Pricing is all over the place. Some vendors list this mini at a reasonable $1,099, and at that level it's a decent deal for a quiet, business-ready Windows PC with a Pro OS license. Others, however, have it marked up to a staggering $172,688, which is either a typo or a genuine attempt to sell you a space heater for the price of a small house. Even at the low end, you're stuck with that skimpy SSD, and upgrading or adding external storage eats into the value fast. Compared to Apple's Mac mini M4 at $599 with more base storage and way better performance, this HP asks you to pay a premium for the Windows logo and a smaller footprint.

Forget the gaming towers like the ASUS ROG GM700TZ or Lenovo Legion Tower 5i, those are in a different universe. The real competition here is the Apple Mac mini M4, which is slightly larger but crushes this HP in processing power, graphics, and storage flexibility, all for less money. If you're glued to Windows, the Dell XPS EBT2250 comes in a bigger case but offers more room for expansion and similar business chops. The HP's ace is its size and near silence, but that alone doesn't outweigh its shortcomings when there are stronger mini PCs on the market.

If you need more than 256GB of storage on day one or plan to do any gaming, 3D work, or heavy photo editing, move along. The integrated UHD 770 graphics are a dead end for those tasks, and adding external drives just to get by defeats the whole point of a clean mini PC. Anyone craving raw speed or future expandability should look at the Mac mini M4 or a small form factor DIY build instead.

The HP Elite Mini 800 is for the specific person who needs a tiny, quiet Windows machine that'll live under a monitor and never be asked to do anything beyond Outlook, Excel, and web apps. If that's you and you're fine with plugging in an external SSD on day one, it'll serve you well. For everyone else, those compromises in storage and graphics sting too much to ignore.