HP EliteDesk 800 G1 Tower Review

For $467, you get a tower with a cripplingly old CPU (19th percentile) but a huge 32GB of RAM. The GTX 1050 Ti GPU (44th percentile) allows for light gaming. It's a budget stopgap with zero upgrade headroom. Only consider if your budget is set in stone and your needs are minimal.

The HP EliteDesk 800 G1 is a $467 tower that's trying to be a lot of things at once. It's built on a 10-year-old Intel Core i5-4570 CPU, which lands in the 19th percentile for performance, but it's paired with a surprisingly generous 32GB of DDR3 RAM, putting it in the 71st percentile for memory. The result is a machine with a serious identity crisis: is it a budget gaming rig, a home office workhorse, or just a refurbished business PC with some new parts? Let's dig into the numbers. It comes with a 512GB SSD and a 1TB HDD, though that combo only scores in the 30th percentile for storage against modern desktops. The discrete NVIDIA GTX 1050 Ti GPU is a step up from integrated graphics, but at the 44th percentile, it's not exactly a powerhouse. This is a spec sheet from different eras.

Performance is a story of mismatched parts. The CPU is the clear bottleneck, sitting in the 19th percentile. That i5-4570 is a quad-core chip from 2013, and it shows. For basic tasks and light multi-tasking, the 32GB of RAM will keep things smooth, but any CPU-intensive work will hit a wall fast. The GPU, an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti, is better, landing in the 44th percentile. It can handle esports titles like League of Legends or CS:GO at decent settings, but modern AAA games at 1080p will be a struggle. The storage setup is practical—a 512GB SSD for your OS and key apps, plus a 1TB HDD for bulk files—but its 30th percentile ranking shows it's just average by today's standards.

At $467, the value proposition is entirely about upfront cost versus modern performance. You're getting a complete system with a dedicated GPU and a ton of RAM for less than the price of a new mid-range graphics card alone. However, you're paying with performance, especially on the CPU side. It's a trade-off: save hundreds of dollars now, but accept that this PC is already operating at the lower end of today's performance spectrum and has very limited upgrade potential without replacing the core platform (motherboard, CPU, RAM).

Stacked against its listed competitors, the EliteDesk is in a different league—a much slower one. The HP Omen 45L or Dell Alienware Aurora R16 will have modern CPUs and GPUs that are multiple generations ahead, offering 5-10x the gaming performance for 3-4x the price. A more direct comparison might be a modern budget gaming PC or a mini-PC with a recent Ryzen APU. Something like an ASUS ROG NUC with an Intel Core Ultra CPU would run circles around this EliteDesk in CPU tasks and likely match or beat its GPU performance with integrated graphics, all in a tiny form factor. The EliteDesk's only advantage is its sheer amount of cheap DDR3 RAM and its rock-bottom price.

Gamers should look elsewhere. With a GPU in the 44th percentile and a CPU in the 19th, this isn't a gaming machine. Anyone doing CPU-intensive work like video editing, streaming, or software development will find the i5-4570 painfully slow. Also, skip this if you want a small PC—it scores a 23.9/100 for compactness. If you have any flexibility in a $500-$700 budget, you can build or buy a much more capable modern system.

This is a tough one to recommend broadly. The data is clear: the ancient CPU cripples the system's potential. If your needs are strictly defined—light office work, web browsing, and very casual gaming—and your budget is absolutely capped at $500, this gets you a working tower. But for almost anyone else, especially considering gaming or home office scores in the 40s, saving a bit more for a modern platform with a Ryzen 5 or Core i3 will provide a dramatically better experience and a viable upgrade path. This PC is a dead end.