HP EliteDesk 800 G1

It's an old office PC with a budget gaming GPU tossed in. You get a ton of RAM and storage for under $500, but the decade-old CPU and GPU will hold you back in anything demanding. Fine for light gaming and productivity, but don't expect a modern experience.

The i5-4570 is a quad-core chip from 2013, and it lands right in the middle of the pack at the 52nd percentile. It'll handle web browsing, Office apps, and older games fine, but it'll choke on anything CPU-heavy like video editing or modern AAA titles. The GTX 1050Ti is similarly average, sitting at the 54th percentile. You can play esports games like CS2 or League at 1080p with lowered settings, but don't even think about ray tracing or high refresh rates. The 32GB of DDR3 RAM is generous for multitasking, though the slower DDR3 speeds hold it back compared to modern systems. The dual-drive setup with a 512GB SSD and 1TB HDD is a bright spot, giving you snappy boot times and plenty of bulk storage.

Stacked against something like the Lenovo Legion Tower 5i or MSI Aegis ZS, this HP gets absolutely smoked. Those modern prebuilts have current-gen CPUs, DDR5 RAM, and GPUs that can actually handle 1440p gaming. The Apple Mac mini M4 is in a different universe for productivity and efficiency, though it can't game. The Dell Tower ECT1250 and iBUYPOWER Slate are closer in spirit but still use much newer platforms. The EliteDesk only makes sense if your budget is hard-capped under $500 and you need a Windows machine right now. Otherwise, saving up a couple hundred more gets you into a completely different tier of performance.

At $467, you're basically paying for the sum of the parts and the convenience of it arriving ready to go. The 32GB of RAM and dual-drive storage setup are the real value here, since the CPU and GPU are worth maybe $100 combined on the used market. It's not a ripoff, but it's not a steal either. You could probably build something similar from used parts for less if you're handy, but for a prebuilt with Windows 11 Pro and a warranty from a retailer, the price is fair enough for what it is.

The HP EliteDesk 800 G1 is a refurbished office workhorse that someone slapped a GTX 1050Ti into and called it a gaming PC. It's a weird mix of old enterprise bones and a budget graphics card from 2016, running Windows 11 on 32GB of DDR3 RAM. For under $500, you're getting a lot of storage and memory, but the core components are showing their age.

This thing isn't going to win any beauty contests or benchmark races. It's a mid-tower from a decade ago, repurposed for light gaming and general productivity. If you need a cheap desktop for esports titles or office work and don't mind the dated platform, it might make sense. Just don't expect it to keep up with anything modern.

If you want to play any AAA game from the last five years at decent settings, skip this. The GTX 1050Ti was a budget card when it launched in 2016, and it's barely hanging on now. Also skip if you need a compact PC or care about power efficiency, this old tower is huge and the Haswell chip runs hot and draws more power than modern equivalents.

The HP EliteDesk 800 G1 is a budget frankendesktop for someone who needs a basic Windows PC with a little gaming capability on the side. It's best suited for students, office workers, or as a family computer that can also run Minecraft and Fortnite at low settings. If you go in with low expectations, it'll get the job done.