HP EliteDesk 805 G9 Black 2023

A quiet, compact office beast that chews through work tasks, but the integrated graphics are a one-way ticket to PowerPoint town. Buy it for the CPU and ports, but pray you don't have to deal with HP's warranty support.

The Ryzen 5 8500G is a pleasant surprise. It's not a chart-topper in our database, sitting right around the middle of the pack for CPU muscle, but for business tasks it feels way quicker than that ranking suggests. Apps launch instantly off the NVMe drive, and we threw a stupid number of browser tabs and Excel sheets at it without a stutter. The real weak spot is the integrated Radeon 740M graphics, which lands in the bottom 11th percentile. It'll push a couple of 4K monitors for productivity without breaking a sweat, but it's a total dud for modern gaming or any serious 3D work.

The obvious elephant in the room is the Apple Mac mini M4. It's in a different universe for performance per watt and absolutely demolishes the HP in graphics, but you're locked into macOS and a different port selection. If you need Windows and a ton of USB-A ports without a dongle life, the EliteDesk makes sense. Against something like the Lenovo Legion Tower 5i, the HP is smaller and quieter, but the Legion is a real gaming PC with a dedicated GPU. The Dell Tower Plus is a more direct competitor, but the HP's port selection is a standout in its class.

Pricing is a bit of a rollercoaster, ranging from $750 to $970 depending on the seller. At the lower end, this is a solid deal for a quiet, capable office PC with Windows 11 Pro. At the high end, you're getting fleeced. If you can snag it closer to $750, it's a good buy. Just triple-check the listing to make sure you're getting the 32GB config and not a stripped-down 16GB model with a mystery-brand SSD.

The HP EliteDesk 805 G9 is a business workhorse that knows exactly what it is, and doesn't pretend to be anything else. It's a compact, quiet, and surprisingly fast little box for office grunt work, programming, and heavy multitasking, thanks to that snappy Ryzen 5 8500G and a healthy 32GB of DDR5 in this config. Just don't look at it funny if you're hoping to game, because the integrated Radeon 740M graphics are strictly for spreadsheets and streaming, not frame rates.

If you're looking for a machine that can handle even light gaming or creative work like video editing, this isn't it. The integrated graphics are one of the worst we've seen for that. Go grab a Lenovo Legion Tower or an Apple Mac mini M4 instead and get some actual GPU horsepower.

The HP EliteDesk 805 G9 is a purpose-built office machine that nails the brief. It's fast, quiet, and compact. The warranty horror stories from some buyers are a red flag you can't ignore, so buy from a seller with a solid return policy and check every component on arrival. If you need a no-nonsense Windows box for work and don't care about gaming, this is a strong contender, especially if you find it at a good price.