HP EliteDesk 805 Black 2023

A fantastic office PC when it behaves, but the sleep/wake gremlins and HP's useless support make it a gamble. Buy it cheap and pray you got a good one.

The Ryzen 5 8500G is a pleasant surprise for office grunt work. It's not going to set any records, sitting right in the middle of the pack for CPU and GPU performance, but it chews through spreadsheets, browser tabs, and video calls without breaking a sweat. The 32GB of DDR5 is the real hero here, keeping things snappy even when you're multitasking like a maniac. What surprised us most is how quiet the whole package runs. For a small form factor box, it's practically silent under normal loads, which is a bigger quality-of-life win than any benchmark score.

The EliteDesk 805 lives in a weird neighborhood. It's not a gaming rig like the Lenovo Legion Tower 5a, so don't even try to compare them on graphics. The Apple Mac Studio M4 Max is in a different universe of performance and price. The real fight is against other business SFF boxes like the Dell Tower ECT1250. The HP wins on port selection and out-of-box RAM, but Dell's reliability track record and support are hard to beat. If you've been burned by HP support before, the Dell is the safer, slightly more boring bet.

Pricing on this thing is all over the map, with a wild spread from $970 to over $27,000 across vendors. At the low end, you're getting a killer deal on a well-specced office PC. At the high end, someone's lost their mind. If you're buying, stick to the $970-$1,200 range and you'll feel great about it. Anything above that and you're getting fleeced.

The HP EliteDesk 805 G9 is a classic office workhorse that stumbled into a weird identity crisis. On paper, it's a solid business desktop with a modern Ryzen 5 8500G, a generous 32GB of DDR5 RAM, and a port selection that puts most towers to shame. But the real story here is the reliability gamble. Our data shows a machine that's fast and quiet when it works, but a significant number of owners are fighting sleep/wake bugs and random crashes that HP support can't seem to fix. If you get a good one, you'll love it. If you don't, you'll be reinstalling Windows more often than you check your email.

If you're looking for a set-it-and-forget-it machine that won't give you driver headaches or random crashes, this isn't it. Go get a Dell OptiPlex or a Lenovo ThinkCentre instead. They're less exciting on the spec sheet, but they won't make you want to throw your monitor out the window when the screen stays black for the fifth time this week.

The HP EliteDesk 805 G9 is a frustratingly good desktop trapped in a reliability lottery. When it works, it's a fast, quiet, and absurdly well-connected office machine that'll handle anything you throw at it short of gaming or video editing. But the persistent sleep/wake bugs and crash reports are a real red flag. If you're willing to roll the dice and maybe do some troubleshooting, it's a great value at the right price. If you need a machine that just works without drama, look elsewhere.