PhilsComputerLab wrote:Those HP boxes, and other brands, are all over eBay in Australia at the moment. Must be the right time for the recyclers? I find these make great retro machines.
The 7 Pro licence is super handy, as I believe you get a XP downgrade right as well? Not sure how one goes about activation though.
Does that HP use standard ATX layout and PSU to transplant it into another case if needed?
No idea on the layout compatibility or anything but in mine I put a Core2duo chip in it. A 3.33 ghz xeon dual core in it, 6MB 45nm wolfdale chip, and I have it fitted with a GeForce 310 low profile card. This combo is bare minimum enough to accelerate h.264 and VC-1 videos and I use it as my htpc machine in the living room with a bd-rom and a 32GB SSD in it. Plays all the *.MKV videos I can find off the internet @ 1080p with no slow down just fine, and does great at playing blu ray movies with PowerDVD, and I have a USB IR + Remote dongle package I picked up for $10 that's supposed to go to an HP machine. Remote works perfect to interface with the PowerDVD system. Get arrow keys, enter button, pause, fast forward reverse, stop, mute, volume controls, etc. Works with VLC for the controls too. Only need 32GB on it for a bare bones Win7 install.. it streams all the actual content over the network off my big NAS server in the back room @ gigabit wired. Onboard NIC is gigabit, it works great. And I get audio and video out through the GeForce 310 which comes out DVI -> I convert it to HDMI -> routes through our receiver, is perfect. I think the 310 + adapter cable dongle thing to split it's connector to 2xDVI was $5 for the card $7 for the cable.
Funny quick story, I actually got the whole SFF chassis free (Came with 2.4 ghz core2duo 4MB chip, 500GB mechanical hard drive and 4x1GB ram) completely free. Paid for a $12 LGA-1366 xeon chip on ebay.. seller screwed up and sent me the SFF machine instead then for some reason offered me a refund for the $12 via ebay (I didn't say a word to em) and I accepted.. got my $12 back and the SFF computer free. Seller never asked for it back or anything or even mentioned it. Weird.. but free 😁
I've been thinking of putting a Core2Quad in it to maybe some day start playing 4K content on it, possibly. Pretty far off for that though.