Should I buy HP EliteDesk 800 G4 mini or Dell Optiplex 7060 micro?

[Thinkcat]

My educational institution is offloading a bunch of old computers for below market prices. Only one for each buyer. These both have i5-8500T, 8 GB and 512 GB (probably 2.5" SATA SSD, because M.2 is mentioned separately for other units). Given that they have no Thinkstations or Thinkcentres on offer, which one of these two should I go for, or is there any difference?

My other options are to buy nothing and see what I can do with my current computers or pay double the price for something from Lenovo through eBay. Since these are Coffee Lakes without the Refresh, these don't include the Spectre / Meltdown mitigations in hardware as far as I know.

Tl;dr: Out of an identically configured HP EliteDesk 800 G4 mini or Dell Optiplex 7060 micro, is one better than the other?

 

[Rand__]

I dont have any experience with those older models, I have 12th gen models, but my HP400 G9 has way better build quality than my Optiplex 3000, more flexibility, better layout etc, that would be a clear recommendation.
O/c no idea how that changed in those 4 years in between the generations, but maybe its helpful if nobody else can chime in with more accurate information

 

[jdanecki]

HP are better built (just a bit), but often you will be missing the SATA tray (hard and expensive to buy) and overall more expensive. You will have possibility to add many option cards, but there are no clear (or just valid) compatibility tables and some of those might be hard to get.
But with all those things taken into account those machines can be really nice to work and fun to tinker with. At the same time Dells might be easier to work on when you have zero experience.
Remember that I look at this from perspective of Europe.

 

[Thinkcat]

I got one HP, with 512 GB M.2 and one 8 GB SO-DIMM. Seems like nobody wanted these and on the last day of the sale for the last two hours they would have given additional 30 % off, but at that point I had already bought mine. They had 39 and sold four, which includes the one I got. If I had known about this I could have even bought two.

Now I am trying to figure out if I want to a) attempt to hackintosh it, because I've heard that it's possible to get accelerated graphics. Or b) use it as my sole Windows computer. Or c) put ESXi into it. Or not replace my aging P8C WS with the Thinkstation I bought earlier, but use the Thinkstation for ESXi and d) replace the workstation with this HP. Or maybe I will start with e) installing Debian into it and seeing how it runs Doom.

 

[jdanecki]

Hackintosh is for me a bit passe (M* hardware anyone?) but if you have never done it, it might be nice to try it, but not working on it on daily basis any more.
For main battle station: if you do not require ton of horsepower and 2 monitors are OK for you: this is a really solid and stable machine. I would just give it more RAM.
ESXi will work fine just limited to the Cores you can fit into it (remeber: the CPU is not soldered it. Having the 65W version of the machine allows you to update the processor quite far).
Linux will also fly on that machine, you can dualboot and so on. This is nice, not loud and well built machine. It will do whatever you will hit it with within reason

Out of curiosity:
- Did you get the SSD/SATA cradle with cabling? Usually those are missing.
- What OptionCard you have it with?
- Did you get WiFi interface and antenna in the set?

 

[Thinkcat]

Out of curiosity:
- Did you get the SSD/SATA cradle with cabling? Usually those are missing.
- What OptionCard you have it with?
- Did you get WiFi interface and antenna in the set?

- No cradle and nothing related to it. Not sure yet but I have in mind to buy one from eBay and then dremel it in a way that still lets me use both M.2 slots.
- No option card. I'd like to know what is the best quality or closest to original HDMI 2.0 output.
- No WiFi or anything related to it. These were in use in a computer lab and all had wired Ethernet.