Casing and upgrading
As the 800 G2 is a business PC, it has a very plain black casing. It's very sturdy though as it's made out of thick metal, yet it's also easy to open up. Twist off one screw and the top plate slides off to reveal the interior.
Our review unit came fitted with a fast 128GB NVMe M.2-based SSD. If you want to fit a bigger SSD, you'll first have to remove the combined cooling fan and cage for an optional 2.5in SATA hard disk that sit on top of it. The existence of this cage means you could instead stick with the current SSD and rely on a bigger and cheaper, if slower, hard disk for storing your very big files instead.
Performance and noise
The HP EliteDesk 800 G2 Mini is available in a variety of configurations. Our review unit came fitted with a quad-core 2.8GHz Intel Core i7 6600T that can turbo boost to 3.6GHz. Paired with the PCI-based SSD and 16GB of RAM, it raced through our benchmarks - it's very, very fast. We haven't seen any other similarly sized PC that's this fast - only bigger compact PCs such as the Z240 SFF Workstation are faster the 800 G2. This PC is obviously not as exemplary when it comes to 3D graphics performance where even the Z240's relatively old Nvidia Quadro trumps this mini PC's integrated graphics.