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.
Impressively, this PC wasn't too noisy given its sprightly performance. The cooling fans did produce a whirring that was audible in a quiet room but it wasn't too intrusive - especially considering the substantial load our benchmarks placed on the processor.
Operating system and extras
Our review unit come with Windows 7 Professional preinstalled. This might seem like a throwback, but it's a welcome sight if you have software that has yet to be certified for Windows 10, is just outright incompatible or if you've yet to start your company's transition. If you're ready to go, then a free downloadable upgrade to Windows 10 Pro is available out of the box.
Although the included USB keyboard and mouse are basic, they're good enough that you won't want to replace them with better alternatives straight out of the box. The two-button, scroll wheel-equipped USB mouse was comfortable and responsive, while the keyboard has a standard layout and keys with enough travel and tactile feedback. The only other included extra is a stand for positioning the 800 G2 vertically to save a little more space on your desk.