HP's "Landfiller" Desktop PC

[iamdarkyoshi]

I recently built a PC to replace one of my friends' slow machines.

 

I've seen these before, but now that I have gotten a hold of one, figured I'd make a detailed post about it.

 

HP's typical basic tower is an mATX case with one optical drive, space for one or two HDDs, four expansion slots, and a standard ATX PSU.

 

This machine is pretty normal from all views...

 

...Except the back of the unit. Almost nothing has been punched out! And yes, they only used three screws on the fan. Four would have been far too much.

 

There are no expansion slots punched out, not even space for a PSU. The machine is instead powered by a typical 65w HP laptop charger.

 

If we open it up, things get even more absurd.

 

What a remarkable waste of space!! And in traditional HP fashion, one wifi antenna on a card that clearly can do two.

 

Taking everything out of the machine, its pretty clear that the same PC could be achieved in a massively smaller space. Obviously exact component placement would be a bit different than just "on top of each other" but still, this general layout would be totally doable, especially if they had switched the 5.25in optical drive for a laptop optical drive.

 

 

Powering this monster is an AMD A4-5000 APU.

 

...yes, a 15w 1.5ghz laptop CPU. I'd like to point out that a basic e8400 core 2 duo released 5 years before this one will beat this CPU in both single and multithreaded tasks, even though it has half the core count.

 

While I'm sure it would be fine for VERY basic web browsing at a low cost, its still sad to see all of this steel being wasted when a machine 1/4 the volume would have been totally possible. My 1080Ti/8086K PC is less than half the size of this machine.

 

 

 

Thoughts on HP's design choices here?

[GDRRiley]

hey that big case is way easier to make a build in for HP. While dell may ship enough volume to make small cases I don't know if HP does.

[PlayStation 2]

It's literally a fucking laptop in a big case.

Actually, the A4 5000 wouldn't be that bad for a YouTube machine. It should be able to do VP9 720p60 and MP4 1080p60 fine.

[KarathKasun]

Cost savings are at play here.  Its the same case used for a bunch of HP builds but without the slots/PSU mount cut out.  I have one that had a SB Pentium in it.  Took a dremel to it and its now a real micro ATX case.

[comicsansms]

A while back, I picked up the AMD E1 version of that off the side of the road. 4GB DDR3, 500GB HDD and a fucking useless mini ITX board with no expansion. It was so gutless that the CPU heatsink didn't have a fan.

 

I also grabbed the shitty 19" 1600 by 900 screen.

 

I also had an intel Celery version of that, a little bit more useful, but they have CPU locked it to only support 35W LGA 1155 CPUs (that said, I am running it with a 65W pentium, because I found a bug in the boot-up sequence).

[manikyath]

2 hours ago, iamdarkyoshi said:

its still sad to see all of this steel being wasted when a machine 1/4 the volume would have been totally possible.

my guess on why, is that the cases they use for these bottom-of-the-barrel shitboxes are actually also used for decent systems, except the decent systems *do* have the expected cutouts. guess its cheaper to just take a case they have off the assembly line sooner, than it is to engineer a smaller chassis just for these things.

 

that said, for as long as the board *works* it makes for a really powerful oversized raspberry pi

[Stefan Payne]

5 hours ago, iamdarkyoshi said:

Thoughts on HP's design choices here?

Now that's what you would call pollution...

A tiny Case like ANtec ISK110 or similar with a Laptop drive would have made more sense than this...

 

Seems like Lazy designing and tooling...

[Helldogz]

Actually, I am impressed that they put the effort in changing the stamp tools to produce the cases with the mission extension slots and PSU openings on its backside. Why would you spend extra money to make it worse?!

 

And where is the PSU at all? @iamdarkyoshi I didn't even saw a power cord connector at the back side.

 

On the side of HP I can actually understand some of their choices. Sitting here behind a PC which is pulling 350 Watts in idle, I was thinking about a second PC with optimization for tasks that are just time-consuming and don't need so much computing power, like Downloading, watch Netflix or just writing smthg. in Word. The benefits are: delay large downloads to overnight (yes the internet here is crap), reduce the that is blown in your room and save money on your electric bill (also expensive over here). Also you can build such a PC from stuff other people consider as useless so you will get components for cheap, eventually free. - So seen from that point Its kinda "reasonable" even though the marketshare for people like me could be tiny ... at its best.

[DildorTheDecent]

There's enough room to fit the catto in there too.

[iamdarkyoshi]

4 hours ago, Helldogz said:

Actually, I am impressed that they put the effort in changing the stamp tools to produce the cases with the mission extension slots and PSU openings on its backside. Why would you spend extra money to make it worse?!

 

And where is the PSU at all? @iamdarkyoshi I didn't even saw a power cord connector at the back side.

 

On the side of HP I can actually understand some of their choices. Sitting here behind a PC which is pulling 350 Watts in idle, I was thinking about a second PC with optimization for tasks that are just time-consuming and don't need so much computing power, like Downloading, watch Netflix or just writing smthg. in Word. The benefits are: delay large downloads to overnight (yes the internet here is crap), reduce the that is blown in your room and save money on your electric bill (also expensive over here). Also you can build such a PC from stuff other people consider as useless so you will get components for cheap, eventually free. - So seen from that point Its kinda "reasonable" even though the marketshare for people like me could be tiny ... at its best.

There's a DC jack on the back of the motherboard for a 65w laptop charger.

 

65w.

[Helldogz]

Ooooh right, saw it on the IO shield now. So they actually just through the Guts of an old Laptop in a PC case, literally.

[iamdarkyoshi]

19 minutes ago, Helldogz said:

Ooooh right, saw it on the IO shield now. So they actually just through the Guts of an old Laptop in a PC case, literally.

Laptop CPU, but desktop HDD, RAM, and optical drive.

 

But yeah, pretty pathetic and a massive waste of space and steel.

[orbitalbuzzsaw]

Some models of older HP desktops are known to to be laptops in a desktop case