Upgrading HP Compaq Elite 8300 USDT

[franush]

You're welcome, I do admire the challenge in building onto a platform that you respect even though it may not be an obvious one for some other people.  You've taken it further than me especially in your level of investment.  The benchmark of even the i5 is quite respectable, I find this really works well and does everything I want it to and I'm doing more than just browsing.

Oh and thanks for the kudos, I'm just getting used to this HP forum stuff.

About the 2nd HDD, I forgot about the mSATA slot, I did get an adapter and a SATA power splitter a couple of years ago but hit a snag, I think it was the cramped space between the drive bays and the motherboard, I'll revisit it and see if there may be a workaround.  I want to keep the optical drive and even thought of sticking the 2nd HDD down - messy but effective 🙂

How do you adapt an mSATA to hold memory, and how did you even know that was possible?

Yes I'm okay with eBay - actually my USDT came with an optical drive that didn't have write capability, I ordered a used one from eBay but it was faulty and got a refund, I'm about to try again, also that's were I got my two DP2HDMI adapters (for what they were worth, frustrating that I don't know whether they work).  My new fan arrived today, fitted it but there's still an annoying whirr, heard in the quiet.

I was thinking of getting another USDT to use as a HTPC but as there's no cheap way to get it to have an HDMI I'm thinking seriously of a Raspberry-PI project, well that's another story 🙂

[NonSequitur777]

Looked at the HP Elite 8300 USDT's motherboard specs  and it listed, quote: "(1) mSATA" as one of the expansion slots.

This mSATA slot can be used to add additional SDD storage, and so I decided to add a 512GB full-size mSATA SSD card:

[NonSequitur777]

A lot of graphics card are sold without a backplate.  That is no big deal as long as they are installed internally in a PC chassis/frame, but if they're parked outside the PC, like mine, adding a backplate for safety and aesthetic considerations makes sense.

Interestingly, there doesn't appear to be a whole lot of backplate options on the supply side. Btw, I'm in principle all for buying domestically manufactured products, but it's either not available or just way too expensive.

Picking what I believe to be the most affordable option, I just ordered an aftermarket backplate for my RX 570. Let's see how that turns out.

[NonSequitur777]

The Intel Xeon E3-1280 V2 (3.60-4.00 GHz, 4 cores, 8 threads) arrived and installed: and it works flawlessly!  -As a matter of fact, this CPU performs almost equal as well (~99%) compared with the i7-3770K on the HP Elite 8300 USDT:

E3-1280 V2 CPU Mark of 6584 vs. i7-3770K CPU Mark of 6652 !

[NonSequitur777]

Dear Forum, according to UserBenchmark, my HP Elite 8300 USDT powered with the Xeon E3-1280 V2 & RX 570, scored a respectable 7th out of 813 submitted user benchmarks.

I believe that if I were to install a more powerful eGPU, like an RX 5600 XT 6GB, my rig would rival the top spots currently occupied using the NVIDIA RTX 2060 6GB eGPU.

[NonSequitur777]

Dear Forum, update: Just ordered an AMD RX 6600 XT 8GB graphics card via Newegg.  Never ordered anything before from that company, but they had/have a sale that I couldn't ignore. This card should really ramp up the HP 8300 Elite USDT's gaming performance. Product is in stock and will be shipping today.

[NonSequitur777]

The Kingston HyperX Impact 2x8GB DDR3L PC3-14200 @ 1866 MHz RAM memory modules came in, and installed.

Condensing: After running some benchmark programs, the Kingston RAM appeared not to be quantifiably faster or better than the Samsung RAM, even though the PC recognized its higher bandwidth capability: 889 MHz vs. 800 MHz.  However, the Memory DRAM frequency didn't change -remained at 798 MHz.  On the other hand, the Elite 8300 USDT accepted the DDR3L 1.35V low voltage RAM modules to actually running them at 1.35V vs.1.50V for the DDR3 Samsung RAM modules. The Kingston RAM probably generates less heat.

In any regards, for the time being, back to the Samsung 2x8GB DDR3 PC3-12800 @ 1600 MHz.

[NonSequitur777]

Once the HP Elite 8300 USDT upgrades are complete, this "pc build comparison" shows the expected scores for Gaming, Desktop, and Workstation performances:

[itsmyname]

@NonSequitur777  --  the PC recognized its higher bandwidth capability: 889 MHz vs. 800 MHz.  

The tiny SPD chip on the Kingston sticks gives that "889" value as the maximum speed of the RAM.

Within SPECCY, expand the "motherboard" section, to see the clocking-rate supported by the motherboard.

My guess is that it maxes-out at 800, meaning that one of the slower-than-889 values (stored in the SPD) will be used.

[NonSequitur777 · Accepted solution]

Dear Forum, I succeeded in pushing an HP Compaq Elite 8300 USDT into a lean-mean gaming machine.

Took some effort, time, and some expenses, but it is perfectly feasible!  And it was fun.

As you can see from my previous posting, the UserBenchmark Gaming/Desktop/Workstation rig prediction was very accurate indeed.

And of all the global HP 8300 USDT's ever submitted to UserBenchmark.com, my rig is (currently) number one running with a Xeon E3-1280 V2 CPU -and come to think of it, as number two, running with an Intel i7-3770.  The i7-3770K is now installed in an HP Pro 6300 SFF, my latest obsolete HP PC Gaming experiment "project".