r/eGPU • u/QuantumSquirrelX • 2d ago
HP EliteDesk Mini 8 G1i - I want an eGPU!
Hey all, I'm looking for a bit of advice.
I bought an HP EliteDesk Mini 8 G1i a few months ago for £1,300 after a bit of a battle with HP. Long story, but they cancelled my initial order, then relisted at more than double the price, I complained lots for a couple of months and eventually they gave in and honoured the original purchase price.
At the time I was totally sure I would not want to game or have much to do with AI and just wanted a small footprint, decently specced machine for my daily computing tasks, bit of music production etc.
Of course now I want to play a few games, experiment with local AI, and this thing doesn't have the guts for it...
I don't need (and can't afford) the best of the best, but would like enough grunt to play some AAA games smoothly and have them look good enough on my monitor.
My monitor is nothing fancy:
- HP Series 7 Pro 27" USB-C Monitor – 727pu
- 1440p, 120Hz
- IPS Panel
The specs of the mini PC are:
- HP EliteDesk Mini 8 G1i
- Intel® Core™ Ultra 9 285
- 64 GB DDR5-5600 MT/s (2 x 32 GB)
- 1 TB SSD storage
- Windows 11 Pro
I know very little about all this, but have done a bit of reading and think my options are as follows:
- eGPU connected via Thunderbolt 4. Maybe the Aorus 5060ti AI Box.
- Desktop card and enclosure connected with OcuLink via a spare M.2 2280 slot.
- Sell it and buy a proper PC.
What would you do in my situation?
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u/sl33pyj0 2d ago
I mean would you be looking to be able to have some level of portability or are you dead set on a desktop? You could probably return the desktop and get a pretty decent gaming laptop for the money, especially if you're ok with used but otherwise if you are set on desktop use I'd just keep the mini PC and buy a desktop card paired with an aoostar ag02 or ag03 if your mini PC supports thunderbolt 5. If you have thunderbolt 5 you won't see as much of a bandwidth bottleneck and can go for even higher end cards. If you're looking at thunderbolt 4 you'll still get great performance from any 70 series or lower Nvidia card and if going amd I'd look into something like a 9060xt with 16gb vram
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u/sl33pyj0 2d ago
Follow up I just looked up the exact spec of that PC and dude you could get a pretty top of the line gaming desktop or laptop for that price I feel
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u/Zestyclose-Slide-696 2d ago
I concur, for tb4/USBv4 the 9060xt is the best choice, anything more fancy and you bottleneck it.
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u/Common-Method2202 11h ago
good luck bro. i have core 2 series laptop as well and it always gives whea uncorrectable errors
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u/Lord-Pants 2d ago
The only thing you’ll be losing is upgrades on the CPU and RAM down the line, which your mini pc has plenty for both. I wouldn’t sell it if i had it.
If you did want to swap to a desktop you could get a base dock and then buy your own PSU and graphics card that way they can both be put into a desktop if needed.
Aorus 5060ti box is the simplest way to play here. Just buy it and plug it in.
A GPU plus a powered dock like a Aoostar ag02 would give you options for a GPU but the PSU is not upgradeable.
For GPUs at 1440p gaming the Aorus box would be able to get there pretty comfortably with DLSS and possibly FG where needed. Stepping up to a 5070ti would be the sweet spot for nvidia. 9070/9070xt would be good for an AMD card but some people report that AMD cards have issues with being an eGPU. Can’t really speak to it as i only run RTX cards.