HP Envy Desktop disassembly

[HCHTech]

I attempted to work on one of these this past weekend - installing a hard drive for extra storage. New out of the box:

There is a full-width cage that folds out after you take off the front panel....which was a bear to get off. Turns out you have to take off the DVD drive bezel (snapped on with plastic clips). as the front panel is captured between the dvd bezel and the dvd drive. What a bone-headed design!

Once that nonsense was out of the way, I discovered there were no free sata power cables. There was a single cable that powered the dvd drive and the SSD, and instead of coming from the power supply, this cable was plugged into a special port on the motherboard with a proprietary connector. WTF, HP.

I am NOT confident in the splitter adapter I used. it was only JUST long enough, and the power supply probably has about 4 watts of spare power, I think the output was 287 watts. Some weird-a$$ number like that.

OEM vendors continue their race to the bottom for consumer builds.

 

[timeshifter]

Wow, will try to steer people away from those.

 

[Markverhyden]

And it probably comes with a miniATX motherboard. Been a while but last time I saw one of those my first reaction when I opened it was "why in the world do you need to make and ship so much empty space?"

 

[MichaelBits]

why in the world do you need to make and ship so much empty space?

Haha, and you know them as soon as you pick them up. First full desktop I picked up that had one of those tiny boards in it I about put it through the ceiling.

 

[River Valley Computer]

 

[lan101]

Just that much more reason to go biz class refurb.

 

[Diggs]

I bumped into a Dell like that a few years ago already. At least yours had a power supply. The one I saw used a laptop charger.

https://www.technibble.com/forums/threads/dell-ultra-small-form-factor.71181/#post-560792

 

[lan101]

I bumped into a Dell like that a few years ago already. At least yours had a power supply. The one I saw used a laptop charger.

https://www.technibble.com/forums/threads/dell-ultra-small-form-factor.71181/#post-560792

Hp has some of those too. I've seen like 1 or 2. The towers weigh like 5 pounds lol. At least they are light weight to carry to the junk yard lol.

 

[fincoder]

output was 287 watts

I agree with your post apart from the power supply output. Branded PCs generally have good quality PSUs and their output rating is accurate (hence the odd number). An i7 quad core with GTX 1050 Ti graphics card would run fine on a good quality 287W power supply with some headroom. HP Elite 8300 SFF desktops can power a 1050 Ti card, and they only have a 240W PSU. So no need to worry about the power output unless putting in a high-end gaming card.

 

[mikeroq]

Once that nonsense was out of the way, I discovered there were no free sata power cables. There was a single cable that powered the dvd drive and the SSD, and instead of coming from the power supply, this cable was plugged into a special port on the motherboard with a proprietary connector. WTF, HP.

I hate to break it to you but that's standard now days for computers from HP, Dell, and Lenovo across their product lines outside of high end workstations and gaming computers (maybe).

 

[backwoodsman]

Used to always see that with the caption "Hit any key to continue..."