HP Elite t660 Evaluation: Redefining The Skinny Shopper PCCategory

	HP Elite t660 Skinny Shopper: Pricing TBA HP’s Elite t660 provides stable efficiency, loads of connectivity, and an array of equipment, blurring the strains between a standard skinny shopper and small kind issue edge PC.
	Spectacular Skinny Shopper Efficiency Strong Exterior Connectivity Passive Cooling Means Whole Silence Consists of Competent Peripherals Secure Stand And Versatile Mounting Choices	Case Plastics Might Really feel Extra Premium Requires Exterior Energy Brick

The truth is, when you simply take a look at the spec sheet, the Elite t660 appears to be like rather a lot like a typical mini-PC. Certainly, when you throw a clear copy of Home windows 11 on it, you should use it similar to every other system, and the efficiency is sort of good—even when it’s driving 4 displays. We’ll get to that in a bit, although. First, let’s discuss why a skinny shopper might need this a lot horsepower and connectivity.

Trendy Skinny Purchasers And Multimedia Redirection

Traditionally, skinny purchasers relied closely on distant servers to deal with most processing, with the native {hardware} doing little greater than displaying the outcomes. Nevertheless, fashionable digital desktop infrastructures (VDIs) have turn out to be more and more reliant on multimedia redirection to enhance efficiency and cut back community and server pressure. Multimedia redirection offloads duties like video decoding, audio playback, and even some graphical rendering to the native skinny shopper fairly than processing the whole lot remotely.

This shift is pushed by the altering nature of labor itself. Video conferencing, display screen sharing, and wealthy internet functions are actually on a regular basis necessities for a lot of professionals, and these duties demand low latency and excessive responsiveness. By leveraging the GPU and media engines inside fashionable skinny purchasers just like the HP Elite t660, VDI environments can obtain smoother video playback, higher audio synchronization, and a greater general person expertise.

With all of that in thoughts, let’s check out the HP Elite t660’s full specs for this mighty mite:

HP Elite t660 Skinny Shopper System Specs

Many of the element checklist above will look fairly acquainted to PC {hardware} lovers: 16GB of DDR5 RAM, a 256GB M.2 SSD, the ol’ dependable Realtek Gigabit Ethernet and an Intel 2×2 Wi-Fi 7 controller. That “Intel Processor U300E” might be a curve ball for many HotHardware readers, although. That’s what Intel describes as a “Raptor Lake Embedded” processor, however extra precisely, it is truly Alder Lake, based mostly on the mixture of 1 Golden Cove P-core and 4 Gracemont E-cores. It additionally sports activities a Xe-LP built-in GPU, like Alder Lake and Raptor Lake CPUs.

The opposite actually notable factor on the t660’s spec sheet is the exterior connectivity. It is extraordinarily strong, exceeding even most mini-PCs. You get three fastened show connections, that are Twin-Mode DisplayPort, that means they’ll perform as both DisplayPort or DVI/HDMI connectors with solely a passive adapter. You could have the choice for connecting one other show to the USB Kind-C port within the swappable bay, permitting this technique to deal with 4 displays directly. The truth is, it could possibly truly deal with 4 60Hz 4K displays directly, and it actually can—we examined it.

Moreover that, you get piles of USB connectivity, analog audio, and a devoted port for an exterior, high-gain Wi-Fi antenna. We did not have any Wi-Fi connectivity points with out plugging in an antenna, however doing so would offer you significantly improved vary and throughput. In case you want legacy connectivity like VGA or RS-232, these are each out there as choices within the swappable bay too, though you may have to surrender the rear Kind-C port.

HP provides a number of completely different working programs on the t660, which might be provisioned on the time of buy. We’ll discuss that only a bit extra within the ‘Software program’ portion beneath. First, let’s take a look on the system iteself.

HP Elite t660 Skinny Shopper Development And Construct High quality

The Elite t660 is available in comparatively nondescript packaging that features the system, its energy adapter, a stand, a VESA mount bracket, and a fundamental keyboard and mouse: the “Wired Desktop 125” package deal, consists of the 320M Mouse and 320K Keyboard. The chassis is metal, however the exterior case is a plastic composite materials. The fabric used for the exterior case would not really feel notably strong, however because of the fanless cooling resolution and metal body, the general system does really feel fairly weighty and stable.

In case you’re VESA mounting the t660, or when you intend to make use of the included base in horizontal mode, you may must pop a small plastic plate off of the underside of the machine. For VESA mounting, you may set up an included bracket, however the base merely screws into two devoted holes within the steel sizzling plate that cools the CPU. If you wish to set it as much as run vertically like within the high picture, you simply attache those self same thumbscrews into the underside of the unit.

Click on these pictures for a bigger view.

HP’s skinny shopper is straightforward to get into for repairs and upgrades. You pop a skinny plastic fascia off the rear of the system after which push on a hidden tab to launch the highest of the chassis. That provides you entry to the SSD, Wi-Fi card, swappable bay, and the RAM, which is beneath the EMI defend within the heart of our photograph there. That mainly sums up the replaceable elements, so there’s no need to totally disassemble the unit.

Across the again of the system you may see the vaunted connectivity. It actually is sort of a bit for what HP calls a skinny shopper. Particularly, exposing all 4 show pipes on the Intel SoC is sort of spectacular, and a key promoting level for these machines; when you have the Kind-C with DisplayPort possibility as our machine does, you may even run a 5K show off of that port. The RJ-45 jack provides Gigabit Ethernet connectivity which is totally acceptable, though it could have been good to see 2.5-Gigabit right here.

HP Elite t660 Skinny Shopper Software program & Benchmarks

The boot display screen that greets you at each POST.

HP carries ahead its suite of safety and administration applied sciences for the Elite t660. You get the total Wolf Safety package deal, which implies you get HP Certain Begin boot safety, HP Certain Admin distant administration, HP Safe Erase, HP Certain Sense AI-powered heuristic file scanning, and HP Certain Get well to revive machines to a default state while not having native entry.

Our system got here provisioned with Home windows 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC version, and it featured each Wolf Safety in addition to HP’s PC Converter software program that features HP System Supervisor, HP Port Supervisor, HP Write Supervisor, and HP’s Straightforward Shell, all of which can probably be acquainted to any IT division that has deployed HP skinny purchasers earlier than. In case you want, you may as an alternative skip the Home windows license for HP’s personal ThinPro OS, the favored IGEL OS, or just get it with no OS from the manufacturing unit, primed and prepared so that you can slap down your personal OS picture.

We did not run an entire bunch of benchmarks on the Elite t660 as a result of it is a skinny shopper and the efficiency of the native {hardware} will not be notably related. Nonetheless, we did not have a VDI prepared to make use of for testing, so we have been merely utilizing it as a Home windows shopper. Utilizing the system this fashion is definitely fairly snappy and the expertise is sort of good; shopping in Microsoft Edge and dealing in Google Docs goes very easily. We needed to current a few information factors as an instance that reality, nevertheless.

First up we have now Browserbench Speedometer 3.0, and we have in contrast the Elite t660 towards client mini-PCs sporting a few current Ryzen processors. The Elite t660’s speedy Golden Cove P-core helps it energy by means of difficult duties whereas the Gracemont E-cores deal with background duties. Make no mistake; a rating of 26.5 is not aggressive with the newest desktop or laptop computer CPUs, but it surely is not unhealthy in any respect for a 15W skinny shopper processor.

We additionally needed to current this fast take a look at of a Zoom name on the HP Elite t660. Do not thoughts the excessive CPU utilization simply earlier than the screenshot; that was from putting in the app itself. Utilizing typical distant work functions on the Elite t660 is completely easy and flawless. Whereas some duties on the machine (like file compression) can drag on a bit, typical shopper duties like synchronous and asynchronous office collaboration are completely performant on the Elite t660, which is not one thing lets say about each “skinny shopper” we have ever laid fingers on.

HP Elite t660 Skinny Shopper: Our Ideas

HP introduced these machines again in January and we have had this technique on the take a look at bench for fairly some time. The truth is, we have now been utilizing it to compose information tales most days. We have been holding out for HP to ship pricing data to us earlier than we made our last judgment, however these selections have not been made simply but, so for now, we have now to go off of our opinion of the machine itself.

The HP Elite t660 is so highly effective (comparatively talking) and have wealthy, you would actually deploy these items as stand-alone workplace PCs for customers that primarily work in a browser, Zoom, and Workplace functions. They’ll drive 4 high-resolution shows with no drawback, and you’ll stuff in as much as 64GB of RAM in addition to the largest M.2 SSD you will discover. The light-weight CPU is basically the one factor separating this from a NUC-like mini-PC, however the U300E is greater than quick sufficient to maintain Home windows 11 snappy and responsive.

We’re reluctant to be too effusive with our reward with out official pricing data, however frankly, it must be in-line with earlier choices from HP, which is to say the Elite t660 must be competitively priced. If your organization is an HP store, and also you’re about to refresh your skinny purchasers, the Elite t660 is HP’s newest and best and we’re assured that you simply will not be disenchanted. These are succesful little machines that actually stretch the boundaries of what “skinny shopper” actually means.