HP Elite t660 Evaluate: Redefining The Skinny Shopper PCCategory

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

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

Trendy Skinny Purchasers And Multimedia Redirection

Traditionally, skinny shoppers relied closely on distant servers to deal with most processing, with the native {hardware} doing little greater than displaying the outcomes. Nevertheless, trendy digital desktop infrastructures (VDIs) have turn out to be more and more reliant on multimedia redirection to enhance efficiency and scale 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 every part remotely.

This shift is pushed by the altering nature of labor itself. Video conferencing, display sharing, and wealthy net purposes at the moment are 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 trendy skinny shoppers just like the HP Elite t660, VDI environments can obtain smoother video playback, higher audio synchronization, and a greater total 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

A lot of the element listing above will look fairly acquainted to PC {hardware} fanatics: 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, primarily based 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 mounted show connections, that are Twin-Mode DisplayPort, which means they will operate as both DisplayPort or DVI/HDMI connectors with solely a passive adapter. You’ve gotten the choice for connecting one other show to the USB Kind-C port within the swappable bay, permitting this method to deal with 4 displays directly. In reality, it may truly deal with 4 60Hz 4K displays directly, and it actually can—we examined it.

In addition to 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 provide you with significantly improved vary and throughput. In the event you want legacy connectivity like VGA or RS-232, these are each obtainable as choices within the swappable bay too, though you will have to surrender the rear Kind-C port.

HP presents a number of completely different working techniques on the t660, which shall be provisioned on the time of buy. We’ll speak about 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 Building 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 primary keyboard and mouse: the “Wired Desktop 125” bundle, contains 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 does 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 the event you’re VESA mounting the t660, or when you intend to make use of the included base in horizontal mode, you will should pop a small plastic plate off of the underside of the machine. For VESA mounting, you will 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 prime picture, you simply attache those self same thumbscrews into the underside of the unit.

Click on these photos 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 offers you entry to the SSD, Wi-Fi card, swappable bay, and the RAM, which is underneath the EMI protect within the heart of our photograph there. That principally sums up the replaceable elements, so there’s no use to completely disassemble the unit.

Across the again of the system you possibly can see the vaunted connectivity. It actually is kind of a bit for what HP calls a skinny shopper. Specifically, exposing all 4 show pipes on the Intel SoC is kind of spectacular, and a key promoting level for these machines; when you’ve got the Kind-C with DisplayPort possibility as our machine does, you possibly can even run a 5K show off of that port. The RJ-45 jack presents 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 that greets you at each POST.

HP carries ahead its suite of safety and administration applied sciences for the Elite t660. You get the complete Wolf Safety bundle, which suggests 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 Recuperate 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 Machine Supervisor, HP Port Supervisor, HP Write Supervisor, and HP’s Straightforward Shell, all of which is able to doubtless be acquainted to any IT division that has deployed HP skinny shoppers earlier than. In the event you desire, you possibly can 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 facility, 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} is just not 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 manner is definitely fairly snappy and the expertise is kind of good; shopping in Microsoft Edge and dealing in Google Docs goes very easily. We wished to current a few knowledge factors for instance that truth, nevertheless.

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

We additionally wished 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 purposes on the Elite t660 is completely clean 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 let’s imagine about each “skinny shopper” we have ever laid arms on.

HP Elite t660 Skinny Shopper: Our Ideas

HP introduced these machines again in January and we have had this method on the take a look at bench for fairly some time. In reality, 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 ultimate judgment, however these choices 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, tou may actually deploy these models as stand-alone workplace PCs for customers that primarily work in a browser, Zoom, and Workplace purposes. They’ll drive 4 high-resolution shows with no downside, and you may stuff in as much as 64GB of RAM in addition to the largest M.2 SSD yow will discover. The light-weight CPU is de facto 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 ought to be in-line with earlier choices from HP, which is to say the Elite t660 ought to be competitively priced. If your organization is an HP store, and also you’re about to refresh your suppose shoppers, the Elite t660 is HP’s newest and best and we’re assured that you just will not be disillusioned. These are succesful little machines that actually stretch the bounds of what “skinny shopper” actually means.