I was using the HP EliteDesk 800 G2 65W for testing. The only issue was the memory, which has just two expansion slots. I upgraded from 8GB to 16GB, but the SSD had limited space for upgrades and no NVMe slots.
I need a modern computer with WiFi, Bluetooth, USB-C, two HDMI or Display ports, two NVMe drives, enough memory for Virtual Machines, and low power consumption.
Which brings me to the next question, what to buy. After a couple of weeks of research I decided to pick the
- AMD Ryzen 7 8700G
- Gigabyte B650M D3HP AX
- Corsair VENGEANCE DDR5 (4 x 32GB) DDR5 5200MHz
- MSI SPATIUM M470 PRO 2TB M.2 SSD
- WD Black SN770 1TB M.2 SSD
- Cooler Master Elite V4 400W PSU
- Cooler Master Hyper 411 Nano
- Cooler Master MasterBox Q300L
- Arctic Case Fan Hub
- Arctic P12 Silent x 4
- Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut 1g
After assembling everything, it wouldn’t start. I had to upgrade the BIOS to version F36b, which took a while during the first boot. I tried several operating systems, including CachyOS, Omachy, Redhat, and Ubuntu, but decided to stick with Ubuntu because all the drivers worked immediately, including Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. I don’t like dealing with drivers for Linux, so I’m happy that Ubuntu handled everything automatically.
CachyOS was nice, but there were issues with GNOME and VirtualBox. I didn’t want to troubleshoot the host operating system, so I chose Ubuntu instead.