Libreboot: HP Elite 8200 SFF support added (plus more desktops coming soon) (opens in new tab)

While I ran a Beowulf Hyper-V cluster on these (in production) I wouldn't call them 'quite' powerful for today's needs.

I had a stint with PhotoPrism recently and it was faster to upload gigabytes of photos to my Xeon E5-26xx server and run PhotoPrism there (including transfer time) than wait for it to complete the face recognition on my desktop with the Ivy Bridge CPU.

But for a bare packet pusher ie file server, PiHole and the like I would agree it would be more than just fine.

I have an 8300 USDT too, but I don't think it's supported in Coreboot yet. Will be looking onto that too hopefully sometime.

I've got a bunch of these around, either multi-booting diskless (Devuan/Debian/Windows), more than enough for browsing, video calls and light development. Spec is E8400's at 3GHz/4Gb RAM, 1G ethernet, display port and decent sound ('lspci' shows wall-to-wall Intel parts). In USFF ('USDT') format they're great little systems for the price (on ebay they go for less than the cost of the Windows licence they come with, and if they're from a pro-recycler the licence often isn't even locked to the hardware).

Edit: Oh, and being HP they are pretty much clip together, no screwdrivers needed.

Please note, that to boot Windows you require a vBIOS to be present, something that is off by default in libreboot, as it's a proprietary blob. It will only boot into safe mode. But you can configure it in the coreboot config menu, though that would go against the libre principle. But the ultimate principle is consumer choise of course.

Why would someone run Microsoft Windows on top of Libreboot?

Two 3.5" and one 5.25". All nice and toolless.