I know more about Dell than HP but they likely do make their own motherboards. If memory serves, they even at one point had a different PSU pinout that would fry the mobo if you tried to use a standard power supply. They could easily program their PCIE chipset to reject GPUs that aren’t sold with the computer, for example, under the guise of “keeping the warranty valid” in case of “third party hardware”
I know more about Dell than HP but they likely do make their own motherboards. If memory serves, they even at one point had a different PSU pinout that would fry the mobo if you tried to use a standard power supply. They could easily program their PCIE chipset to reject GPUs that aren’t sold with the computer, for example, under the guise of “keeping the warranty valid” in case of “third party hardware”