Probably because they charge WAY too much for those rack mount consoles. New or used they tend to cost as much as another server. Buying a new one doesn't make much sense anyways when all purpose built servers and many workstations post 2013 come with one kind of remote management or another. Unless you're managing a rack of ex-consumer desktops it just makes more sense to ditch the console entirely rather than upgrade it.
I purchased my personal HP EliteBook 745 G6 custom laptop with the FreeDOS option too. Because HP.com charges 209 bucks for Windows 10 Pro, but Micro Center only charges 149 bucks (and I can get a discount if I purchase it with an SSD - which I did).
I was at an educational institution getting some certifications when they were upgrading/replacing some computers, and they chose those HP minis, and got a great deal on some higher end i7s, but there was a reason they were a deal, the thermal solution does not fully support high end CPUs, so they thermal throttle a lot, and worse some of them just straight up died and had to be sent back, heard that it was a common problem for the models with high end CPU.
Stumbled across this video while searching for some elitedesk 800 g1 reviews. Found one at local ebay(sahibinden) and will probably go for a cheap edge server on my istanbul colo(colo being my family home LOL). It is really impressive how much your production and this channel has improved over the years, from camera angles to audio to how video is laid out, this channel has really evolved into an A-tier tech review channel in a really good way. Will watch the new firewalls video soon too, stuff like that inspires me to experiment more, and thank you for that.
Looking forward to the next instalments - I use an EliteDesk 800 G1 mini (i5) as a web browsing desktop, a real cheapy plastic Celeron 2957U one as a firewall (Sophos UTM9, unfortunately I can't get XG to boot) and a G2 i7 I'm about to pimp up to 32GB and add an nvme drive to run as a single node Nutanix cluster to replace a huge old Z-series desktop!
Warning on the Intel HP minis, the newer BIOS for at least the 800 G and G2 will cause the POST times to become extremely long. From cold, those units can take over several minutes just to get to the initial HP logo of POST, many take over 5 minutes just to start loading the OS. On only a few, disabling all security features helped slightly. I have not found a fix for this issue and downgrading the BIOS is blocked. I have 40+ of these, all that have been updated have had this problem.
Very interesting and good to know. Sounds you are referring to the bios update on the Intel machines? Any ideas on bios updates on AMD machines? I’d like to update bios on mine and see if I can upgrade this AM4 to a Ryzen APU.
If you need a bit more power, I'd recommend the HP Compaq 8300 Elite SFF w/ i5-3470 4C4T 6MB which can be had for anywhere between 70 to 150 USD. It doesn't have an M.2 slot but it comes with 4 SATA3 ports and enough PCIe slots to make it OK. It's also got a decent Intel NIC, 4 USB3 ports and will take up to 32GB DDR3. I've so far bought two and the experience has been great. They take to Linux as well as BSD and run stable, cool and quiet. The only thing stopping me from setting up a cluster is the fact that an i5-3470 just isn't enough for me and upgrading to a more powerfull LGA1155 CPU doesn't make sense financially.
i am watching this video on the exact same machine, though the one i got is the AMD A10 series 4 core. mine came with extra display port to use two displays. mine does get a lil warm watching videos at 720p, it really does not like to multi task unit grinds when alt tabbing or clicking off window to another screen. i need to figure out how to park the cores as this is an A10 cpu. also the 2 front usb ports cannot handle more then 2 milli amps! i tried to run an external hard drive as the unit sent an alert of usb overloaded and crashed the unit. this machine cannot power heavy usb devices at all, so despite being usb 3.0 it does not have the power to drive the devices. another thing with these machines, since i get em refurbished i had to pull the heatsink off and re apply thermal compound, since not many places do that.
If you don't have to have the smallest, the desktop version of this machine is under $100. I got mine with an A10 processor, which should do a bit better than the a6. It looks like it can take a micro atx board, so I was thinking of a ryzen 4600g for an upgrade.
Definitely going to pick up a couple of these, much better performance than the RPI4. They're a bit more expensive in the UK so I'll be waiting to see you you make of the Lenovo and Dell before I make my choice.
The different SSD is because the original buyer destroys their drives so the leasing company selling them in large lots never includes a drive. The refurbisher that is putting them into retail just grabs scrap drives from pallets of recycled as-is scrap value only recycling lots. So they have totally random junk level SSD drives. I usually buy the configuration with regular hard drive as it's slightly cheaper and buy a new SSD on my own and throw away the junk drives the refurbishing company included. Also great point on the wifi is almost always a cheap dongle just to check off the boxes on the amazon listing for wifi.
@@ServeTheHomeVideo The oem has identical issues before selling their machines. Most leased machines on fair market value leasing go to medical and financial firms who have to destroy the drives. So they are replacing drives on returned machines and using whatever spares they can find. Just in their case they likely pick parts from old warranty refurb stock. But its still not enough consistent supplies to always have matching drives.
Verry cool, I think when you go to software and show what's possible, I would go with Proxmox. For me it's verry intersting, becaus I thought about building a NUC cluster with new gen 8 or gen10 NUCs and your solution is waaaaay more costeffective.
I can explain you WHY FreeDOS. In some countries we have laws that force the seller of computers to include a Operating System with any assembled computer. The vendor doesn't wants to include the Windows licence and also doesn't wants to "fight" installing a Linux that almost no user is going to use, so they installs FreeDOS to say that it has a operating system and that way they can sell it.
Patrick - Could you comment more on your experience with firmware updates? I have almost this same AM4 machine and wanted to update the bios and get a Ryzen APU into there. Thanks for this serious. It’s very interesting!
Part of this series is going to be covering the individual boxes, as you can see here. The other part of this series will be all of the how-tos and probably some tips and tricks as well. It is coming, but we are going to put some of the how-tos between the TMM node feature pieces as we go through the series. Just a lot to cover.
What I would like to see is an am4 mob that's server grade that you install into a server case and then you can use ecc ram and AMD Ryzan, this would be interesting to me as I love IPMI. Some times we need fast vCores for our work loads. I currently use a couple of the 2690v2 in a supermicro server, and they are great but Im thinking of moving to the 3950 or something similar as I suspect the 3950 will put proforma both my 2690v2s
We have an ASRock Rack X570D4I-2T review coming for the STH main site. I am not sure if we will do a video for it but it will be up there in the next few weeks.
I've got 3 of the Elite Desk Mini PCs. 2 of which are i5 Intel. The 3rd is an AMD A10. The AMD Model was returned because only 1 RAM slot worked. The replacement was identical. same problem... I wanted to put in 16GB DDR4. so instead of 2x8GB, I ended up putting in 1x16GB in first slot. I got the amount I wanted, but why isn't the second slot ever working on this thing? no BIOS setting available to turn on or off. nothing disabled for hardware. no hardware issues detected. strange. It's the HP EliteDesk 705 G3 Desktop Mini PC - any ideas? What do I use this one for? It's great as a streaming device for my TV when using it with a wireless touch keyboard (Logitech)- it's fantastic for fast booting. very responsive. AMD A10 is a great quad core 3.5GHz apu with multicore Radeon graphics. Running Windows 11 Pro on it also, it's great. Don't forget the RAM is shared for video. so more RAM is good. it has maybe 512MB video RAM only dedicated. so extra RAM is a good idea. FYI the A10 is 3.5GHz and it is fast. dunno what you are talking about. responsive as hell. I also have a 4.1 Ryzen7 Octa core 2700 tower, so I understand the power and speed difference. but the A10 Quad is quite good actually. It won't make a great gaming machine, but streaming and regular computing it's fantastic.
I'd love to hear your thoughts about the Raspberry Pi 8GB. Naturally it won't be compatible with all the common hypervisors we use for homelabs, but the value is pretty hard to knock, and for docker/kubernetes I'm guessing you'll get much better performance per dollar!
I discussed this a bit in our Project TinyMiniMicro introduction video. These nodes were purchased because if you are RAM limited, then these are a similar cost, if not less expensive, than 2x Canakit RPi 4 8GB starter kits were to get 16GB of RAM but the rest of the system was better (e.g. 256GB SATA SSD v. 2x 32GB SD cards for storage.) That insight directly led to the project's expansion.
I‘m using an Lenovo m720q tiny with an i5-8600t as a little plex server which works perfectly! as this is so tiny I managed to hide it in a little ikea shelf where my router sits in :) plan on doing a little offside nas with another one over at my parents house, as this is so tiny and barely draws power they won’t mind it.
The HP EliteDesk 800 G3 mini's are great little systems. Up to 32GB RAM plus SATA & NVMe disk support. One issue I had was with the NVMe disk overheating - as the chassis is very small and no active cooling on the SSDs. I added a small heatsink to the NVMe and removed the little metal cover under the SATA SSD to improve cooling. Problem solved! 🙂
I think we have EliteDesk 800 G2, G3, and G4 systems already tested. Stay tuned for future installments. Great feedback on the NVMe SSDs. Generally, these use low-performance and lower power NVMe SSDs from the factory.
@@ServeTheHomeVideo problem with nvme ssds most of them don't state if they are cool running (just like to show big numbers) even my Toshiba dell branded xg3 1tb nvme thermal throttles if its not actively cooled need a heatsink for it but I need a single sided one because there is a stupid chip under the nvme slot on the Asus prime pro x370 motherboard witch prevents me from using a nvme heatsink that has a under plate for the back side of the nvme ssd (this hp system you have on this video has no chips under it so it would support a heatsink even if its just a slab of metal on top of the nvme ssd)
Windows 10 Pro minimum (as you can use gpedit to control Windows update, I set it to 20 days delay on normal Updates and 150 on feature upgrades so everyone els gets burned first before the fixed updates get to my customers systems) , these systems will Likey have a Windows 8 Pro logo (with windows 8 Pro key in uefi bios) but somehow loaded 10 home (it have to be in legacy mode) Just go into bios enable UEFI and start the windows 10 USB install (at language screen, shift+f10, disk part, list disk, select disk 0{assuming disk 0 is system disk} , clean, to erase the disk) install windows 10 Pro without a key, it won't actually let you pick what version if your using UEFI with Windows 8 Pro key in the bios so it automatically picks windows 10 Pro on its own and self activate soon as it sees the Internet (if it only has a Windows 8 flag on the unit it will be home version, but these are business units not seen any HP elite version that came with the home version they always came with pro Windows 7 (a lable key) or Windows 8 Pro (UEFI bios witch will work fine on Windows 10 Pro automatically)
@@SimmanGodz depends if it came with windows 8 home or 8 Pro built on (normally these business systems are windows 7 Pro/business or win8 Pro, depending on age) if its Windows 7 pro/business/ultimate just can use the key on the system to activate Windows 10 Pro if its Windows8 Pro logo on the box the only pre request is make sure bios is in UEFI boot (setting bios to default should be enough as Windows8 systems UEFI is a requirement for certification by default UEFI+secure boot) then just clear the disk using diskpart (as it has to be GPT type) and install clean copy of Windows 10 it won't ask for key
just install freepbx on them and sell em , sounds more then capable for any SMB, we can get 10 concurrent calls out of a pi 3b+ these ought get closer to over over 100 concurrent
10:10 dont many of these enterprise licencing schemes require the hardware come with some version of windows(any licenced version from XP home to 10 ultra home premium), and lets you upgrade to pro for workstations, enterprise, or education?
I think the reason FreeDOS is a thing, because of some Microsoft shenanigans where systems sold without an OS required a license payment to Microsoft. I don't know if that's still a thing, but I believe it was a thing in the past.
Excellent video. I see a BIOS came out in November, so I think maybe some level of Zen CPU support? It would be a great upgrade over Bulldozer. Right now I have a 805 G6 on order and might get one of these 705 G3 ones and upgrade it.
For those that have these type machines, what prices are you paying (and for what specs)? I'm in the UK and some of the prices look outrageous on eBay!
Can you talk about heat? Like could I cram one up in a box on the wall for a home automation controller? How much airflow would it need? I'm thinking better than a pi for running home assistant type application
You could mount on a wall, under a desk, behind a monitor or elsewhere. So long as the room is a normal temperature. Also I would not suggest mounting it IN a wall since they do need airflow
That is a big part of this series. If we had only bought one unit, we may never have experienced this and been able to share it. We have a bunch of others like this that we are going to cover.
Will there be ryzen embedded systems included in a future roundup for tiny mini micro? i saw they are available on newegg for purchase. there is an asrock model for $300 US
We may expand to that. We have a few with chips like the Ryzen 3 Pro 2200GE, Ryzen 5 Pro 2400GE, Ryzen 5 Pro 3400GE. These are still socketed parts but they benefit from having the AMD DASH. For around the same $300 price point, we have gotten some of these TinyMiniMicro systems configured with SSD, RAM, and a Windows 10 Pro license. They sometimes even have on-site service attached.
Ha, buying dual core machines for servers? I did get an AsRock Deskmini with an Intel 6th gen quad cpu, installed esxi and running 2 W10, 1 W8.1 and 3 Linux VMs and simply love it.
Depends on your use-case. I have two machines in production with 32 GB of memory each, and 2 cores is far more CPU than they each need, but the memory is required for the application.
@@ServeTheHomeVideo It would still be nice to compare the value to the Deskmini machines. As the new Ryzen cpu's offer so much value for money. And the Deskmini are so cheap and power efficient as well.
Are you going to look into using iscsi or a remote storage system using each of them as nodes for high availability? You have plenty of USB 3 ports, could you use those with USB to ethernet to allow higher throughput than just the one network port.
Are you going to run kubernetes on the cluster? Would be interesting to see how you would set up a cicd pipeline with a development and a production environment!
How do you make it stealth noisewise? I maybe add a desk fan to mine ;) Stuff you run into with consumer gear: My 2 node mini-itx system uses a BioStar a68n- 2100 motherboard. I use a fanless Pico PSUs with 12 V 200 Watt Power bricks. Total system is fanless at the moment. I use a tiny Goodisory a01 case. Storage are 2 120GB SSDs from old systems. Memory is 8GB for each node also from an old system. Since the ram is doubly sided it cannot run at full 1600Mhz. Currently have one node complete. Trying to source the case for the second one for a reasonable price. Ran into not enough power issues with a Pico PSU that I got cheap with the case. Brick was not powerful enough. System has a PCIE slot. So I can add an NVME adapter.
Have you found anything that would let you power multiple systems from a single power supply? Like a multi-output, high power 19V adapter with multiple tips?
Hey I know this comment is 2 years old but I just wanted to point out that PoE splitters do exist. You can get one that has a barrel jack to plug into the computer.
One possible use case that I'd be very interested in for one of these boxes is as a pfSense box. Ideally this means 2 NICs, but I wonder how many of these micro machines provide that (either onboard or with some expansion?). It'd be nice to get a very compact and
Would it be possible to use a cluster in this fashion to host a virtual environment? For example, can I cluster 4 of these machines together and run a hypervisor to create VMs using all the provided hardware?
You can cluster them and run VMs on each. If you have 4x 16GB nodes you cannot run a single 64GB machine across all of them though. Check out the Of BBQ and Virtualization video for more on why (linked in description or see our July 2020 videos)
I don't know. That doesn't sound bad at all for some uses. I rocked multiple years NUC with 2820 celeron for years 24/7 with openmediavault. This by specs has much more cache and is apparently like 4x more performance and that NUC handled home samba pretty damn well with few additional services. Would actually still use it but ended up putting it on raspberry 4 as version was already horribly dated. It absolutely sips power, like something like max 11W from wall, which is insanely good for old Intel machine that costed something like 110euros new (without memory, drives etc. obviously). Now I'm on the verge of getting new minicomputer and putting everything on Proxmox. But don't know. Maybe I should actually buy one of the latest computers instead of the like 6th gen intels that already cost quite a bit here and electricity is very expensive. Any thoughts?
We just looked at the new HP's: - Elite Mini 800 G9 - ua-cam.com/video/bPs5XGBoXr0/v-deo.html - Elite Mini 600 G9 - ua-cam.com/video/YP99uBwBXeQ/v-deo.html Since power in Europe is so expensive now, we added more to our power testing that we show in newer videos. Also - take a look at the N305 coverage we are going to have soon on STH.
@@ServeTheHomeVideo Thanks. Alder Lake is getting even more appealing. I knew it was good, but not that good. Seriously impressive performance for so little power usage. Heck it could run everything I can think of and have headroom for...ages. Prices are still quite steep, but I'm getting the feel. Since I have "workable" hardware for now I think I'll wait for these to come up more in markets. P&E core setup just begins to feel worth the wait and higher investment. Thanks for the links 👍
if you aren't using these anymore, are they by chance for sale?? Also I was thinking about turning this into a torrent box for Linux Isos would that be an ok use?
Can you do a video showing how to get linux installed on here? I've gone over every setting so far but I think I'm still missing something when I boot form USB with my 705 g3
Protip: would old mac minis or Mini Servers be way more potent for small home labs or clusters. They are not that expensive. Features are better (Tunderbolt, USB, Firewire, RAM Upgrades etc ...) the Hardware in the oder models is great and long lasting. Some of the are even in the vMWare HCL or they do run esxi perfectly fine ?
We looked at the Mac Minis as well. One can get USB 3 (and Type-C) on these TMM nodes. The 705 G3 is one of the few DDR4-based nodes without Type-C. We also covered you can get 16-32GB inexpensively in the two SODIMM slots. The big deciding factor is simply cost. As an example, a used (via ebay) Mac Mini 2018 edition configuration we were looking at sells for around $650. We got a Dell Optiplex 3070 directly from Dell with a newer 9th gen Core i3 + Windows 10 Pro and onsite service (3 years) for $330. At $500 we have core i7 units with NVIDIA GPUs and twice the RAM/ SSD space.
Quick question! I am looking for a small workstation pc under 200, I don't do gaming and I don't like big rigs lol don't got that space haha. I do basic photo editing and basic paperwork. Anyone have great recommendation?
IMO the Windows Home license isn't worth it from the standpoint of it becoming a web browsing machine since Linux can do that just as well. In fact, a low resource usage Linux distro might even be preferable for speed later in this machine's life. Win 10 pro is probably useful for someone into active directory though.
If you got one of these with the SATA SSD and Wi-Fi card, you could use one of these (www.amazon.com/Crest-Interface-Gigabit-Ethernet-Modules/dp/B07DTK7ZZJ), with the extension cable going to the extra display output port to make a fantastic pfSense box.
My cousin worked for a private school, and when they got rid of their old iMacs, they drilled a hole through the screen and hard drive... almost made me cry.
I am confused. Why do you care about having Windows when converting your node to web browsing? Pretty much every Linux distro has a browser anyway. And if you only care about web browsing, wouldn't something like Chromium OS make even more sense?
I wouldn't buy these any way, minimum I buy is i5 4570 or 4590 and 8gb of ram for under £70-100, or under £100-130 if includes a 250gb SSD (the gpu is fully supported by Windows 10 {shows in taskmanager} and they boot to desktop in less then 15 seconds Mostly specific to lenovo systems they boot so fast to desktop you need to set a windows login password so it slows the boot to desktop down as without password it hits the desktop before the network has had a chance to startup (witch results in disconnected network drives and programs complaining) I never buy an AMD Type A CPU as they are just single or dual core cpus (4 core is 2 core, 2 core is 1 core if its a type A cpu) even if they was under £50 with ssd (they are just to slow) and they are so slow even at single threaded tasks with are more important for what these machines are used for typically (you can get 4th gen i5-i3 for under £80 typically that blow these away)
Part of this series is learning and trying bits out so that others do not have to. There are some places where these may be the only options available on the second hand market. Trying to get a lot of different systems covered with this.
Unsure if my last post got moderated if I didn't submit one of the two, the main problem I have had with them is that they get hung up on things like windows update and perform more like a core2duo but slower (I have ignored amd CPUs for long time, but I do have a ryzen 1800x and now 3800x cpu and that was there first real cpu in 8 years) I have a core2duo (1.8ghz) that runs remarkably OK with windows 10 on it (with ssd) and it feels like it runs better then amd bulldozer and k8 cpus (ran even better once I got a core2quad to work in this donkey old asrock motherboard that was inside the system with a £10 psu from The looks of it) only thing amd has going for them on the pre ryzen cpus was the gpu (as long as it wasn't a nvidia one)
Ebay (4570,4590) 8gb Under £100 max (total, as some charge £20 for postage) and make sure it's searching description in the search as a lot of sellers don't put the model type in the title (just i5 witch can be anything) And set it to search by lowest price (I don't typically bother with bidding listings as people are stupid and bid war past £100 and you could of just bought one for £80-100 right away, I seen some system with ssds pushed pass £180 witch is bonkers when max you should be paying is £120) I don't recommend using i5 as part of the search as it can be a first gen i5 as to why I don't search for i5 as it brings up any thing from 3rd gen to loads of expensive first gen i5s witch are quite slow, I avoid 3rd gen i5 because the gpu isn't fully supported by Windows 10 the 4th gen and higher is (it shows in task manager) but speed wise the i5 3rd gen run as good as 4th gen
that VGA port is only there cuz one senior manger insists on not changing their ancient VGA monitor
Its more like, "why should we change these perfectly working 15yo LCD monitors!"
Probably because they charge WAY too much for those rack mount consoles. New or used they tend to cost as much as another server.
Buying a new one doesn't make much sense anyways when all purpose built servers and many workstations post 2013 come with one kind of remote management or another. Unless you're managing a rack of ex-consumer desktops it just makes more sense to ditch the console entirely rather than upgrade it.
I purchased my personal HP EliteBook 745 G6 custom laptop with the FreeDOS option too. Because HP.com charges 209 bucks for Windows 10 Pro, but Micro Center only charges 149 bucks (and I can get a discount if I purchase it with an SSD - which I did).
I want to see more about the home about the stealth home lab you talked about in the first episode
wating for 4700ge based mini PCs from HP, Lenovo, and Dell
Great stuff. Good to hear about the stuff that was too low-end and should be avoided. Looking forward to more in the series.
I was at an educational institution getting some certifications when they were upgrading/replacing some computers, and they chose those HP minis, and got a great deal on some higher end i7s, but there was a reason they were a deal, the thermal solution does not fully support high end CPUs, so they thermal throttle a lot, and worse some of them just straight up died and had to be sent back, heard that it was a common problem for the models with high end CPU.
Stumbled across this video while searching for some elitedesk 800 g1 reviews. Found one at local ebay(sahibinden) and will probably go for a cheap edge server on my istanbul colo(colo being my family home LOL). It is really impressive how much your production and this channel has improved over the years, from camera angles to audio to how video is laid out, this channel has really evolved into an A-tier tech review channel in a really good way. Will watch the new firewalls video soon too, stuff like that inspires me to experiment more, and thank you for that.
Looking forward to the next instalments - I use an EliteDesk 800 G1 mini (i5) as a web browsing desktop, a real cheapy plastic Celeron 2957U one as a firewall (Sophos UTM9, unfortunately I can't get XG to boot) and a G2 i7 I'm about to pimp up to 32GB and add an nvme drive to run as a single node Nutanix cluster to replace a huge old Z-series desktop!
I’m hoping to learn enough to setup a computer lab at school - thank you for sharing!
Man, thank you ! Looking for this kind of videos. Yeah, put more cluster computing, RaspBerries, Nucs, SBC´s, ET Cetera. Salutations, stay safe.
Warning on the Intel HP minis, the newer BIOS for at least the 800 G and G2 will cause the POST times to become extremely long. From cold, those units can take over several minutes just to get to the initial HP logo of POST, many take over 5 minutes just to start loading the OS. On only a few, disabling all security features helped slightly. I have not found a fix for this issue and downgrading the BIOS is blocked.
I have 40+ of these, all that have been updated have had this problem.
Very interesting and good to know.
Sounds you are referring to the bios update on the Intel machines? Any ideas on bios updates on AMD machines? I’d like to update bios on mine and see if I can upgrade this AM4 to a Ryzen APU.
If you need a bit more power, I'd recommend the HP Compaq 8300 Elite SFF w/ i5-3470 4C4T 6MB which can be had for anywhere between 70 to 150 USD. It doesn't have an M.2 slot but it comes with 4 SATA3 ports and enough PCIe slots to make it OK. It's also got a decent Intel NIC, 4 USB3 ports and will take up to 32GB DDR3. I've so far bought two and the experience has been great. They take to Linux as well as BSD and run stable, cool and quiet. The only thing stopping me from setting up a cluster is the fact that an i5-3470 just isn't enough for me and upgrading to a more powerfull LGA1155 CPU doesn't make sense financially.
i am watching this video on the exact same machine, though the one i got is the AMD A10 series 4 core. mine came with extra display port to use two displays. mine does get a lil warm watching videos at 720p, it really does not like to multi task unit grinds when alt tabbing or clicking off window to another screen. i need to figure out how to park the cores as this is an A10 cpu.
also the 2 front usb ports cannot handle more then 2 milli amps! i tried to run an external hard drive as the unit sent an alert of usb overloaded and crashed the unit. this machine cannot power heavy usb devices at all, so despite being usb 3.0 it does not have the power to drive the devices.
another thing with these machines, since i get em refurbished i had to pull the heatsink off and re apply thermal compound, since not many places do that.
If you don't have to have the smallest, the desktop version of this machine is under $100. I got mine with an A10 processor, which should do a bit better than the a6. It looks like it can take a micro atx board, so I was thinking of a ryzen 4600g for an upgrade.
Definitely going to pick up a couple of these, much better performance than the RPI4. They're a bit more expensive in the UK so I'll be waiting to see you you make of the Lenovo and Dell before I make my choice.
The different SSD is because the original buyer destroys their drives so the leasing company selling them in large lots never includes a drive. The refurbisher that is putting them into retail just grabs scrap drives from pallets of recycled as-is scrap value only recycling lots. So they have totally random junk level SSD drives. I usually buy the configuration with regular hard drive as it's slightly cheaper and buy a new SSD on my own and throw away the junk drives the refurbishing company included.
Also great point on the wifi is almost always a cheap dongle just to check off the boxes on the amazon listing for wifi.
That is true on the recycled ones but we have purchased a few direct from manufacturers as well (e.g.at Dell.com)
@@ServeTheHomeVideo The oem has identical issues before selling their machines. Most leased machines on fair market value leasing go to medical and financial firms who have to destroy the drives. So they are replacing drives on returned machines and using whatever spares they can find. Just in their case they likely pick parts from old warranty refurb stock. But its still not enough consistent supplies to always have matching drives.
A FreeDOS cluster actually sounds interesting, might try that ;)
Verry cool, I think when you go to software and show what's possible, I would go with Proxmox. For me it's verry intersting, becaus I thought about building a NUC cluster with new gen 8 or gen10 NUCs and your solution is waaaaay more costeffective.
I can explain you WHY FreeDOS. In some countries we have laws that force the seller of computers to include a Operating System with any assembled computer. The vendor doesn't wants to include the Windows licence and also doesn't wants to "fight" installing a Linux that almost no user is going to use, so they installs FreeDOS to say that it has a operating system and that way they can sell it.
Patrick - Could you comment more on your experience with firmware updates? I have almost this same AM4 machine and wanted to update the bios and get a Ryzen APU into there.
Thanks for this serious. It’s very interesting!
Thanks for this series, natch.
Can you do a recommended step by step setup for a home lab cluster with these?
Part of this series is going to be covering the individual boxes, as you can see here. The other part of this series will be all of the how-tos and probably some tips and tricks as well. It is coming, but we are going to put some of the how-tos between the TMM node feature pieces as we go through the series. Just a lot to cover.
What I would like to see is an am4 mob that's server grade that you install into a server case and then you can use ecc ram and AMD Ryzan, this would be interesting to me as I love IPMI. Some times we need fast vCores for our work loads.
I currently use a couple of the 2690v2 in a supermicro server, and they are great but Im thinking of moving to the 3950 or something similar as I suspect the 3950 will put proforma both my 2690v2s
We have an ASRock Rack X570D4I-2T review coming for the STH main site. I am not sure if we will do a video for it but it will be up there in the next few weeks.
@@ServeTheHomeVideo I'm looking at buying the 2x X470D4U, it looks like a great mob. And very compact at the same time.
I've got 3 of the Elite Desk Mini PCs. 2 of which are i5 Intel. The 3rd is an AMD A10. The AMD Model was returned because only 1 RAM slot worked. The replacement was identical. same problem... I wanted to put in 16GB DDR4. so instead of 2x8GB, I ended up putting in 1x16GB in first slot. I got the amount I wanted, but why isn't the second slot ever working on this thing? no BIOS setting available to turn on or off. nothing disabled for hardware. no hardware issues detected. strange. It's the HP EliteDesk 705 G3 Desktop Mini PC - any ideas?
What do I use this one for? It's great as a streaming device for my TV when using it with a wireless touch keyboard (Logitech)- it's fantastic for fast booting. very responsive. AMD A10 is a great quad core 3.5GHz apu with multicore Radeon graphics. Running Windows 11 Pro on it also, it's great.
Don't forget the RAM is shared for video. so more RAM is good. it has maybe 512MB video RAM only dedicated. so extra RAM is a good idea.
FYI the A10 is 3.5GHz and it is fast. dunno what you are talking about. responsive as hell. I also have a 4.1 Ryzen7 Octa core 2700 tower, so I understand the power and speed difference. but the A10 Quad is quite good actually. It won't make a great gaming machine, but streaming and regular computing it's fantastic.
I'd love to hear your thoughts about the Raspberry Pi 8GB. Naturally it won't be compatible with all the common hypervisors we use for homelabs, but the value is pretty hard to knock, and for docker/kubernetes I'm guessing you'll get much better performance per dollar!
I discussed this a bit in our Project TinyMiniMicro introduction video. These nodes were purchased because if you are RAM limited, then these are a similar cost, if not less expensive, than 2x Canakit RPi 4 8GB starter kits were to get 16GB of RAM but the rest of the system was better (e.g. 256GB SATA SSD v. 2x 32GB SD cards for storage.) That insight directly led to the project's expansion.
I‘m using an Lenovo m720q tiny with an i5-8600t as a little plex server which works perfectly! as this is so tiny I managed to hide it in a little ikea shelf where my router sits in :) plan on doing a little offside nas with another one over at my parents house, as this is so tiny and barely draws power they won’t mind it.
Awsome videos! Cant wait fot more!!!
Coming soon! Thanks!
The HP EliteDesk 800 G3 mini's are great little systems. Up to 32GB RAM plus SATA & NVMe disk support. One issue I had was with the NVMe disk overheating - as the chassis is very small and no active cooling on the SSDs. I added a small heatsink to the NVMe and removed the little metal cover under the SATA SSD to improve cooling. Problem solved! 🙂
I think we have EliteDesk 800 G2, G3, and G4 systems already tested. Stay tuned for future installments. Great feedback on the NVMe SSDs. Generally, these use low-performance and lower power NVMe SSDs from the factory.
@@ServeTheHomeVideo problem with nvme ssds most of them don't state if they are cool running (just like to show big numbers) even my Toshiba dell branded xg3 1tb nvme thermal throttles if its not actively cooled
need a heatsink for it but I need a single sided one because there is a stupid chip under the nvme slot on the Asus prime pro x370 motherboard witch prevents me from using a nvme heatsink that has a under plate for the back side of the nvme ssd (this hp system you have on this video has no chips under it so it would support a heatsink even if its just a slab of metal on top of the nvme ssd)
Windows 10 Pro minimum (as you can use gpedit to control Windows update, I set it to 20 days delay on normal Updates and 150 on feature upgrades so everyone els gets burned first before the fixed updates get to my customers systems) ,
these systems will Likey have a Windows 8 Pro logo (with windows 8 Pro key in uefi bios) but somehow loaded 10 home (it have to be in legacy mode)
Just go into bios enable UEFI and start the windows 10 USB install (at language screen, shift+f10, disk part, list disk, select disk 0{assuming disk 0 is system disk} , clean, to erase the disk)
install windows 10 Pro without a key, it won't actually let you pick what version if your using UEFI with Windows 8 Pro key in the bios so it automatically picks windows 10 Pro on its own and self activate soon as it sees the Internet (if it only has a Windows 8 flag on the unit it will be home version, but these are business units not seen any HP elite version that came with the home version they always came with pro Windows 7 (a lable key) or Windows 8 Pro (UEFI bios witch will work fine on Windows 10 Pro automatically)
Key is tied to the mobo, so no real need for a key.
@@SimmanGodz depends if it came with windows 8 home or 8 Pro built on (normally these business systems are windows 7 Pro/business or win8 Pro, depending on age) if its Windows 7 pro/business/ultimate just can use the key on the system to activate Windows 10 Pro
if its Windows8 Pro logo on the box the only pre request is make sure bios is in UEFI boot (setting bios to default should be enough as Windows8 systems UEFI is a requirement for certification by default UEFI+secure boot) then just clear the disk using diskpart (as it has to be GPT type) and install clean copy of Windows 10 it won't ask for key
just install freepbx on them and sell em , sounds more then capable for any SMB, we can get 10 concurrent calls out of a pi 3b+ these ought get closer to over over 100 concurrent
You won a new subscriber, nice review, keep doing those videos.
Thanks!
10:10 dont many of these enterprise licencing schemes require the hardware come with some version of windows(any licenced version from XP home to 10 ultra home premium), and lets you upgrade to pro for workstations, enterprise, or education?
Any chance these would be sufficient as a Plex frontend transcoding 4k with a NAS storage backend?
I am not sure I would pick this particular model for that use case over some of the newer models we have tested if we are being frank about it.
Look at HP 290 g2. With intel QuickSync it’s capable of transcoding 4K.
This seems like a real nice "Blade server on a budget" option.
I think the reason FreeDOS is a thing, because of some Microsoft shenanigans where systems sold without an OS required a license payment to Microsoft. I don't know if that's still a thing, but I believe it was a thing in the past.
Excellent video. I see a BIOS came out in November, so I think maybe some level of Zen CPU support? It would be a great upgrade over Bulldozer. Right now I have a 805 G6 on order and might get one of these 705 G3 ones and upgrade it.
Great series! Looking forward next episodes. Very interested in dedicated GPU with this small machines. Want to build small GPU rendering farm.
Виктор Платов no PCIe slots
I'm waiting for your opinion on the lenovo ones - I just picked up 7 M93 units (only i3 / 4GB ram / 500GB HDD) for £40 each...
For those that have these type machines, what prices are you paying (and for what specs)?
I'm in the UK and some of the prices look outrageous on eBay!
You could check the UK company bargainhardware for used hardware. Not as cheap as the US, but hey ho, best of a bad situation and all that..
@@Trooper_Ish Thank for the suggestion. Think I'll stick with just watching what other people have on YT at those prices ! :-)
Can you talk about heat? Like could I cram one up in a box on the wall for a home automation controller? How much airflow would it need? I'm thinking better than a pi for running home assistant type application
You could mount on a wall, under a desk, behind a monitor or elsewhere. So long as the room is a normal temperature. Also I would not suggest mounting it IN a wall since they do need airflow
“WiFi included” is so shady. 802.11n 2.4ghz only USB adapter from 10 years ago doesn’t count as WiFi.
That is a big part of this series. If we had only bought one unit, we may never have experienced this and been able to share it. We have a bunch of others like this that we are going to cover.
Will there be ryzen embedded systems included in a future roundup for tiny mini micro? i saw they are available on newegg for purchase. there is an asrock model for $300 US
We may expand to that. We have a few with chips like the Ryzen 3 Pro 2200GE, Ryzen 5 Pro 2400GE, Ryzen 5 Pro 3400GE. These are still socketed parts but they benefit from having the AMD DASH. For around the same $300 price point, we have gotten some of these TinyMiniMicro systems configured with SSD, RAM, and a Windows 10 Pro license. They sometimes even have on-site service attached.
are they good for trading or browsing ?
What type of Hdmi cable to connect to Samsung smart TV ?
Ha, buying dual core machines for servers?
I did get an AsRock Deskmini with an Intel 6th gen quad cpu, installed esxi and running 2 W10, 1 W8.1 and 3 Linux VMs and simply love it.
I think all of the rest of them are 4C and higher. These are also older AMD cores that are way behind mainstream Intel cores.
Why go with Intel, the Deskmini is available for AMD as well (limited to Ryzen 3400G but still)
Depends on your use-case. I have two machines in production with 32 GB of memory each, and 2 cores is far more CPU than they each need, but the memory is required for the application.
When you decide to sell them let me know!
@@ServeTheHomeVideo It would still be nice to compare the value to the Deskmini machines. As the new Ryzen cpu's offer so much value for money. And the Deskmini are so cheap and power efficient as well.
Are you going to look into using iscsi or a remote storage system using each of them as nodes for high availability? You have plenty of USB 3 ports, could you use those with USB to ethernet to allow higher throughput than just the one network port.
What about the thin clients? I have an HP t630 arriving in a few days, and an older t620 plus running pfsense that I bought a few months ago.
There is a lot of traffic on the STH forums about those.
Are you going to run kubernetes on the cluster? Would be interesting to see how you would set up a cicd pipeline with a development and a production environment!
There is actually a screenshot of one of these nodes running kubernetes in this video!
How do you make it stealth noisewise? I maybe add a desk fan to mine ;)
Stuff you run into with consumer gear:
My 2 node mini-itx system uses a BioStar a68n- 2100 motherboard.
I use a fanless Pico PSUs with 12 V 200 Watt Power bricks. Total system is fanless at the moment. I use a tiny Goodisory a01 case.
Storage are 2 120GB SSDs from old systems.
Memory is 8GB for each node also from an old system. Since the ram is doubly sided it cannot run at full 1600Mhz.
Currently have one node complete. Trying to source the case for the second one for a reasonable price.
Ran into not enough power issues with a Pico PSU that I got cheap with the case. Brick was not powerful enough.
System has a PCIE slot. So I can add an NVME adapter.
Have you found anything that would let you power multiple systems from a single power supply? Like a multi-output, high power 19V adapter with multiple tips?
What I really want is PoE.
@@ServeTheHomeVideo Have you found any of these that support PoE+ or the like?
Not yet.
Hey I know this comment is 2 years old but I just wanted to point out that PoE splitters do exist. You can get one that has a barrel jack to plug into the computer.
One possible use case that I'd be very interested in for one of these boxes is as a pfSense box. Ideally this means 2 NICs, but I wonder how many of these micro machines provide that (either onboard or with some expansion?). It'd be nice to get a very compact and
We have some folks discussing this use case on the STH forums.
It’s easy: VLANs.
@@ServeTheHomeVideo Thanks, I'll take a look.
@@amp888 zotac has dual nics nucs. Sapphire also made some mobo's with dual nics but they are yet to be used in a case
The SEEED ODYSSEY has a J4105 quad-core and dual Intel NICs (along with things like M.2, WLAN, and options for WWAN and such) for sub-$200.
I've found that the Lenovo m93 is the best bang for the buck
Would it be possible to use a cluster in this fashion to host a virtual environment? For example, can I cluster 4 of these machines together and run a hypervisor to create VMs using all the provided hardware?
You can cluster them and run VMs on each. If you have 4x 16GB nodes you cannot run a single 64GB machine across all of them though. Check out the Of BBQ and Virtualization video for more on why (linked in description or see our July 2020 videos)
@@ServeTheHomeVideo Thanks, that was a fast response! I just watched that video, now it makes sense in context. This gives me much to think about.
Which of these smaller form factors can accept a quad Intel GbE NIC for pfSense?
I don't know. That doesn't sound bad at all for some uses. I rocked multiple years NUC with 2820 celeron for years 24/7 with openmediavault. This by specs has much more cache and is apparently like 4x more performance and that NUC handled home samba pretty damn well with few additional services. Would actually still use it but ended up putting it on raspberry 4 as version was already horribly dated. It absolutely sips power, like something like max 11W from wall, which is insanely good for old Intel machine that costed something like 110euros new (without memory, drives etc. obviously). Now I'm on the verge of getting new minicomputer and putting everything on Proxmox. But don't know. Maybe I should actually buy one of the latest computers instead of the like 6th gen intels that already cost quite a bit here and electricity is very expensive. Any thoughts?
We just looked at the new HP's:
- Elite Mini 800 G9 - ua-cam.com/video/bPs5XGBoXr0/v-deo.html
- Elite Mini 600 G9 - ua-cam.com/video/YP99uBwBXeQ/v-deo.html
Since power in Europe is so expensive now, we added more to our power testing that we show in newer videos. Also - take a look at the N305 coverage we are going to have soon on STH.
@@ServeTheHomeVideo Thanks. Alder Lake is getting even more appealing. I knew it was good, but not that good. Seriously impressive performance for so little power usage. Heck it could run everything I can think of and have headroom for...ages. Prices are still quite steep, but I'm getting the feel. Since I have "workable" hardware for now I think I'll wait for these to come up more in markets. P&E core setup just begins to feel worth the wait and higher investment. Thanks for the links 👍
Witch is the best of the hole project?
Would be cool to have a detailed look at an Nvidia DGX A100
if you aren't using these anymore, are they by chance for sale?? Also I was thinking about turning this into a torrent box for Linux Isos would that be an ok use?
Can you do a video showing how to get linux installed on here? I've gone over every setting so far but I think I'm still missing something when I boot form USB with my 705 g3
Could you review the Compulab airtop 3?
We can look into it.
@@ServeTheHomeVideo EDIT *Compulab
Thank you so much anyway for the availability
Protip: would old mac minis or Mini Servers be way more potent for small home labs or clusters. They are not that expensive. Features are better (Tunderbolt, USB, Firewire, RAM Upgrades etc ...) the Hardware in the oder models is great and long lasting. Some of the are even in the vMWare HCL or they do run esxi perfectly fine ?
They run proxmox (which is Debian based) just fine
We looked at the Mac Minis as well. One can get USB 3 (and Type-C) on these TMM nodes. The 705 G3 is one of the few DDR4-based nodes without Type-C. We also covered you can get 16-32GB inexpensively in the two SODIMM slots. The big deciding factor is simply cost. As an example, a used (via ebay) Mac Mini 2018 edition configuration we were looking at sells for around $650. We got a Dell Optiplex 3070 directly from Dell with a newer 9th gen Core i3 + Windows 10 Pro and onsite service (3 years) for $330. At $500 we have core i7 units with NVIDIA GPUs and twice the RAM/ SSD space.
hp 705 g3 mini dm a10-8770e can i use memory higher then ddr4 2400 ex. 3200 ddr4 ?
can i connect 2 sata drives to this pc ?
My big unknown is the wifi capability, it seems that all these refurbished units come with a small wifi dongle, what inexpensive unit will be good?
A lot of these units have built-in WiFi. Check pictures for WiFi dongles.
This looks pretty cool.
Quick question!
I am looking for a small workstation pc under 200, I don't do gaming and I don't like big rigs lol don't got that space haha. I do basic photo editing and basic paperwork. Anyone have great recommendation?
graphics ?
IMO the Windows Home license isn't worth it from the standpoint of it becoming a web browsing machine since Linux can do that just as well. In fact, a low resource usage Linux distro might even be preferable for speed later in this machine's life. Win 10 pro is probably useful for someone into active directory though.
Please test some emulator games on it from retro to 3d game consoles emulators.
Run routeros chr with 2 10G port (if it have pci ports)
And run traffic test.
Dan Goot no PCIe slots.
Can you load Pfsense on these TinyMiniMicros?
Nick has a guide here that you may want to read www.servethehome.com/guide-tinyminimicro-pfsense-firewall/
@@ServeTheHomeVideo Thanks!
@@ServeTheHomeVideo Thanks. I don’t have a managed switch. I was thinking of using a USB to Ethernet?
These sort of run hot
These could make nice little DLNA servers for people who want them to be hidden and silent
Hi Patrick!!!!!!
Good information but video could be MUCH shorter.
👍👍👍👍👍👍😀
If you got one of these with the SATA SSD and Wi-Fi card, you could use one of these (www.amazon.com/Crest-Interface-Gigabit-Ethernet-Modules/dp/B07DTK7ZZJ), with the extension cable going to the extra display output port to make a fantastic pfSense box.
The pace I work send them all to landfill just in case there is customer data on them
Interesting. Many just destroy HDD/ SSDs from them.
My cousin worked for a private school, and when they got rid of their old iMacs, they drilled a hole through the screen and hard drive... almost made me cry.
So what's the use case ?
Talked about that in both the TinyMiniMicro introduction and the last part of this video.
Acer Veriton is another One…i made a pfsense box with i5.. at $100 au
Dell 3020m and call it a day!
I am confused. Why do you care about having Windows when converting your node to web browsing? Pretty much every Linux distro has a browser anyway. And if you only care about web browsing, wouldn't something like Chromium OS make even more sense?
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm I wonder will you be re-selling all these computers when you're finished. I smell a good deal a-coming.
I wouldn't buy these any way, minimum I buy is i5 4570 or 4590 and 8gb of ram for under £70-100, or under £100-130 if includes a 250gb SSD (the gpu is fully supported by Windows 10 {shows in taskmanager} and they boot to desktop in less then 15 seconds
Mostly specific to lenovo systems they boot so fast to desktop you need to set a windows login password so it slows the boot to desktop down as without password it hits the desktop before the network has had a chance to startup (witch results in disconnected network drives and programs complaining)
I never buy an AMD Type A CPU as they are just single or dual core cpus (4 core is 2 core, 2 core is 1 core if its a type A cpu) even if they was under £50 with ssd (they are just to slow) and they are so slow even at single threaded tasks with are more important for what these machines are used for typically (you can get 4th gen i5-i3 for under £80 typically that blow these away)
Part of this series is learning and trying bits out so that others do not have to. There are some places where these may be the only options available on the second hand market. Trying to get a lot of different systems covered with this.
Where are you purchasing from?
Unsure if my last post got moderated if I didn't submit one of the two,
the main problem I have had with them is that they get hung up on things like windows update and perform more like a core2duo but slower (I have ignored amd CPUs for long time, but I do have a ryzen 1800x and now 3800x cpu and that was there first real cpu in 8 years)
I have a core2duo (1.8ghz) that runs remarkably OK with windows 10 on it (with ssd) and it feels like it runs better then amd bulldozer and k8 cpus (ran even better once I got a core2quad to work in this donkey old asrock motherboard that was inside the system with a £10 psu from The looks of it) only thing amd has going for them on the pre ryzen cpus was the gpu (as long as it wasn't a nvidia one)
Ebay
(4570,4590) 8gb
Under £100 max (total, as some charge £20 for postage) and make sure it's searching description in the search
as a lot of sellers don't put the model type in the title (just i5 witch can be anything)
And set it to search by lowest price (I don't typically bother with bidding listings as people are stupid and bid war past £100 and you could of just bought one for £80-100 right away, I seen some system with ssds pushed pass £180 witch is bonkers when max you should be paying is £120)
I don't recommend using i5 as part of the search as it can be a first gen i5 as to why I don't search for i5 as it brings up any thing from 3rd gen to loads of expensive first gen i5s witch are quite slow, I avoid 3rd gen i5 because the gpu isn't fully supported by Windows 10 the 4th gen and higher is (it shows in task manager) but speed wise the i5 3rd gen run as good as 4th gen
Talk to much
You could always read the blog if you don't like videos.