Do These CHEAP PCs Live Up To The Hype?
Вставка
- Опубліковано 15 тра 2024
- UGREEN Revodok Pro 210(29% OFF 12.20-12.31): bit.ly/41sfAZx
UGREEN Revodok Pro 313(23% OFF 12.20-12.31): bit.ly/41q01S3
UGREEN Revodok Series(Up to 40% OFF): bit.ly/3v1XuSd
Check out UGREEN Official Store: bit.ly/47Z6B4x
Make sure to check out@apalrdsadventures !
► / @apalrdsadventures
► Want to support the channel and unlock some perks in the process?
Become a RAID member on Patreon or UA-cam!
🔓 Patreon: / hardwarehaven
🔓 UA-cam: / @hardwarehaven
► Checkout items I used in the video (affiliate links):
🛍️ m.2 E key to mPCIe adapter: amzn.to/3RRjUP2
🛍️ m.2 e key to dual SATA adapter: amzn.to/41ydk2R
---------------------------------------------------
Music (in order):
"Hardware Haven Theme" -Me ( • Hardware Haven Theme M... )
"If You Want To" - Me
"Sunshower" - LATASHÁ( / best-music-pro.. )
"VULF JAMS" - GARRISON ( / garrison-brown )
"CRENSHAW VIBES" - GARRISON
---------------------------------------------------
🎥 Curious About the equipment I use to make my videos?
Click Here ► hardwarehaven.media/gear
---------------------------------------------------
Timestamps:
0:00 Dell Wyse Thin Clients
0:33 Sponsor - UGreen
1:49 What Are These
2:49 Specs - 7010
3:35 Specs - 5060
3:49 Specs - 3040
4:16 First Boot and Operating Systems
5:28 Teardowns and Potential Upgrades
7:32 Debian 12 install
8:31 CPU benchmarks
8:57 Power Draw
9:56 M.2 sockets and RAM upgrade
11:06 Simple home server with 7010
11:38 Minecraft server with the 5060
12:17 HAOS woes
13:00 Using thin clients as thin clients
14:17 Are these worth buying? - Наука та технологія
When I started IT in 2010s thin clients were DA BOMB for business clients. But ever since the Intel NUC came out, we all jumped ship because the cost didn’t outweigh the benefits anymore.
I don't blame them the NUC are great machines. I was looking into thin clients as a way to do some old school win 98 to Xp era LAN gaming. Never pulled the trigger on it thou.
Back in the '90s, diskless HP clients and NCD X-Terminal displays were the thing, sharing computing servers down in the data center. Management decided to put disks and O/S on the HP clients, and replacing the X-Terminals with HP-UX desktops, which caused us admins no end of trouble on the helpline when users would keep cycling the power on them when they had a problem like they used to, crashing quite a few of the disks, and corrupting O/S's. "I'm having trouble. I already cycled the power, and it still doesn't work...". The "re-training" to NOT power-cycle was a chore.
Yep, I'm old...
I have an old Intel NUC 5 with Celeron that I use as a thin client of sorts with Remmina on a minimal Debian GNOME setup, so I can agree, though to be fair, I already had it from a previous project that I decommissioned some years prior.
Yeah. The company I worked for had these connecting into a Citrix XenApp server. Not much reason to anymore since fully capable USFF PCs are very cheap.
We used to buy thin clients, then when we could get HP EliteDesk DMs for cheaper we switched to those. More power for less money? Sure, why not? We still use them for Citrix and they're faster. Win all around.
I'm running a 3040 as a dedicated proxmox backup server (PBS). Backing up a 170GB LXC takes about 1h30 min (full backup).
Validating that backup does take about 1h5 min.
Installing PBS is not easy (PBS doesn't allow install to flash by default) but absolutely worth it. Small, quiet, draws next to no power and looks good.
I have been working on a "baby's first hypervisor" project for a friend. Initial version i installed proxmox completely on a usb WD passport hard drive and it seemed to work reliably. Currently, i reinstalled proxmox on a 128gb sandisk ultra fit and deleted the thin storage and expanded the other storage volume to fill the entire drive. I am including a 512gb Samsung USB SSD for VM storage. The idea being if it is completely solid state storage there is much less chance of damage since the friend lives across the country.
I have been considering using the WD drive to install PBS on but havent gotten around to it.
Quick note about the Minecraft server you tried on 5060 - most Minecraft servers are heavily single-threaded due to the original Minecraft server design. Customizing your settings and Java flags could help a bit, but they definitely benefit from very fast cores and fast and large memory (avoiding garbage collection pauses).
That would explain why the i5-2500k in my former gaming PC turned home server doesn't fall over itself while it's running Minecraft over my local network and doing things with Plex.
The 3040s are a nice option to use as an Octoprint server, too. In some printers, you can even slot it below the print bed, making it so that you don't need to increase the printer footprint at all.
As for me, I've been running a 5060 competitor (aka an HP t630) as a test homelab server: it's the one I first deploy stuff to, to check things out, before moving them to the main server.
True that, one of mine is running a Klipper/Mainsail install, and another of the 16GB ones for Home Assistant. HASS is OK on it but nothing to write about.
I picked up a couple of 5060s from my local IT recycling shop for next to nothing last year. One has been running CasaOS on Debian with pi-hole (now adguard) non-stop, and the other is running a long-term time-lapse capture of my new work building. As long as you don't ask them to do too much, they're amazing little machines!
This was really interesting - I especially liked that you compared it to the Raspberrry Pi 5 for contrast! I really like these small form factor PCs, and I've focused on the 6th Gen and higher Intel CPU's because from that generation onward they seem to have more power and less power draw. Keep up the good content, and props for the quality of your whole sound/lighting/editing - you make a quality video!
Had to check, but it was even a pi 4! So a pi 5 or other alternatives would perform even better. The problem with those is usually the lack of decent IO...
@@AkosLukacs42 thanks - my bad - I have Pi 5 on the brain apparently!
I'm using 3 5060s for a proxmox cluster. Two with 16GB of ram and one with 8GB. They're working great. I even have ceph running well. It's a great environment to test out ideas before committing them to my larger cluster and works for my more modest home needs. I'm slowly adding tasks to it and I've not had any issues. I used USB for system boot and a sata ssd to host ceph for all the vms. The cost of three systems upgraded to meet my needs was under $200.
I also have 2 7010s and they are working great as low load web servers in another location. They're okay and meet my needs. I also had plenty of old ram to stuff into them. They're not as good a value as the 5060s but they meet my needs and have been running non-stop without issue for roughly 9 months.
These have been more reliable than my raspis. They reboot cleanly every time, even the remote the boxes. All of my raspis have hung at reboot at one time or another and every so often I've had one freeze.
hey man great video i'm glad to see my suggestion was good enough, keep up the good work!!
Apalrd's adventures is a great channel. Love his videos. He's apparently working on some kind of ceph build for homelab use. Curious to see how that goes.
I purchased one of those Dell Wyse systems off of Amazon.
I was overjoyed with what I received. In the box was the Wyse system, a throwaway mouse, and a BEAUTIFUL OLD STYLE MECHANICAL KEYBOARD 🎉🎉🎉
I never powered up the Wyse system but that keyboard has been my daily driver for many months.
Im a MES specialist for a huge company with many factories all over the globe, and we use these wyse clients in a production environment, running all sorts of stations and machines. They are great for such infrastructure, respond fast, their setup is amazing, and for what they're made, its a blast to use them.
One precaution, you need a good foundation for those, servers to support it all and a great network situation if you have a lot of them.
Also, I suggest tinkering with the other OS distros for it, and its corresponding management suite, because dell is... well, sometimes pain in the ass to work with, both their products and the company.
About the 3040; I was using one for a headless (eventually) ROIP Allstar radioless node machine and it works beautifully bolted under a table. Also, when I was buying mine I noticed there's 2 different power supply versions for those; one is 5V and the other is (I forget which) 12v or 19V, so pay attention so you avoid crispiness...
I had 2 3040 both with diet pi x86_64 ufei installed running pihole and unbound and they do make for a great high availability alternative during the rpi shortage a few years ago.
you can run dietpi pihole and unbound and home assistant on pi 1 or pi zero no problem. pi4 is only good for samba and docker
I wish Dell would bring back the 3040 form factor with Alder Lake-N chips. Imagine a modernized version that could be powered over USB-C, boot from a Gen3 x2 drive, and use an N100 CPU. That would be an awesome little form factor.
That would be pretty sweet.
the N100 intel atom based CPU is slower than some ARM CPUs while costing more. I compared getting one of the best intel atoms on a SBC vs an intel laptop mobile CPU on a desktop board (cheap chinese options) and ended up with the mobile CPU as its very power efficient and is well suited for proxmox, and has instruction sets the intel atom doesnt. As for arm some faster ones come with a generic NPU, equivalent to vnni on intel, which the intel atoms do not have as they only do image inference via the gausian instructions.
Cost wise the intel atom was the same as the laptop cpu, and i had a 1U chassis sitting around. Sure the SBC would've been more compact, but i would'nt have been able to do as much as i am now by choosing it.
You can thin clients with proper full core laptop CPUs than going the atom route. Im surprised many people dont know this and want the very slow intel atoms not knowing how slow they actually are. I can still feel the slowness of a fast intel atom running proxmox even for something like a dedicated php VM.
@@System0Error0MessageN100 is based on Gracemont which are used in 12-13-(14)gen Core CPUs as Efficiency cores and are actually quite fast, often on par with 6-9gen with greater power efficiency, also fewer limitations than previous "Atoms". With modern GPU these are perfect for HTPC (AV1!), game streaming, also network appliances like NGFW and many other use cases. CPUs don't need to be super fast to be great products.
I've used quite a lot of the HP thin clients. I have a T410, T420, 2 T520 & a T620. They've all been super strait forward to setup with Linux. I went HP, because I had a massive pile of PSUs (don't ask) and I was aware of the 3040 bios quirks! Good to see a bit of coverage on the Wyse systems though! I'm running a T520 as a router (OpenWRT), another as a temporary TV server and the rest have no current use.
Ive got 8 identical t520s, and i hated hps special bricks, so i got usb c to hp adapters, now all of them are connected to usb c bricks. Awesome little things. For beginners, they are cheap, no trickery with distros to make it work on rasp pis, it has m.2 sata and i have 128 gb ssd on them.
I'm using a 3040 to run pi hole on Debian 11. I tried this during the RPI shortage and it's been solid. The storage limitation is a bigger issue than the CPU and RAM for small Linux projects.
The J4105 based wyse are nice, and still somewhat cheap. I put a SATA ssd in mine and just made it my frontline lowspec server for basic containers.
We use these in our call centre, I like them because they're so easy to use and are low powered. Literally plug them in out the box and they're good to go using DHCP options to send the config for thinOS. They log into a connection broker that hand them off to session host servers. Smooth operation and users can log on from any thin client terminal to get to their profile. Performance isn't an issue as the servers do all the work - even UA-cam runs smoothly on them.
I was looking at these, but ended up just spending a little extra to get a couple HP 400 G3 Minis with i3 7100ts. They don't draw too much power and perform very well. I'd even be happy using one of them as my daily driver machine, it'd work fine as long as I'm not playing any games.
I agree, it really helped that you threw in the Raspberry Pi for contrast. Very smart!!! Thank you.
I recently bought an ODROID H3+ x86 SBC, 32gb RAM stick and a 1tb drive.
I use it to work on my programming personal projects. I have it in a dual monitor setup, both 1080 displays.
Arch with Hyprland, all the flashy bits, and it's an enjoyable experience.
~$500 after everything and I haven't turned on my desktop in weeks.
I recently got the 5060. It's awesome for low power homelab stuff like a website, nginx proxy manager, docker containers, etc. I barely use 2% of the CPU while running all 8 of my docker containers. The RAM and storage were upgradeable, so I added a 500GB SSD inside, and my OS of choice is ubuntu server.
So if you want to get a much better system, the Wyse 5070 runs a J4105 or J5005 with 8 GB RAM. There is a slot for a m2 sata drive and power draw is pretty low on them. They also tend to cost the same as the 5060 you were showcasing.
Agreed, the RAM is DDR4 and can go at least to 16GB. I got 3 for a great price on eBay, and set up a small, power efficient proxmox cluster for kubernetes. Great video as always!
I’ll have to check them out
@@HardwareHaven also if you get the 5070 extended, it has a pcie 2.0 x 8 slot+riser, working on getting those setup as my HA cluster
Yep, if you get the 5070 extended version, it’s got a pci card slot and is still tiny and low powered. I added more m.2 and now it’s a flash nas with vm’s.
@@perryholman5302 I got 3 of them running proxmox, it has 32GB RAM , looking at my wattage meter it runs at 5w even with some HA and a few other docker images.
Prolly older than you, Wyse started back in the 1980's as third-party VT1xx terminal devices in the era of VAX computer systems. At one time, they were considered best of breed of that era for those products. Sadly, as the world of terminals morphed into PC software terminal emulators and eventually just faded out, Wyze moved to thin-client devices (the Citrix-era) and eventually Dell acquired them and the brand. Quite a hoot to see them mentioned here :)
I noticed you used Minecraft servers sometimes in your videos, you could do a standardized test for them If you either load into the same seed each time or use the same world each time with redstone machines or farms going and then either use Fabric and Carpet to do a tick warp or wait until 1.20.3 to be released where tick sprint will become a command you can see how fast the server can theoretically run the game.
I'm using Wyse 7020 as my home server for "stuff". It has some lovely features: 1. It's cooled passively, no fans at all, and this was important for me. 2. Performance-wise it's decent, I got 946 and 3779 evts/s in sysbench for 1 and 4 threaded loads, respectively. 3. I was able to find this dreaded SATA power cable, so I have a 1TB 2.5" HDD connected to it - using it as a crude NAS and a media server. 4. It uses x86 architecture, which, contrary to Pi, allows for some hardware (e.g. printers, scanners) to work easily. My Brother printer just plain refused to work on Pi, but I'm having no issues whatsoever on Wyse. 5. It was dirt cheap - overall I paid around 60 USD for Wyse+SATA cable+power brick+HDD. It's an awesome machine for my particular needs.
I set up a 5070 as a media downloader/DLNA server (Universal Media Server)/Streaming media player running Win11 (debloated) with logitech k400 keyboard for my brother in law. Runs great. After that I had my entire family wanting the same setup. I've done about 8 now, people love them. Great for travel too, I have one that I take away on work trips with me.
I've built Batocera gaming machines with those 5060s. Worked great for low end 8 and 16 bit games.
I bought my N10D Wyse, admittedly, mostly for the aesthetic. But it's definitely a great little Borg Backup Server for the price!
But I'd warn that the tiny flash memory can be an absolute *pain* to work with... I had to fully reinstall Debian three times from my screwups: Maxing out the storage accidentally can leave you unable to reduce it again, and end with a practically broken system. Get a little too eager with apt, and now the entire system is unable to update or properly uninstall things.
It's working fine now, with external storage for the backups obviously, but I am getting a little worried watching the flash memory usage creep up with each Debian update still...
Haha yeah.. I can see that being an issue
This is exactly what I needed today. Haven't been going so good the last few weeks.
Love the content! Keep it up!
Hope it gets better for you. I've been going through a bit of a rough patch myself but this is life I guess.
You should look into the Zimaboard sata power cable. It's got a 4pin power connector very similar to that and splits the 4 pin into 2 standard data power plugs
Interesting video. Although I am using thin clients from HP, the approach may be similar with these devices.
No intention to start a vendor discussion here who makes better hardware, not relevant.
I am currently using an HP T520 (with 8 GB RAM and 256 GB storage) running Debian 12 server and a few lightweight Docker containers like Pi-Hole, Home Assistant, Netbootxyz and NUT UPSD. My UPS and Smart Meter (DSMR 5 device) are directly connected to it over USB.
I am planning to host a small Samba and Corosync container to facilitate a two-node Proxmox cluster as well.
In my scenario, this machine is more or less idling and does what it needs to do.
I consider these devices good candidates for leightweight containers.
You may consider building a Kubernetes cluster with a bunch of these....
However, replacing these with cheap 1L PC's may be a viable choice once you'd run some heavier stuff.
Hope this helps!
Appreciate this video, thank you. 👍
I didn't know thin clients for VDI (like Wyse PCs) were spec'd like this, so low/weak yet capable enough to just pull a VDI stream.
Albeit costlier, rPi 5 or 4 probably is a better bet for my uses, including among other things some kind of VDI inside my home network for fun and experimentation . . . when I prioritize it.
Kindest regards, neighbours and friends.
I bought a 7010 years ago and installed server 2016 on it and 16GB of RAM with Hyper-V and inside Hyper-V I installed a PF sense VM. I then removed TCP/IP from the onboard NIC inside Windows and connected the virtual NIC to the VM which made the "server" almost incapable of being remote exploited as there was no TCP/IP on the NIC, it was only forwarding traffic from the VM. It was a fun little thing to play with.
I'm using a 5060 as a Pfsense router running on a trunk line to a unifi switch with my wan being a vlan on a port on my switch. I've been running that for almost a year now, it's really awesome. I designed a 3d model ssd mount and found a super short SATA extension cable so you can mount a 2.5" SSD inside. I even went to the level of designing a fan mount, even though it's probably completely pointless. Considering I paid $40 for 2 of them, I always have a back up.
I almost pulled the trigger on a 5070 but found a much better deal for an HP Prodesk 400 G3 Mini. I set it up as a Jellyfin server, though I haven't gotten Jellyfin subtitles to work properly so I just use it as a file server for Chromecast running Nova media player. Works great with 4k files. I think it idles at 8W which is fine for me.
The total setup was less than a Pi 5 and runs on SSD. Sure it uses more but idle is so low it doesn't really matter that much. I'm not concerned about data loss as there is nothing of value on it and that situation wouldn't necessarily be better on a Pi anyway.
I'd really like to see you do a cost/performance analysis between some of the new mini PCs and some of the older inexpensive hardware listed on ebay such as a laptop like the HP Elitebook 8470p or one you have worked with before such as the HP ELITEDESK 800 G4 Mini.
"Who cares about the video . . . now do what I want!"
I was recently looking at these Wyse systems. The ones that caught my eye ware the ones built into a monitor. I saw a couple of them when visiting a hospital. Might be cool for some older LAN games.
VESA mount they use, u can do Arcade system that way too, any old CPU can do that, not needing GPU acceleration.
I have 3 of the Wyse 5060's, one running OMV as a NAS backup, one running Home Assistant and one as an IP based CCTV display for onvif cameras. Although I could containerize everything onto a single more powerful box, only the HA pc is on permanently so it makes more sense to me to split the jobs between PCs. My current favourites though are the HP Elitedesk series as they are considerably more powerful. Mine have I5 7th gen CPU's at 3.4 GHz. One is a thin client and the other is an All-in-one with full HD screen and both are surprisingly fast as long as you aren't doing anything GPU intensive. Both have M'2 NVME SSD's plus sata connectivity and both were under £70 delivered (Less then $90 currently) So more expensive than the 5060s but vastly more capable.
I have a WYZE 7010 and had to buy some SATA adapters to be able to upgrade the storage. once that was done and I had 2 512GB chips installed, the system took W10 pro with no problem. these units are mostly used on a corporate network... Mine came with a 16GB flash Module and 4GB memory. I was able to upgrade the system to 8GB of memory and since the unit has a SECOND SATA Channel, I was able to add the D Drive. really Like the little system! and mine was a "Legacy Edition" so it has 2 extra USB channels plus 2 serial ports.
i have a Dell Wyse 5010 with 2gb ram + 128gb ssd and it runs batocera quite well. Although the startup splashscreen and some ui elements could be a bit laggy but gameplay wise, all 👍🏻. So retro gaming on these boxes can also be recommend 😁
I've got one of them running my Home Assistant and another running Octoprint. Good stuff.
Watching from a Fujitsu Futro S920 (AMD GX-415GA version). :)
Great content, was nice and interesting to watch! I am here from the competition, and I'd recommend to check it out!
My reasons for this tiny machine: wanted something cheap, small, and silent for my tv, as a media player. Ended up choosing a thin client,
and this Futro S920, to be specific. Has an AMD 4-core, 1.5GHz, no moving parts, 40W psu, 2 SO-DIMM slots, 1 sata, 1 mSATA, 1 miniPCI-E,
2 USB3.0 on the front, 4 2.0 on the back,
AAAND a PCI-E x4!
What made me eventually buy one, and tune up over time, with a 64gb mSATA SSD (instead of the 4gb), and 2x4GB 1600MHz DDR3 (instead the 1x2gb),
got a 90 degree PCI-E adapter, than first a GT710 2gb DDR3, and lately a GT1030 ddr4, for the extra low power consumption. :D And a 128gb usb 3.0 in the front as external storage.
Conclusion: no, it is not the cheapest idea, BUT I do not regret, since I use it on a daily basis, good fast for avarage tasks, does some older gaming too,
AND practically dead silent and max 40W power usage, on a 1080p big screen TV, and can use my beloved Win 7 HomePremium.
I even consider to eventually get a GX-424CC version as a final update, to satisfy my tinker side.
@HardwareHaven Let me start with, that was a great video. I myself use the Dell Wyse 5070. I have been able to score them pretty cheap at about $25/ unit. Even with the Intel Celeron J4105 running at 1.5 GHz, they still seem to do an awesome job running Ubuntu Server. I have one just running Klipper for my 3D printers. Yes it may be overkill, but when RPi's went scare during the pandemic, I resorted to these things.
I feel this is one of those things people simply never thought about doing it but it is a great use of them: Why not using it as it was intended? For people working remotely, sometimes it is a great pain in the ass to unplug the work laptop and plugging the personal laptop for personal and work usage if you have a big setup like me, with two monitors, keyboard, mouse, fullHD webcam, usb headset, thumb drives, etc... It would be amazing to have a guide on how to setup your work and personal laptops to serve remote connections to one of the Wyse cheapo thin clients, and how to setup it to access both machines, alternating between them when needed...
I would love to see you to a piece about using these for simple machine controllers vs Raspberry Pi.
We use Citrix a lot in healthcare. Most of the workstations are thin clinets and it allows those with laptops or working from home to securely log into applications.
I use one of these systems to run my 3D printers. The raspberry Pi 4 might have blown it away in benchmarks, but for the same price I could get the RPI for I was able to get upgraded memory and storage. And normally you have to run a separate raspberry for each printer.. I can run four printers on one of these thin clients. And I'm basically just running Linux mint.
In your next video, I would really like to see how they perform when connecting to an AWS WorkSpaces. Years back, I looked for a desktop in a cloud solution because I wanted to connect to a desktop from anywhere. I tried to use my work computer, iPad, home computer, or an actual WYSE workstation. After searching for workstations in the cloud, I found AWS WorkSpaces. It worked great! Have you ever seen Windows 10 on an iPad? It wasn't running locally, but seeing a full Windows 10 desktop on an iPad is something else. But back to AWS WorkSpace, it is awesome to have all my files, desktop, and apps available anywhere. I even tried using a very old WYSE terminal (before Dell bought them), and it could connect and use it as a desktop. However, it worked with reduced graphics and a few performance issues. Yet, I could still do office work on it.
Can you sign up for an AWS account, activate an Amazon WorkSpace desktop, and connect each WYSE terminal to see if there are any performance issues between them? I would like to see such a comparison of the hardware being used for what it was intended to. I settled with using a Vevo Stick to run the AWS Desktop software, but that seemed like it needed to be more powerful. Maybe you can also try setting up the software (clients.amazonworkspaces.com/) on a Raspberry Pi to do a full comparison of performance.
Thanks for the video, and I hope you are able to do such a comparison!
finally seeing what i subscribed for low end/priced hardware getting reviewed 😊
Thank you, bro! You helped me save some time and money
I have Wyse 7010 Z90D7 running Debian 11 as a 2.4/5GHz wireless router, VPN gateway and samba server. These things are great! Or used to be because sellers are price gouging and increased the prices by 400%. I like mine because it's fanless, low power and surprisingly expandable!
I'm using one of the 7010 like models with a PCIe slot; with a multiport network card to run Pfsense for my router. Been working great. Didn't do anything but slot in a network card and install Pfsense, no other upgrades.
That terrain generation reminds me of the first server I set up on a P4 I found at a yard sale. 🤣
Good learning experience, if nothing else.
My NAS is whirring away right now on a Wyse, absolutely love it. Cheaper and more powerful than a Raspberry Pi, and without ludicrous power draw. My model had a wifi card slot that can be adapted to PCIe or extra SATA aswell.
While watching the video I was thinking what kinds of uses I would have for a lower power computer that I could leave powered on with not much issue on the power bill. And so far I've come up with the following:
1. Storage server (not a home NAS or anything but just something simple to make transferring files between devices easier since Warpinator on Windows and Android isn't as good as the Linux version)
2. Spotify connect hub I could leave by the stereo (using raspotify)
3. Print server (no idea if it would work fine on my Epson L220 since there's some functions there that I need the Windows driver to access)
4. Thin Client (so I can access my main pc from a different part of the house when necessary)
This video’s perfectly timed, I picked up an OptiPlex 3000 thin client off Amazon for only $50 last week and after throwing extra RAM and storage at it, it’s capable even as just a small Linux machine and emulation system for the price I paid for it.
I got one of these for free that was still new in box because the business wasn't using it anymore, it's been great as a headless OpenSUSE server until the kernel broke during an update or something and my system started booting into grub. I never learned to fix a system that's in a state like that so now it sits.
This was interesting! I've seen some of these for sale locally and was curious how they'd compare to something like an HP Elitedesk 800 G3 which I own. It seems like they're fine for some things but not nearly as easy to work with as my HP or similar tiny form factor PCs. Because of that I'll probably pass on these because while they are interesting they don't have the flexibility that I want. Thanks again for making such accessible content!
Thanks for watching!
I have both the Wyse 5060s and a couple of HPs (one 800-G3 mini and one 600 G3 all in one, both running I5 7th gen. The HPs are considerably more capable than the Wyse.
You might want to try and use them with a proper remote desktop software, like xrdp (on the server) and any decent rdp client on the wyse thin client. Stuff like spice (afaik) is not really meant for low-latency. I get an usable remote dekstop with xrdp, and it also supports both playing the audio (originating on the remote desktop) on the local client as well as microphone forwarding and niceties like clipboard sharing.
I've got a dell fx170 thin client (single core) with debian running OpenVPN and pihole and after years it is still working great with 0 maintenance!
im working at an ewaste/refurbishing place and ive seen plenty of these kinds of things laying around as we cant do anything with them, i might see if i can take a few home with me and mess around with them.
ive already snagged a 24 port gigabit network switch from them, so i could probably set up a cluster of them doing something.
The wyse 3040 is really impressive, I've got a few of those, I got one of them to run a stripped down version of windows 10, which just fills up the available 7.3GB of storage. Unfortunately the sdio internal connector only works for WiFi cards afaik, it would have been cool if it was a pcie connector, that way you could make it even more useful in some strange ways. Mine runs 24/7 just as a remote access computer (using chrome remote desktop) to manage network more easily as well as a "backup" for wake on lan if that doesn't work outside the network. I don't have to worry about any power consumption, I measured it precisely and it tops at around 2.5w even during boot (no peripherals other than a dummy DP connector and a small fan). Unfortunately they seem to not like most Linux distros, which would have probably worked better in terms of usability.
I use a 16gb 3040 for piHole, and a 5070 with Ubuntu desktop for Steam in-home game streaming from my main desktop. Both have been working great! Just make sure you get the right version of each. I love these things!
Thin Clients can be useful to run old Windows OSes to play classic Windows games from the 90s, etc. I currently have a Wyse N06D that runs FreeDOS on it. Does pretty good too!
I have one of those Dell Wyse 5060 and I mainly use it as a SMB file and printer server. Currently have Windows 11 on it despite not meeting the requirements. Though it's still running smoothly for almost a year now since i got it.
The 3040 was a part of my proxmox cluster till recently. Not just as a QDevice but a proper node with 3-4 VMs and 2-3 CTs (Had a SATA SSD for boot+storage). It wasn't a pinnacle of performance but it did the job without any problems.
The main problem is the extremely limited connectivity. It has USB3 and an ethernet port, and that's it. The WIFI slot is SDIO. The USB2 are slow. You would always need better storage than the built-in eMMC. That needs the be over USB3. Which leaves nothing for expandability. Can't add a USB NIC, can't ad a PCIE device. No SATA either.
I was looking at one of these for a print server where I only had x86 drivers available.
But for anything with ARM support, I'd go with a raspberry pi.
I'm using Dell Wyse 3290 (n03d) with Celeron N2807 CPU since 2019 for hosting small personal database I want to be accessible 24x7 under Centos 7.
Initially it had 16GB mini mSata SSD and 4GB of RAM, but recently I bought Chinese 256GB drive and swapped RAM module to 8GB.
Now it serves as home SMB share and torrents / yt-dlp downloader, too. Performance wise it is slow (like Pentium 4 3GHz), but draws only 3-4 watts idling or 6W under load.
Recently I've tested 8th gen Intel NUC (i3-8109u) and was impressed with its performance (plays 4k60 video easily), relative silence (fan at idle is almost inaudible) and low power draw (sometimes it fell to 6w under Windows 11). NUCs are popular, spare fans or even fanless cases are available, so I consider buying NUC as my next home server and bedroom HTPC in one package.
Excellent information thank you.
Could you please note which exact Sysbench version was used for these comparisons? Afaik the results can vary a lot depending on version. I am comparing this to one of my Lenovo M900 Tiny with a i5-6500T and the numbers just dont make sense at all. Using Sysbench 1.0.20 on Debian Bookworm
The company I work for has a couple of clients that use these. It's crazy that for the price of a new thin client, you can get a (fairly) cheap laptop that can do so much more and is so much easier to troubleshoot. I loath having to fix any thin-client problems because they are so uncooperative. Even the management software is just terrible and unhelpful. I ousted them from our internal use over the course of a few years and no one regrets moving to docked laptops from them, even with the higher cost.
refurbished laptops are my favorite option. Cheap, well known quantity, built in keyboard and monitor... why would I want to futz with anything else? Sure, something rack mounted might be cooler, or a tiny mini PC stashed out of the way could be really great. I can just SSH into it when I need to, right?
But there's that 1 in 20 situation where you just need to be directly on the console. And, no, I don't want to scrounge around for a keyboard, and balance a flat screen on whatever weird place I need to put it...
Just give me a pile of cheap laptops, and be done with it.
(but make sure they are business grade lease returns and they have ethernet ports, lol)
you can also power 19V barrel jacks with a USB-C PD trigger board
Excellent! another of my question answered.
i just love ths channel , idk why but keep going hero 😉
I am running home assistant on a 3040
The OS is plain debian installed on a USB SSD, HA is in docker
I have the internal flash set as a swap, but it is never really touched
Works quite well
i have a wyze 5010 running as a VPN gateway,Pi-hole in docker , also a ansible host. added a cheep ssd and picked 8gigs of ram. upgraded was like 25bucks in total
I still use an elitedesk 800 G4 mini with Windows on it to play some specific light games because of anti-cheat (I use fedora as my main OS and those often doesn't work well with linux). I might change it when there will be intel Ultra 5 125H based mini PCs as gaming performance of igpu has greatly improved and they are capable of doing AV1 encoding.
It would be interesting to see how these would work in a k3s cluster, with for example one powerful control node and these as worker nodes. I would maybe set them up with pxe or something too, so one wouldn’t have to install a full os on them
You should really look into repurposing old Chromebooks, Right now i'm typing on an old HP Chromebook 11 G5ee on Debian 12 and they're cool little netbooks when repurposed. One could always run them headless for light server needs too.
I used some upgraded 5070s for routers as you can add a second nic using OEM adapter or aftermaket
back when I was working at a big company about 15 years ago that had national presence everywhere, I had to go and fix stuff at those stores. In all of them they had these little thin clients that have been running the sales system for the last 20 years or so. They don't fail, they don't crash and when they lose connection from time to time, you just press a button to turn it off and on again. It's probably a good thing that they never crash because the only person who knew how they work had retired 10 years ago already hahaha... So yeah, in the case of a home setup environment... I would set them up at different locations at your home maybe and be able to access your computer everywhere? Not sure though what the utility would be of that haha
great video! i actually have some Hp thin clients (t630 and t620) and they're great, and they're better thank dell's ones, maybe try them as well
These could probably be cool to build a test environment for clustered software or high availability related stuff. RPIs are hard to get and if you can find them in stock they are actually quite expensive now, they are pushing $100+ and even higher now depending on model.
I got one of these for 24$ on ebay but had trouble installing any distro but manjaro because of the issues said in this video, and manjaro was completely unusably slow, I didn't know I could fix those booting issues so it just ended up being used as a bookmark for my stack of thinkpads in my room to keep them from tipping over, I guess it found a use after all! lol
The older models with DVI-I might have a niche as Batocera machines because of their ability to output 15khz. Slap a DVI-I > VGA to SCART (or RGB outside of europe) adapter and enjoy the best analog video signal with virtually 0 input lag in your CRT tv. Considering you can find some thin clients for $10 and smaller CRT sets for a similar amount, it's a bargain.
Even older models with VIA cpus make great DOS/Windows 98 machines, as some are old enough to still have drivers for the latter. I recall the via C3 in particular having the ability to play with the multiplier to bring the frequency down to ridiculously low numbers, which is necessary for some DOS games.
I ran haos on a 3040, I used just dd to install the extracted .img file. Also, don't forget to set the BIOS setting to always power on after power outage.
i have 3040 and ive installed dietpi on a couple, one is my airplay using shairport sync, another is being used as homeassistant
We have all of these thins and more at work. Currently they are being phased out and, they make great home VM clients Obviously and excellent retro games boxes running Mame and Retro Pi. A lot of corps actually pay to have them disposed of so if you are in the right place at the right time you can get them cheap or free. Then paying a few dollarbucks for adaptors etc makes them so much cheaper than even the cheapest Pi set up.
Another weird use for these are if you require x86. I setup a print server on one of these when I discovered the drivers for my old laser printer are only compiled for x86 and closed source so I couldn't use a raspi.
I highly suggest the HP T5740 thin clients for lightweight servers. Older but inexpensive, fairly power light, and easy as a PC to load with most OS. I replace the SSDs in them though as the oem ones are cheaply made and small capacity. Also you can find a std pci expansion for them. One of them is running my firewall as we speak with a PCI network card.
Also these are good for running SIMH and emulating ancient hardware.
maybe a as an Icinga (or Nagios😑) to monitor your network hardware. I've done this with an EeePC900 and after my DSL got unstable had it announce with TTS if something went down or up (the logs also allowed me to pressure the support of the ISP after three months of issues to finally do a real check on their end 😈)
Retro Gaming PC, like Windows 95/98 games, I've seen someone else do that.
Personally I have an HP Thin Client that I use as a low powered NAS, since it has 2 Sata ports internally and USB 3 unlike the Pi 3 that I had back then
I've run a 5060 as a desktop/ lightweight gaming(read OLD games).. it was running under Lubuntu. it now lives as a CUPS server and probably a NAS in the future....
Sounds like they would be worth testing out running the SteamLink Linux client as they could be a cost effective alternative to using a Raspberry pi to do the same thing. For those of us who have gaming PC's in other rooms than the living room but like to game on Living room telly from time to time.
I was planning on using one of these for my video security on my rv.
1:49 I did laugh also 🤣🤣 gr8 video tho...😁
id be really interested in seeing a video where you set up XCPNG and set up the tiny one as a client on it.
The dell wyse 5070 are awesome. Just fitted mine with a £15 2.5GbE adaptor
"Fireport" Wow. As soon as you said that it all came rushing back. I used to manage a bunch of Wyse thin clients and this was the same password they used way back then.
Nice reviews! Thin clients running Linux based Daphile make great music servers.