so, why would someone get this (say at $75) vs a 5070 (with double the ram an double the storage) at $85 (or less). I see a few possible reasons
1) higher single core speed (though it seems going full blast, the 2 cpu's are fairly equivalent)
2) more execution units on gpu (though in reality, is anyone using this gpu for anything besides plex/htpc type workloads? and does the more execution units matter then?
3) fanless (I guess it makes less noise than the 5070, but I can't imagine the 5070 making a huge amount of noise. perhaps in a bedroom it make a difference. I also wonder without a fan how ful bore performance would be impact on this guy. i.e. what happens once the heatsink has soaked up al the heat it can, how will the heat throtling impact the i3.
4) more ram, but again, depending on one's workload, more than 8GB might have not much value.
so people who have both this at the 5070, what do you see in the value in this over the 5070? did I miss anything? do you disagree with my analysis at all?
I have both, a Cisco IEC4650 and an HP t640 with the Ryzen embedded R1505G, so here’s the assessment/comparison between the first 2.
Keep in mind that the 85 dollar version of the 5070 is typically the Celeron J4105/4GB/16GB soldered eMMC variant with no WiFi/BT. The 8GB/64GB version is usually 100+, the Pentium J5005 version usually starts at 120 with the 4GB RAM/16 GB flash…which is close to what I paid for the t640 with the 8GB RAM/64GB Flash/WiFi/BT setup.
1) It depends on what circumstances where you would want 4 14nm Goldmont Atom cores versus 2 Kaby Lake i3 cores. The former has speedstep support so it runs slightly more efficiently in terms of power usage, while the latter has AVX/AVX2 support and a faster GPU. In terms of HTPC/transcoding…eh, the Atom idles slightly lower while the Kaby gives you better h264/265 throughput in Quicksync and x264/265…that being said, for HTPC applications in a living room situation? That’s where you go with a t640 - better margin for growth - you can pull off AV1 software decoding on the Ryzen but it’ll simply take up nearly 70% utilization.
2) Retrogaming - the Coffee Lake GT1 in the base 5070 is much slower on DX12/OpenGL than the Kaby Lake GT2 in the IEC4660. We are talking about half the clock rate with half the EUs. Note that in either case it’s not nearly as good as the Radeon Vega 3 setup in the t640.
3) I actually performed full thermal hysteresis testing on all 3 - the IEC4660 has a full (and rather heavy) metallic case that acts as a heat sink, so even after loading it up for 2 hours the highest the temp will go is around 67C, while on the Wyse 5070 it usually hovers around 72C or so due to its smaller heat sink. This is actually much better than the 84C I typically get on the mostly plastic t640. The thermal mass on the IEC4660 also means that once the CPU load disappears the temp drops quickly. This actually makes sense since the IEC boxes are designed to run inside trade show booths with little or no air flow for days at a time. I mean, sure, it’s not that easy taking apart the IEC box, but it’s actually upgradable once you get into the chassis.
4) Once again, depends on the use case. If it’s an HTPC running either Windows 10/some Linux variant with 8 or 16GB, it’s roughly equal. But on the Wyse 5070, 16GB is the max in Win10 (anything beyond and the machine acts weird) 32 is the hardware limit in Linux/ESXi, and since it has a Realtek NIC embedded, it can’t do ESXi 7 out of the box (the same also applies for the HP t640). The 4650/4660 are Intel i211/217 equipped so it can run ESXi out of the box.
In the case of the IEC4660 and the t640, both will run happily with 64GB of RAM and can use NVMe and SATA drives (the HPs can also use the Sandisk Mothim SD7 cards off the M.2 key M port). As I recall the Wyse 5070s are soldered eMMC and SATA M2 only. So if the use case calls for running a quiet low duty hypervisor somewhere inside a garage, I’ll tape an IEC4650 or 4660 to a wall somewhere and it’ll do quite well. The Cisco Moderro IEC4650 (which I didn’t have a chance to document yet) is nice because you can conceivably feed it a bunch of IT department leftover parts (DDR3L RAM, M.2 SATA, mSATA) and it’ll still be somewhat useful for the foreseeable future.