HP T730 8GB RAM 32GB Storage Thin Client

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mimino

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Desktop or laptop SODIMMs? The t730 consumes laptop parts, while the DT122 is on desktop parts. The t730 is designed to be a quiet thin client (shrouded air pathways, a single low RPM fan), while the DT122 is an industrial PC with small diameter, high RPM fans in the chassis. If you have a decent ITX case you could swap the board out, put in some large and slow fans and cut the noise out significantly. Of course, due to a very barebones BIOS setup, you won't be able to take advantage of stuff like HSA or (limited) SRIOV like you can on the t730.
The DFI accepts DDR3/DDR3L, not sure about T730. I've got two 8G sticks of DDR3L so that should work.
As to the fans, is it the CPU or PSU fan that is noisy? I see that some DFI boards have DC-in jack, that would be ideal.
 

WANg

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The DFI accepts DDR3/DDR3L, not sure about T730. I've got two 8G sticks of DDR3L so that should work.
As to the fans, is it the CPU or PSU fan that is noisy? I see that some DFI boards have DC-in jack, that would be ideal.
Quick look at the manual, the DFI uses 204 Pin RAM, so it's the laptop RAM just like the t730, and not 240 Pin desktop RAM.
As for types, the t730 can only take DDR3L (so it has to say 1.35v) instead of DDR3 (1.5v). The DT122E should be able to work with anything from 1.25 to 1.5v. 16GB RAM modules should work in both cases (I have 32GB in my t730)
 

mimino

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Quick look at the manual, the DFI uses 204 Pin RAM, so it's the laptop RAM just like the t730, and not 240 Pin desktop RAM.
As for types, the t730 can only take DDR3L (so it has to say 1.35v) instead of DDR3 (1.5v). The DT122E should be able to work with anything from 1.25 to 1.5v. 16GB RAM modules should work in both cases (I have 32GB in my t730)
I'm not concerned about the RAM but the noise and what can be done about it. Curious which fan is the noisiest, PSU or CPU.
 

WANg

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I'm not concerned about the RAM but the noise and what can be done about it. Curious which fan is the noisiest, PSU or CPU.
The 40x40x20mm exhaust fan, it's as loud as a typical rack mount switch exhaust fan. You could of course replace it with something quieter, but you'll need to balance temp/airflow vs noise.

The PSU is virtually silent, and I haven't once heard the CPU fan over the exhaust fan.
There's a separate thread covering the DT122BE.
AFAIK the t730 has a metal enclosure around the DD3L RAM modules both as an EM shield and possibly as a passive heatsink, a single fan and has a large, passively cooled power brick. If it's peace and quiet, the t730 is the way to go. I would only pick the DT122E if you are really, really price sensitive or need a full height PCIe x16 slot.
 

mimino

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There's a separate thread covering the DT122BE.
AFAIK the t730 has a metal enclosure around the DD3L RAM modules both as an EM shield and possibly as a passive heatsink, a single fan and has a large, passively cooled power brick. If it's peace and quiet, the t730 is the way to go. I would only pick the DT122E if you are really, really price sensitive or need a full height PCIe x16 slot.
Thanks. I picked up this board instead: DFI ITOX BE171-77EN-427B 770-BE1711-100G Mini-ITX Motherboard | AMD RX-427BB | eBay
BO $99 got accepted which I think is a good deal. Will put it in the Silverstone case I have laying around, and if it's still too loud then will think about the alternative cooling.
 

WANg

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Thanks. I picked up this board instead: DFI ITOX BE171-77EN-427B 770-BE1711-100G Mini-ITX Motherboard | AMD RX-427BB | eBay
BO $99 got accepted which I think is a good deal. Will put it in the Silverstone case I have laying around, and if it's still too loud then will think about the alternative cooling.
It's a good deal when it's $125 or BO for a chassis + board, but if it's just a board, not so much. You can probably get an AM4 A320 chipset board and an Athlon 200GE APUs bundled for around that much, and it'll be better bang for the buck.
 
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SwanRonson

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I'm actually considering one of these + an external HDD as a little Plex server. Passmark score is quite good so it should handle burning subtitles just fine.
 

arglebargle

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I've been meaning to test Plex transcoding on my t730 as well. If anyone gets to it before I have time (I've been doing some major ripping and tearing on the household wiring and building a wall mounted rack-mount cabinet) could you let me know if HW transcoding of HEVC works?
 

SwanRonson

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I've been meaning to test Plex transcoding on my t730 as well. If anyone gets to it before I have time (I've been doing some major ripping and tearing on the household wiring and building a wall mounted rack-mount cabinet) could you let me know if HW transcoding of HEVC works?

it won't, HEVC / h.265 is UVD 6 and up

Unified Video Decoder - Wikipedia

The t730 or the Athlon 200GE?
t730 but there's gotta be better options that support a 3.5" internal drive I just haven't had time to look.
 

WANg

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it won't, HEVC / h.265 is UVD 6 and up

Unified Video Decoder - Wikipedia

t730 but there's gotta be better options that support a 3.5" internal drive I just haven't had time to look.
Well, if you want it quiet (the DTI BE122 doesn't qualify) and cheap (which the DTI does and the t730... not really), that's probably a custom Athlon 200GE build, or maybe get yourself something that at least Intel Skylake and above (as no Intel CPUs older than that will have Quicksync HEVC hardware encoding support either). As for popping in a GT1030 (common choice for more video playback firepower on thin clients), just remember that the GT series can playback HEVC, but not encode it.
 
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fake-name

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People who got PCIe passthrough to a VM working on this thing, what virtualization platform were you using?

I've spent a few evenings trying to get xen PCI passthrough to work without luck.

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EDIT: Got it to work with Proxmox/KVM. Anyone get xen to play nice with these?
 
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arglebargle

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People who got PCIe passthrough to a VM working on this thing, what virtualization platform were you using?

I've spent a few evenings trying to get xen PCI passthrough to work without luck.

------

EDIT: Got it to work with Proxmox/KVM. Anyone get xen to play nice with these?
I used hardware passthrough with Proxmox/Qemu without issue on a bunch of 10/40GbE NICs when I was playing around with mine.

I did get SR-IOV passthrough working with Mellanox cards but I had issues reclaiming the VF after shutting down the guest so it was one-shot per VF per boot -- and without proper SR-IOV support (I can't recall the feature name at the moment but it's server chipset only) you're limited to a total of 8 VF addresses per device. It was pretty cool handing out 10GbE VF devices to 6-7 different VMs and having wire-speed networking on each without any additional overhead but without any way to reclaim the VFs short of rebooting it didn't work out to be practical.
 

WANg

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I used hardware passthrough with Proxmox/Qemu without issue on a bunch of 10/40GbE NICs when I was playing around with mine.

I did get SR-IOV passthrough working with Mellanox cards but I had issues reclaiming the VF after shutting down the guest so it was one-shot per VF per boot -- and without proper SR-IOV support (I can't recall the feature name at the moment but it's server chipset only) you're limited to a total of 8 VF addresses per device. It was pretty cool handing out 10GbE VF devices to 6-7 different VMs and having wire-speed networking on each without any additional overhead but without any way to reclaim the VFs short of rebooting it didn't work out to be practical.
Any idea if this is due to no support for ACSCtl, or is this something that is inherent to dealing with SRIOV VFs in FreeBSD guests? The next round of thin clients should be Ryzen based, and they should have full PCIe ACS support pre-baked.
 

arglebargle

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Any idea if this is due to no support for ACSCtl, or is this something that is inherent to dealing with SRIOV VFs in FreeBSD guests? The next round of thin clients should be Ryzen based, and they should have full PCIe ACS support pre-baked.
It's not just FreeBSD, that much I know. I had exactly the same issue with Linux guests.

My guess is that it's due to either lacking ACSCtl or a bug in the Linux host driver, I strongly suspect no one tested the corner case of VF passthrough without ACSCtl when they wrote the driver. When I have a bit more time I'll plug in one of my new HP servers and try again (this time with ACSCtl) and see if it works, that at least rules the driver out. I have no experience with vmware or I'd give that a shot on the thin client too.

Edit: Somewhat oddball question but do you have any ideas for shoe-horning more storage into these? The only things I can think of are SATA multipliers (Bad Idea™,) using USB3 ports (not performant) or splitting the PCIe slot with a bifurcated riser and PCIe extension cables (Oof.) If I could jam one more SSD inside each, plus the NIC, I could get a pretty solid Gluster SSD cluster going here.
 
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fossxplorer

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To my surprise, i found out that booting from the internal USB3 Type A isn't working.:eek:
I installed Proxmox using usb-to-msta adapter and installed PVE fine, but rebooting showed UEFI nor BIOS can see anything on that USB port.
Anyone else tried to boot from the nternal USB3 Type A of T730?
 

fake-name

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To my surprise, i found out that booting from the internal USB3 Type A isn't working.:eek:
I installed Proxmox using usb-to-msta adapter and installed PVE fine, but rebooting showed UEFI nor BIOS can see anything on that USB port.
Anyone else tried to boot from the nternal USB3 Type A of T730?
It booted fine for me using the external USB devices. Are you sure you don't have the internal port turned off in the BIOS?

As I remember it, you can specifically deactivate ports in the BIOS. Perhaps the internal port is disabled or shows up as a separate device in the boot order.
 

rivet

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To my surprise, i found out that booting from the internal USB3 Type A isn't working.:eek:
I installed Proxmox using usb-to-msta adapter and installed PVE fine, but rebooting showed UEFI nor BIOS can see anything on that USB port.
Anyone else tried to boot from the nternal USB3 Type A of T730?
I just tested it, and it doesn't work for me either. The internal USB is getting power, but I never saw the LED flicker on the flash drive. External USB ports work fine. I didn't see anything in the BIOS that looked relevant, either.
 
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fossxplorer

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Thx for testing & confirming!There is an option in the BIOS to disable USB ports, including the internal one.
My plan to run PVE from a USB-MSATA and to use m.2 for storage didnt work out now, so running PVE off an M.2 SATA for now.
I got an idea to get a 2.5" SATA inside, let's see in a while when i get some time to experiment.

NB: the internal USB works just fine once the OS is booted!







I just tested it, and it doesn't work for me either. The internal USB is getting power, but I never saw the LED flicker on the flash drive. External USB ports work fine. I didn't see anything in the BIOS that looked relevant, either.
 

arglebargle

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You can definitely jam a 2.5" SATA drive inside with an m.2 SATA to normal SATA breakout board. I have a couple on my desk right now that I'm going to use to drop SATA Samsung 850 Pros into my T730s. I've been looking for a cheap version of something like this (either a PCIe 1x riser or a minipcie) so I can hijack the unused m.2 A+E key slot to add a SATA adapter and turn these into compact gluster SSD nodes.
 
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