The HP tx4x-series thin clients are coming...

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SwanRonson

Member
Sep 27, 2018
33
3
8
meh. the only reason these were any good is because they were cheap on the off-lease secondhand market. the 620 was the sweet spot where the 730 was always overpriced even at its lowest. frankly i'm disappointed with ryzen apu's offerings after the 1st generation. they are just much too little too late.
 

fossxplorer

Active Member
Mar 17, 2016
554
97
28
Oslo, Norway
I have the same opinion wrt. t730. Although both t620+ and t730 are fun devices, prices are ridiculously high. I saw even t620+ was >100$ at some point, not sure they are at these days.
 

WANg

Well-Known Member
Jun 10, 2018
1,302
967
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New York, NY
I have the same opinion wrt. t730. Although both t620+ and t730 are fun devices, prices are ridiculously high. I saw even t620+ was >100$ at some point, not sure they are at these days.
First of all, the t730 is still considered a "current gen" product (The t740 is not volume shipping until November), and when you have CDW listing the Win10 IoT version at 900 USD, well, that pushes up pricing expectations (note: CDW does not sell the machine at 900 USD to large customers, it's closer to slightly-less-than-700 in most cases). I don't expect this to change until more t740s get shipped out and the t730s go off-lease.

Second of all - have you seen the pricing for used hardware on eBay or any of the secondary markets, and seen what their equivalents are listed for? An Intel Haswell NUC (i5-4250U) is at least 150 USD here in the states (buy it now/best offers format), and as for corporate NUCs, it's about 25 USD cheaper than that (like a Optiplex 9020 Micro or EliteDesk 800 G1 Mini). For the t620 plus, pricing expectation is about 100-125 USD per unit - which conforms well to the 130 USD that Dell Wyse D90Q7 commands on eBay, and the t730s are about 175-225 USD, which is similar to their equivalent Broadwell/Skylake NUCs (Ready-to-use units with RAM and SSDs, not barebone kits - you are also paying a premium for the PCIe slot in the t730). Pricing is dictated by the number of machines in stock, and demand for them. Until the recent crop of interest in using the t620 plus/t730s as cheap firewalls/low intensity gaming machines, the demand has been modest to say the least. The limited supply of DFI DT122Es were snapped up fairly quickly, and once that inventory goes, the prices went back up.

Then of course, what exactly are you using these thin clients for? For me, it serves as a relatively cheap and very quiet upgrade path for an ESXi hypervisor, which for about 400 USD in total investments (200 for the t730, 160 for 32GB of RAM, 40 for the 10/40Gbit PCIe x8 card) the t730 performed this task admirably with compactness, decent performance, reliability, efficiency and most important of all, quiet. Find me another compact device in that price range with similar capabilities (4400 Passmarks, 32GB of RAM, 40GBit connectivity/PCIe x8 connectivity, 35w power consumption, Radeon R7 Kaveri graphics with 4 DisplayPorts, 4 Liter sized chassis) - I don't think you can. Frankly, I am looking forward to field usage reports for the t740...initial signs point to them as being competitive to the base model, i3-8100B powered MacMinis, but with NVMe drive support. That's pretty good for a machine that can do 40GBit off the bat, something you can't claim to do on machines of this size.
 
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