I bought
one on Ebay yesterday for just under $50 shipped. Not quite a pittance, but its supposed to be new in the box with AC adapter and mount. It was in my watch list for a while and the seller sent an offer for more than 50% off the original asking.
I bought shortly before you revealed the underside of the motherboard. The seller's offer was under my $50 threshold for an impulse buy, so I went for it. I'll try what cards I have when mine comes, & will of course report back if anything worked. Any chance its another Mini PCIe x1?
Well, I had a few extra parts to salvage from my IT department retired machines pool, so 8GB DDR3L SODIMMs are practically free from the fleet of retired and maxed out Penryn/Sandy/Ivy/Haswell laptops.
Oh, the open box guy? Yeah, I bought from him as well....was trying to lowball him into 50 USD including S&H, but he won't bite. I think I paid ~55 for mine. The Cisco branded IEC-4650s are actually pretty well put together machines (with a very decent mPCIe Wifi+BT card) - the Moderro 4660s are on the same casing but the internals are much more spartan (only the x6x0W machines features the wifi capabilities, which makes me wonder why they didn't just make a single board with a slot but no wifi slot...instead of making one with and one without). It's really too bad the 4660s are not taken up by Cisco...
One small issue though on the 4650?
I figure I'll give the M2 NVMe a try...and then I realized the M2 2280 card is too damned long. You can't even leave it like that since the top case/heatsink block sits on top of the M2 slot (in addition to the Wifi/BT and the CPU/SoC) and it'll simply not fit. I'll need an M2 2264 NVMe card to test this one out.
As for that slot on the bottom that I thought was a mSATA slot? Well...i have a Novatel Expedite E371 4G/LTE card just sitting around, so I figure that I'll give it a whirl.
lspci -vvt doesn't show it in PartedMagic, but lsusb -vv does (I am guessing the card sits on the MiniPCIe slot but chooses to talk to the USB bus or the card acts as a PCIe USB bridge).
So yes, it's MiniPCIe x1. Although, this does present both a headache and an opportunity....
Note the 2 small pegs facing the bottom chassis (between the blue USB3 port pair and the 4 audio jacks) - that's the location of the PCIe x1 slot on the bottom, and you'll need to figure out a way to do something with it (Hmmmm....Intel i82574 based mPCIe network cards?).
If I have to guess? Probably Dremel a hole on the left side (facing you on this photo) or the bottom so the ethernet port can be added.
But yeah, you can conceivably add 2 more NICs (one mPCIe and one more replacing the Wifi) to the machine and run it off the internal USB port ( the Starscream USB/LED/IR board up front should be USB2 based...?) It's not super-powerful but it'll run ESXi 7 and allow you to virtualize the SIP callpath for a small branch office on the cheap.
I might try to see if I can retrofit the IEC4650 chassis to fit inside/replace the guts of an old Sun Cobalt Qube3 server...
Or....it could be the essential ingredient in PROJECT GHETTOMINIMICRO - American International Pictures and Iceberg Slim
@Patrick presents the Young American Saga of hustling bits and getting dat network flow working them corporate thin clients...
(Yeah, I really should brush up on Photoshop)