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Dell Wyse 5070 / 5070 extended thin clients

Welcome to the short and succint guide to the Dell Wyse 5070 thin client

(Very much a work in progress)

So why should you care (as a home labber)?


It's a medium sized-ish thin client from Dell Wyse with some decent performance.

How much CPU and GPU firepower can I expect from one?

To be investigated...

What’s my path to expandability?

• 2 DDR4 Notebook RAM slots (currently supporting up 32 GB via a pair of 16GB DDR4 SODIMMs , but only stable in Linux. Official support is 16GB in 2x8GB modules. AFAIK ECC is NOT supported)

Upgrade Compatibility
  • RAM: DDR4 SODIMM
  • M.2 type: SATA
What can I do with that PCIe 2.0 x4 slot (if present, only so on the extended clients)

The following bas been tested and known to work:


• Intel i340-T4 Quadport GigE adapter

Is there a guide to working inside the chassis?

Dell Wyse is known to publish guides on how to do simple things to your chassis

What does the power usage look like?

Roughly 10w idle, about 17-22 loaded up

OS Compatibility

The following has been tested and known to work:


Proxmox 5.2/6.1
VMWare ESXi 6.0U3/6.5U3 (requires custom ISO for Realtek NIC)
Windows 10 IoT/Pro
Debian Linux 10

How much am I expected to pay for one?

As of Q3 2021, about 50-150 USD for a refurb unit, but they will get cheaper as time goes on.

Advantages
  • Silent / passively cooled, and more resilient than its HP counterpart the t640 series
  • Intel iGPU with virtualization capabilities
  • Rather efficient for what it is
Disadvantages

• No IPMI, and no AMT/ VPro options
• RAM ceiling dependent on OS and is between 16 and 32GB.

So, what can I do with it?

- Use it as a thin client.

So yes. Use it to drive multiple screens - delight friends, intimidate enemies.

- Run a “much more powerful” firewall.
Many people here swears by the t620 Plus, but if you have some serious packet filtering, you could in theory toss in a dual port 1/10/40GbE card on the 5070 extended model, toss up a virtual function or 2 via SRIOV to accelerate throughput, and work successfully with higher line speeds.

- Medium performance expandable hypervisor.
Yeah, it’s about the same as a gimped out C2700 series and VMX/ept-i is enabled. SRIOV is supported in Linux but VMDirectPath (its VMWare equivalent) functionality needs to be investigated, unfortunately. You could in theory load up at least 8-12 VMs (with 64GB of RAM) and do some useful stuff with it. Oh yeah, since it has a PCIe 2.0 x4 slot, you are somewhat limited in terms of pure bandwidth.

- Use it as an HTPC or as a living room PC.

Are there similar products out in the market today?

HP t640 / Elite t655 (if you don't need the PCIe slot)
HP t740 / Elite t755 (if you do)

Are there active discussion on STH for this device?

Try this thread - it's pretty much the one that was kicked off via my misadventures with the thin client.
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