HP T730 8GB RAM 32GB Storage Thin Client

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arglebargle

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Jul 15, 2018
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Fun aside, it looks like the Debian Stretch live disc image does not contain a cpufreq governor or any power saving tunables. Who knows, we can potentially tweak the power savings a little further down. Guess I'll be looking for a second t730 some times in the near future to do a deeper dive.
Just a quick note for for anyone else who's using one of these on a debian derivative (proxmox, ubuntu, etc) on cpu frequency scaling:

A couple further notes: idle cpu frequency scaling doesn't work on proxmox until you install cpufrequtils, idle power draw drops quite a bit after that. Also, turbo scaling doesn't work until you adjust the boot command line in /etc/default/grub, I'm using the following:

Code:
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet radeon.bapm=1"
Append "amd_iommu=on iommu=pt pcie_acs_override=downstream" to the command line if you're going to use passthrough.

Note: "radeon.bapm=1" enables boost frequency scaling so you'll have access to up to 3.7GHz depending on core load. Frequency reporting is a bit funky, install "linux-cpupower" and run "turbostat" for accurate boost clock readings.
 
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WANg

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Just a quick note for for anyone else who's using one of these on a debian derivative (proxmox, ubuntu, etc) on cpu frequency scaling:
Append "amd_iommu=on iommu=pt" to the command line if you're going to use passthrough.
Is the ACS patch still needed, or is that pre-baked into the Proxmox kernel?
 

arglebargle

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The ACS patch is still needed, I'll edit to include it.
 

zack$

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Aug 16, 2018
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Anyone know where I can get the AT29M2/SC card? It's all but vanished from eBay!
 

zack$

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Aug 16, 2018
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I have been watching those listings and the seller..but of recent all the listings are now ended and I can't find the seller on eBay again...no idea what happened.
 

arglebargle

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I have been watching those listings and the seller..but of recent all the listings are now ended and I can't find the seller on eBay again...no idea what happened.
I'd message the seller, it looks like the listing expired and they simply haven't re-listed.
 

shutch

New Member
Sep 30, 2018
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Hi all
Thinking of getting one of the HP T730s for 1Gbps down / 500 Mbps up.

Wondering ,how do these perform in that scenario? And how do they compare to the SG-3100?

Any insight would be appreciated.
 

MiniKnight

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Mar 30, 2012
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Hi all
Thinking of getting one of the HP T730s for 1Gbps down / 500 Mbps up.

Wondering ,how do these perform in that scenario? And how do they compare to the SG-3100?

Any insight would be appreciated.
SG-3100 is good because it supports pfSense and it's lower power.

T730 has more cores, stronger IPC cores, higher clock frequencies, more RAM, and more storage.

With the T730 you can virtualize pfSense and run other things as well. But it'll use more power and is larger.
 

BLinux

cat lover server enthusiast
Jul 7, 2016
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Hi all
Thinking of getting one of the HP T730s for 1Gbps down / 500 Mbps up.

Wondering ,how do these perform in that scenario? And how do they compare to the SG-3100?

Any insight would be appreciated.
If you're only purpose is to run a router/firewall, I would opt for the T620 PLUS instead of this T730. This unit is much more capable, but exceeds what you would need for a firewall/router and uses more energy.
 
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arglebargle

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Jul 15, 2018
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If you're only purpose is to run a router/firewall, I would opt for the T620 PLUS instead of this T730. This unit is much more capable, but exceeds what you would need for a firewall/router and uses more energy.
This is exactly what I was going to post. I'd only consider the T730 if you want to run more services on the same machine as virtualized pfSense. The T730 will draw between 15 and 30W depending on load and the network adapter you install, the SG-3100 is a 5W network appliance.

I picked up a pair of T730's with the intent to virtualize pfSense in HA on them with docker containers providing 3-4 bonded VPN connections. Without the VPN encoding I'd probably look at a T620 Plus for the lower power draw.
 

shutch

New Member
Sep 30, 2018
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Hi all,

I picked up one of the HP T730s along with an Intel Pro/1000 VT quad port NIC. I set up pfsense (2.4.4) with DHCP on WAN and DHCP on LAN1. Everything works great except that after about 15-30 seconds of traffic from the WAN, pfsense locks up (shell menu frozen, GUI not working, no traffic passing through, T730 power button had to be held down to shut-off). On reboot, everything works fine again until some traffic passes through from WAN and then after 15 seconds, same thing.

Has anyone experienced this?
 

arglebargle

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Jul 15, 2018
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No, not at all. You might try following dmesg from the console and then intentionally shoveling traffic across the firewall to trigger it though, that may give you more information about the cause.
 

WANg

Well-Known Member
Jun 10, 2018
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Hi all,

I picked up one of the HP T730s along with an Intel Pro/1000 VT quad port NIC. I set up pfsense (2.4.4) with DHCP on WAN and DHCP on LAN1. Everything works great except that after about 15-30 seconds of traffic from the WAN, pfsense locks up (shell menu frozen, GUI not working, no traffic passing through, T730 power button had to be held down to shut-off). On reboot, everything works fine again until some traffic passes through from WAN and then after 15 seconds, same thing.

Has anyone experienced this?
It shouldn't, but the old Realtek GbE driver on pfsense for the built-in NIC is a real horror show (KPs, freezes, spurious interrupt errors) - download/patch and see if the situation improves itself. Boot it into a Linux LiveCD and run some serious stress tests on it for an extended period of time, see if it does the same - if it does, it's bad RAM, bad SSD, possibly even faulty APU. If it doesn't, it might be bad drivers or maybe the NIC is bad.
 

arglebargle

H̸̖̅ȩ̸̐l̷̦͋l̴̰̈ỏ̶̱ ̸̢͋W̵͖̌ò̴͚r̴͇̀l̵̼͗d̷͕̈
Jul 15, 2018
657
244
43
Hi all,

I picked up one of the HP T730s along with an Intel Pro/1000 VT quad port NIC. I set up pfsense (2.4.4) with DHCP on WAN and DHCP on LAN1. Everything works great except that after about 15-30 seconds of traffic from the WAN, pfsense locks up (shell menu frozen, GUI not working, no traffic passing through, T730 power button had to be held down to shut-off). On reboot, everything works fine again until some traffic passes through from WAN and then after 15 seconds, same thing.

Has anyone experienced this?
I didn't think to ask before: you're not using the onboard Realtek interface as WAN are you? My sad dual realtek celeron router had almost this exact same issue before I built the realtek supplied driver and switched to that. I was never able to push more than 600-650Mbps through any interface on that machine after switching drivers but the box was stable.
 

nijave

New Member
May 10, 2016
15
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3
Columbus, OH
Hi all,

I picked up one of the HP T730s along with an Intel Pro/1000 VT quad port NIC. I set up pfsense (2.4.4) with DHCP on WAN and DHCP on LAN1. Everything works great except that after about 15-30 seconds of traffic from the WAN, pfsense locks up (shell menu frozen, GUI not working, no traffic passing through, T730 power button had to be held down to shut-off). On reboot, everything works fine again until some traffic passes through from WAN and then after 15 seconds, same thing.

Has anyone experienced this?
I had a similar issue with an old desktop and it turned out to be a fried motherboard so it could possibly be bad hardware
 
Nov 1, 2018
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Anyone know what the max ram is of the t730? I'm planning on building a few thin clients with my kid (teaching her linux and other fun builds other then just win 10) and I know the t730 can go as fast as 2133 mhz but wondered if it was maxed at 16 gb like the t630+... Thanks.

*any other specs other then common specs are also welcome like if it can be over/underclocked*
 

WANg

Well-Known Member
Jun 10, 2018
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New York, NY
Anyone know what the max ram is of the t730? I'm planning on building a few thin clients with my kid (teaching her linux and other fun builds other then just win 10) and I know the t730 can go as fast as 2133 mhz but wondered if it was maxed at 16 gb like the t630+... Thanks.

*any other specs other then common specs are also welcome like if it can be over/underclocked*
The official max RAM is 16GB but it's actually 32GB (2x 16GB DDR3L SODIMMs), and this is actually tested/verified by me. My suspicion is that the t620/t620 plus/t630 can take 32GB as well.

As for the specs, here is a rough sketch of the machine

- CPU horsepower is roughly the same as a Broadwell-U i7 (the same as the 2017 MacBook Air), but nowhere as power efficient. It's also functionally identical to the FX7600P APU found in some budget gamer laptops from MSI/Asus.

- It can probably be underclocked using your typical AMD Kaveri userland tools in Linux

- GPU Horsepower is the same as the Kaveri Radeon R7 graphics, so yes, you can run FarCry on it - low/medium detail and below 768p, please. Although if your plan is to run 3D games, think about older applications and take advantage of AMD Eyefinity multi-monitor support (it does have 4 DisplayPorts), or buy an nVidia Maxwell LFF card with slim active cooling.

- Onboard Radeon R7 is GCN 1.1 (around the same hardware support level as the base PS4 but minus some of the juicier HSA 2.0 features, but Mantle support is present) with UVD 4.2 (so hardware decode for H264/VC1/WMP1/WMP9 but no H265/HEVC, that's a UVD6 feature, and no VP9 - that's a VCN1 feature on the Ryzens)

- 2 M.2 slots, one is slot B+M (so it's SATA only and up to M2 2280) and the other is slot E (so it's PCIe x1) so that can be used for the fiber NIC or wifi.

- Kaveri HSA/IOMMU2 is enabled, so technically it can do GPU/CPU zerocopy, and as a bonus, AMD-Vi is enabled. That being said, ACS is not found and ARI is not present, so you can only use the SRIOV for up to 7 PCI virtual functions. @arglebargle and @BLinux spent plenty of time on this one.

- PCIe slot is PCIe 3.0 but only x8 (even though it's an x16 slot). Standard 25w draw, single level low form factor, so the max external video card is a GT1030 GDDR5. Quad GigE (Intel i340/350 T4, Broadcom 5709) and 10GbE cards have been tested working from Intel (X55o), SolarFlare (5-series and some Flareon 7-seres) and Mellanox (VP3). The Mellanox VP2 40GbE/Infiniband card has been tested as well.

- The chassis is actually quite heat sensitive - if you plan to run anything power drawing (GT1030, Mellanox ConnectX4, Solarflare Flareon 7 with the hardware PTP stamper), make sure you get a fan to circulate the airflow inside.
 
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