HP T730 8GB RAM 32GB Storage Thin Client

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fossxplorer

Active Member
Mar 17, 2016
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I bought one T730 a while back without PSU adapter and it took a good while to get it shipped to Europe.
However, today when i tried to power it on, it constantly gets into a loop. Couple of times i was able to see start of the POST, then it rebooted and/or powered off.
I managed after a while to boot into Fedora 28 live USB, and see that the BIOS is 1.07. There are indications of issues with it.
Can other owners of T730 see which BIOS version they have?

I think it might have been a dishonest seller selling this too me.

EDIT1: is the power button on T730 different than T620 plus?
I seem to have issues just getting it to boot as the button is behaving strange. I can feel a press inwards on T730 as with T620 plus.
EDIT2: once i was pulling the Displayport cable out, it just powered off :(
 
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zack$

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Aug 16, 2018
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There is documentation on issues with bios 1.07: Advisory: HP t730 Thin Client - Do Not Update BIOS to Version 1.06 or 1.07 | HP® Customer Support

See bios 1.05: HP t730 Thin Client - Driver Downloads | HP® Customer Support


I bought one T730 a while back without PSU adapter and it took a good while to get it shipped to Europe.
However, today when i tried to power it on, it constantly gets into a loop. Couple of times i was able to see start of the POST, then it rebooted and/or powered off.
I managed after a while to boot into Fedora 28 live USB, and see that the BIOS is 1.07. There are indications of issues with it.
Can other owners of T730 see which BIOS version they have?

I think it might have been a dishonest seller selling this too me.

EDIT1: is the power button on T730 different than T620 plus?
I seem to have issues just getting it to boot as the button is behaving strange. I can feel a press inwards on T730 as with T620 plus.
EDIT2: once i was pulling the Displayport cable out, it just powered off :(
 

fossxplorer

Active Member
Mar 17, 2016
554
97
28
Oslo, Norway
Thanks a lot @zack$, i read that prior to posting.
The doc says, if the T730s were delivered with 1.06 or 1.07, there should be no problem, but i can't know that for sure.
But trying to downgrade seems like a nightmare.
I have the files extracted on a Win8 system, but i don't have the ami_flash they refer to in order to do this in Linux. Also, the BIOS SPxxxx.exe file have me an option to create a bootable USB drive, but that's doing nothing when being booted from...
 

WANg

Well-Known Member
Jun 10, 2018
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New York, NY
I bought one T730 a while back without PSU adapter and it took a good while to get it shipped to Europe.
However, today when i tried to power it on, it constantly gets into a loop. Couple of times i was able to see start of the POST, then it rebooted and/or powered off.
I managed after a while to boot into Fedora 28 live USB, and see that the BIOS is 1.07. There are indications of issues with it.
Can other owners of T730 see which BIOS version they have?

I think it might have been a dishonest seller selling this too me.

EDIT1: is the power button on T730 different than T620 plus?
I seem to have issues just getting it to boot as the button is behaving strange. I can feel a press inwards on T730 as with T620 plus.
EDIT2: once i was pulling the Displayport cable out, it just powered off :(
L43 1.12 for me. You can probably flash the BIOS forward and see if that fixes the issue. Also, are you getting a genuine HP 90w power supply? Does it feel cheap and light to you? Fake HP power bricks do exist and can act up when they fail. The genuine power supply is supposed to feel rather heavy for its size.
 

fossxplorer

Active Member
Mar 17, 2016
554
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Oslo, Norway
Ah, version 1.12 seems quite a revisions forward. I can't see that version from HPE's pages, any idea where to get that from?
I use use genuine HP 90W power adapters from different HP laptops, and couple of the PSUs i got is brand new. I got 4 of them all with notable weight, i,e does not feel light at all. I have some chinese Dell PSU that feels like air, yeah :)

When i try to run the SPxxxx.exe for 1.05 from Windows10, the first option is greyed out (this is not intended for this platform or similar message). I get the option to make a USB recovery or to extract the files. None of the could help me :(

I feel a bit lost now to get this working reliably and install Proxmox:(


L43 1.12 for me. You can probably flash the BIOS forward and see if that fixes the issue. Also, are you getting a genuine HP 90w power supply? Does it feel cheap and light to you? Fake HP power bricks do exist and can act up when they fail. The genuine power supply is supposed to feel rather heavy for its size.
 

WANg

Well-Known Member
Jun 10, 2018
1,302
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New York, NY
Ah, version 1.12 seems quite a revisions forward. I can't see that version from HPE's pages, any idea where to get that from?
I use use genuine HP 90W power adapters from different HP laptops, and couple of the PSUs i got is brand new. I got 4 of them all with notable weight, i,e does not feel light at all. I have some chinese Dell PSU that feels like air, yeah :)

When i try to run the SPxxxx.exe for 1.05 from Windows10, the first option is greyed out (this is not intended for this platform or similar message). I get the option to make a USB recovery or to extract the files. None of the could help me :(

I feel a bit lost now to get this working reliably and install Proxmox:(
Wel, smbiosdump in ESXi 6.5 says it's 1.12, but it could be something else. When I have a hardware downtime window I'll boot it into the BIOS screen to confirm. As for recovering....eh, during the next downtime window (probably over the US Thanksgiving vacation coming up shortly) I'll swap SSDs to my Proxmox5 image and see if it's possible to dump out my healthy BIOS image and put it up on my S3 bucket. Does it stay stable using something like a PMagic bootable USB image? What exactly was it doing?
 
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SCS

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Feb 16, 2017
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I just got a T730 myself and it has BIOS version L43 v01.07. I am having an issue of installing pfSense fine but the system reports that there is no bootable media yet the drive is enables and set as the first boot device. I've tried multiple m.2 SATA SSD's. Just curious if this may be similar to what is being experienced by others with the potentially upgraded v01.05 -> v01.06 -> v01.07 as suggested in the alert from HP in regards to the BIOS. I to have also been unable to track down a v01.12 BIOS as mentioned above.

Does anyone have a reference to the documentation to rolling back the BIOS as the unit is out of warranty and I'm sure HP won't be much help?
 
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zack$

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Aug 16, 2018
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I just got a T730 myself and it has BIOS version L43 v01.07. I am having an issue of installing pfSense fine but the system reports that there is no bootable media yet the drive is enables and set as the first boot device. I've tried multiple m.2 SATA SSD's. Just curious if this may be similar to what is being experienced by others with the potentially upgraded v01.05 -> v01.06 -> v01.07 as suggested in the alert from HP in regards to the BIOS. I to have also been unable to track down a v01.12 BIOS as mentioned above.

Does anyone have a reference to the documentation to rolling back the BIOS as the unit is out of warranty and I'm sure HP won't be much help?
Toggle achi settings in bios, I had a similar issue when installing pfsense even on bios ver. 1.08
 

SCS

New Member
Feb 16, 2017
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T730 came loaded with bios 1.08 from seller :)

Hmm, there's a ROM Recovery socket in the T730, I'm curious if I can order a flashed rom from HP and get the latest revision to update this box I have.

Anyway, your suggestion worked and I've got pfSense 2.4.4 loaded and rocking. Although I seem to be pulling lighter power draw then others at only 10.48W. Thats the Base unit, 2 x 4GB Ram, 16 GB SSD, the 1G PCI 1x Fiber module, and a Quad port i350 v2
 

zack$

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Aug 16, 2018
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Just to clarify, there is nothing wrong with bios ver 1.07 per see, it's the flash utility that's the culprit.

Statement from HP: "The issues begin to occur after updating the BIOS from 1.05 to 1.06 or to 1.07. However, the issues are not due to the new BIOS versions but are due to the BIOS flash utility. Systems that already have BIOS version 1.06 or 1.07 (from the factory) will not experience the issues."
 

fossxplorer

Active Member
Mar 17, 2016
554
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Oslo, Norway
Yeah, but the problem being how do you know how the ver 1.07 ended up in the box you buy 2nd hand, i.e the fact that the box did come with 1.07 or not from the "factory"?
That's why i simply wanted to downgrade and to be certain. Also, IIRC, i read that we need to contact HP to get the BIOS downgraded... I'm afraid if i call HP here they'd first ask for S/N and then....uh this is not sold by us nor out of warranty.."

If anyone succeeds to get the BIOS downgraded, pls let us know :)
 

WANg

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Jun 10, 2018
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A new BIOS release v1.14 was recently released (Nov 27th, 2018) for the t730.
Slight decrease in power usage (1w on average) and enables the power states (P-State/C-State) controls in ESXi 6.5U2.
Should be HP carepaq SP93015.
 

fossxplorer

Active Member
Mar 17, 2016
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Oslo, Norway
Thx, @WANg, i was able to upgrade BIOS to 1.14 Using Win10. Happy about that.
Wrt.16GGB SO-DIMM on T620 plus, still waiting for the shipment stuck in the customs. Will let you know.
 

WANg

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Jun 10, 2018
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Alriight, and now for something completely different...can you have fun on the t730/DT122s - How is it as a casual gaming machine/emulator box?

The answer is...yes, but with some limitations.

So over the Christmas break I took the t730 down from ESXi 6.5U2 duty, pulled the original SSD out, put in a Micron MX500/512GB M.2 module and installed Windows 10 Pro on it - upgraded it to version 1803 with the full AMD Catalyst drivers. After this is done, I installed a few known emulators to get a better idea of how it should play, along with an idea of what the power consumption should look like - all screenshots are taken at 1366x768.

So here's some results:

PCSX2 (Sony Playstation 2 emulator for Windows)

Ghostbusters NTSC



Okami NTSC



Hm. emulating the PS2 is always a bit of a challenge since you are trying to emulate a 300MHz MIPSIII CPU with 2 VLIW vector units, a relatively speedy GPU, 2 sound processors, an I/O processor (which is a PSX SoC on-die), so you are usually looking at multicore + GPU performance. In this case, the t730 can perform up to about 80% of the speed of an actual PS2. Games are playable...somewhat. The issue is that since I installed the AT29 fiber NIC on the M2 Key E slot, I do not have any ability to test it with my Bluetooth Dualshock 4 controller to gauge playability (Star Wars Battlefront 2 for PS2 is a pain to play on a keyboard emulating a Dualshock controller). That can be remedied with an M.2 based bluetooth/wifi combo card like the Intel 7260HMW.

Power consumption at the tap is about 54w.

ReDream (Dreamcast Emulator for Windows) -

Unfortunately, I only have 3 Dreamcast game ISOs (Macross M3, Air Force Delta and Propellerheads), one is corrupt and the other 2 doesn't show decent screenshots. But gauging response times, I'll say that it runs well enough. I would need to hunt down my copies of Shenmue 2 to see how it works here.

Power consumption is about 48w.

PPSSPP (PSP Emulator for Windows / MacOS X) -

Pretty much 100% quality/framerate locked - it ran at 100% on my Haswell based Apple Macs, so I don't expect it to falter here. PPSSPP 1.70 features Vulkan support, and the latest AMD Catalyst drivers for the RX427BB has support for it. Good visuals.

Power consumption is about 46w.

Here it is on the intro for Outrun 2006



Wipeout Pure



I also have to toss in N64 emulation - if you have PJ64 version 2.3 with the latest HLE graphics, it should let you play Rogue Squadron just fine.
Here's a screenshot of it running the demo for WaveRace 64.


It was running at 20fps because the original console ran at 20 fps during the splash screen.

Power consumption about 47w.

So, what about PC gaming?

Battlefield 2 on the Dalian plant level, 16 bots single player mode, all options turned on and maxed out.


About 60 fps locked, ~55w consumption.

Unreal Tournament 2004 SE, latest patch, all options turned on to "Holy sh-t" level, 32 bots, AS-BP2-Outback level.
Oh, about 34-40 fps.



~52 w consumption measured on the taps.

Actually, maybe I should redo those metrics. I subsequently found out that Windows 10 was running/installing updates on the background.
I still need to test the little box out against MAME...I still need to install Steam and really stress test the bugger, especially with the nVidia GT1030 installed on some more modern games. Let me know if you have any requests for the next downtime test.
 
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mimino

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Nov 2, 2018
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I'm torn between T730 and DFI DT122. I do have 16G of SO-DIMM and an SSD, so it would make sense to pick up the DFI. But apparently it's a lot (?) louder than the HP. Does anyone know why and what can be done to kill the noise?
 

WANg

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Jun 10, 2018
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I'm torn between T730 and DFI DT122. I do have 16G of SO-DIMM and an SSD, so it would make sense to pick up the DFI. But apparently it's a lot (?) louder than the HP. Does anyone know why and what can be done to kill the noise?
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.