HP T740 Nvidia GPU success

[megatron-uk]

Just got hold of a Nvidia Quadro T600 (Turing chip, 640 cores, 4gb, 40w) and I can report that it works absolutely fine without any mods in the T740. It's substantially better performance than the APU in my tests so far. I believe it is somewhere between a 1050ti and 1650 by comparison.

Looking at the power specs of the cards on the market this appears to be the best card that fits within both the power envelope of the PCIe riser and the physical dimensions of the case - the ram heatsink/cover is pretty close to the GPU fan, so I'm intending to remove it.

The AMD W6400 and Nvidia T1000 are higher performing cards but are north of 50w, so quite likely to put undue stress on the PCIe power regulator.

It is quite a remarkable little machine for emulation gaming and casual PC gaming as long as you are prepared to be realistic with detail settings for more recent games. I just wish the fan/bios wasn't so useless!

 

[WANg]

Just got hold of a Nvidia Quadro T600 (Turing chip, 640 cores, 4gb, 40w) and I can report that it works absolutely fine without any mods in the T740. It's substantially better performance than the APU in my tests so far. I believe it is somewhere between a 1050ti and 1650 by comparison.

Looking at the power specs of the cards on the market this appears to be the best card that fits within both the power envelope of the PCIe riser and the physical dimensions of the case - the ram heatsink/cover is pretty close to the GPU fan, so I'm intending to remove it.

The AMD W6400 and Nvidia T1000 are higher performing cards but are north of 50w, so quite likely to put undue stress on the PCIe power regulator.

It is quite a remarkable little machine for emulation gaming and casual PC gaming as long as you are prepared to be realistic with detail settings for more recent games. I just wish the fan/bios wasn't so useless!

The HP Elite t755 (the t740 successor) will receive the Radeon RX6300, which is supposed to be the drop-up replacement for the E9173 in the t740, and that's projected to run roughly similar to the GTX1650 at ~30 watts (probably about right - it's essentially a half-bandwidth, half-RAM RX6400).
But yeah, if you can get a Quadro T600 at a reasonable price? Go for it. I've seen the Quadro T600/4GB listed at less than 100, which makes them decent small form factor one-slot cards at the prie. Once the t755s are announced the t740s are expected to be dumped (they can't run Windows embedded 11 due to their Raven Ridge/Zen1 derived microarchitecture), and if you pair it with a T600...should perform surprisingly well. That being said, the Radeon 780M graphics on AMD Phoenix (and upcoming 8000 series desktop) APUs are also roughly at GTX1650 levels, so it really depend on the current price points and what you plan to do with the machines.

 

[megatron-uk]

The new T755 looks like it will get a substantial bump in raw processor performance - that alone will be worth it for some people.

I got the T740 recently for £90, so I don't expect to be getting the replacement anytime soon!

Fortunately in my case I have no intention of putting Windows anywhere near this thing.

I do wonder what the sales figures of these things has been like - they seem to occupy an odd little niche in the market; way more performance than typically needed for a thin client and somewhat overlapping the low end ultra sff desktop models.

 

[WANg]

The new T755 looks like it will get a substantial bump in raw processor performance - that alone will be worth it for some people.

I got the T740 recently for £90, so I don't expect to be getting the replacement anytime soon!

Fortunately in my case I have no intention of putting Windows anywhere near this thing.

I do wonder what the sales figures of these things has been like - they seem to occupy an odd little niche in the market; way more performance than typically needed for a thin client and somewhat overlapping the low end ultra sff desktop models.

Well, there is a substantial microarch improvement going from Raven Ridge (what the V1756B is, essentially) to Renoir (what the V2546 is), although I got the distinctive feeling that HP was dragged kicking and screaming into upgrading it to a V2000 simply because of Win11. Would be nice if Microsoft also screens out Renoirs due to Zenbleed and force AMD/HP to go at least Zen3, and not that Ryzen embedded 7000 weirdness that they just announced.

Oh yeah, I am planning to order one as a drop-in replacement for the t740, and considering that I already have the existing infrastructure for it (extra MCX354-FCBT, existing 4 spindle chassis on the other end as an iSCSI storage device, etc), it's a no-brainer (well, probably minus migrating the current hypervisor from ESXi 6.5 to Proxmox 8, and switching all the guest VMs from VMWare Tools to its Spice/QEMU protocol equivalents). The big one that I want to know about the t755 is whether they accidentally include a better SRIOV implementation as the lack of PCIe ARI was a bit of a letdown for the t740. I think that the Wyse 5070 "big" actually included it, but I didn't manage to get one on my hands....yet.

As for demand? Probably not too bad, or at least, there are definite calls for them, but their competitors mostly gave up or went upmarket - Igel stopped making hardware altogether, Dell Wyse gave up on a multi-head thin client (no replacement for the 5070 big), the Lenovo ThinkCentre Tiny/Nanos are (except the neo 50q) non-starters, and I don't see much Fujitsu/Siemens, even though they make great thin clients - it would be nice to have an S9011 on my hands as they have Ryzen, a PCIe slot and an nVidia P400 card - they are also fairly rare stateside. If you want to hang 6+ monitors off a single small device and you don't want to pay for a Lenovo P6x0 or HP Z2 Mini G9, the t740/755 is pretty much the only thing available in 2024, at least in volume here.