HPE EliteDesk 705 Mini G3 $160!

[Jeggs101]

8GB of memory and 256GB SSD too. HP Elitedesk 705 G3 Mini A6-8570E / 8GB DDR4 / 256GB SSD Warranty until 2021 | eBay

The CPU sucks in these. It should be like a higher power Atom C3338 performance with the integrated GPU.

Still, $160 with a SSD and 8GB of memory isn't too bad. I'm thinking this is just a cheap cluster node.

@Patrick and @WANg either of you planning to do a guide on these?

Edit: Here's a thread on them https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/hp-elitedesk-705-mini-g3-notes.28983/

 

[Patrick]

I am thinking of doing one. I got the 16GB model which was more expensive. This is probably a better idea. 16GB with two low-power cores is probably too much. Not bad for a RDP browser box though.

 

[WANg]

8GB of memory and 256GB SSD too. HP Elitedesk 705 G3 Mini A6-8570E / 8GB DDR4 / 256GB SSD Warranty until 2021 | eBay

The CPU sucks in these. It should be like a higher power Atom C3338 performance with the integrated GPU.

Still, $160 with a SSD and 8GB of memory isn't too bad. I'm thinking this is just a cheap cluster node.

@Patrick and @WANg either of you planning to do a guide on these?

Edit: Here's a thread on them https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/hp-elitedesk-705-mini-g3-notes.28983/

I don't have plans or the budget to buy one (yet). I am also not in the market for an AMD Piledriver APU - the t630 uses the same RAM and offers about the same performance, and it’s only 100 USD on average but with much less RAM/SSD (the APU on that machine is soldered though) - however, if the 705G3 chassis can take an Athon 200GE or other AM4 APUs, I might change my tune.

 

[Patrick]

I ordered an Athlon 200GE as well. We shall see how long it takes to arrive.

 

[jmsq]

I'd be worried about the upgrade path of these considering it uses the B300 chipset. I had the Lenovo equivalent of this (M715q G1) and not even jumping through quite a few hoops to successfully load a G2's BIOS onto it would allow it to boot with a Zen-based chip in it. Will be very interested if this experiment succeeds though.

 

[stamasd]

For essentially the same cost I picked up one of these a few days ago: Hp Elite Desk 800 G1 SFF Intel i7-4770 3.4GHz 8GB RAM 500GB HDD | eBay
It's still in the mail, comes with an i7 Haswell, 8GB RAM and a half-TB of spinning rust. It's a bit bigger form factor than the one in the OP but it doesn't bother me much. I'm going to build my new cloud around it.
It has 4 PCIe expansion slots (1x16, 1x4, 2x1) all half-height which opens a lot of possibilities.

 

[WANg]

I'd be worried about the upgrade path of these considering it uses the B300 chipset. I had the Lenovo equivalent of this (M715q G1) and not even jumping through quite a few hoops to successfully load a G2's BIOS onto it would allow it to boot with a Zen-based chip in it. Will be very interested if this experiment succeeds though.

Wait. You tried to put a Ryzen APU into a m715q Tiny Gen1 and it didn't work (or did it, the sentence reads like a double negative...)? I thought the Gen1 and Gen2 uses the same BIOS and practically the same chassis...my guess is that unless they did some additional lockouts (or require an intermediary BIOS to allow both the Bristol/Raven Ridge SKUs to share one chassis, and then reflash for the correct one) all you have to do is swap the PSU from the default 65 to 90w and it should just work...

Update: huh - looks like for the m715q Tiny, the old Bristol Ridge m715q have an 8MB EEPROM, while the Raven Ridge ones have a 16MB EEPROM - if you have a ROM programmer and can solder in a compatible 16MB chip (8 leg, 5mm pitch SOIC), it’s theoretically doable. I wonder if there are high resolution photos of the EliteDesk 705G3 Mini system board available...

 

[jmsq]

Wait. You tried to put a Ryzen APU into a m715q Tiny Gen1 and it didn't work (or did it, the sentence reads like a double negative...)? I thought the Gen1 and Gen2 uses the same BIOS and practically the same chassis...my guess is that unless they did some additional lockouts (or require an intermediary BIOS to allow both the Bristol/Raven Ridge SKUs to share one chassis, and then reflash for the correct one) all you have to do is swap the PSU from the default 65 to 90w and it should just work...

Update: huh - looks like for the m715q Tiny, the old Bristol Ridge m715q have an 8MB EEPROM, while the Raven Ridge ones have a 16MB EEPROM - if you have a ROM programmer and can solder in a compatible 16MB chip (8 leg, 5mm pitch SOIC), it’s theoretically doable. I wonder if there are high resolution photos of the EliteDesk 705G3 Mini system board available...

Heh, that's actually my Reddit post. I soldered a 16MB chip onto the board and loaded the G2's BIOS onto it, which did in fact work; the system still booted with the 9700E in it, and showed the new BIOS/AGESA versions. However as soon as I put a Ryzen 2400GE chip into it, it would no longer POST. My guess is the embedded controller on the M715Q G1 is sufficiently different from G2 to be incompatible with Zen (and Lenovo never provided any EC updates files for G1 to experiment with.)

 

[jmsq]

If anyone has one of these systems handy, could you please share the full AGESA version string from CPU-Z or equivalent (preferably from the latest BIOS)? The HP bios release notes don't look promising, but just want to verify.

 

[stamasd]

Haha I see the Elitedesk 800 I linked to above has sold 6pcs in the last day - while in the past week it only sold one. I guess some of those sales came from here.

 

[WANg]

Heh, that's actually my Reddit post. I soldered a 16MB chip onto the board and loaded the G2's BIOS onto it, which did in fact work; the system still booted with the 9700E in it, and showed the new BIOS/AGESA versions. However as soon as I put a Ryzen 2400GE chip into it, it would no longer POST. My guess is the embedded controller on the M715Q G1 is sufficiently different from G2 to be incompatible with Zen (and Lenovo never provided any EC updates files for G1 to experiment with.)

Ah, you left the poor Chinese dude on that thread hanging.
Hmmm, you’ll probably need an m715q Tiny G2 to do some differential comparisons...let me see what I can do. I was looking for one earlier...

 

[jmsq]

Ah, you left the poor Chinese dude on that thread hanging.
Hmmm, you’ll probably need an m715q Tiny G2 to do some differential comparisons...let me see what I can do. I was looking for one earlier...

The issue there is I did the BIOS upgrade too early before the testing processor arrived. At the time it was very difficult to source a 2400GE in an non-OEM system and it shipped from the UK. By the time I ran into the CPU issues the thread had locked and I couldn't respond anymore. I have responded to anyone that contacted me by PM about it.

FWIW I ended up getting a G2 instead. The motherboards are visually identical aside from BIOS chip size, but I didn't do a chip-by-chip comparison to figure out if there were other chip differences. I believe there are some minor layout differences as I later discovered some HD Audio weirdness with the new BIOS on G1.

 

[WANg]

The issue there is I did the BIOS upgrade too early before the testing processor arrived. At the time it was very difficult to source a 2400GE in an non-OEM system and it shipped from the UK. By the time I ran into the CPU issues the thread had locked and I couldn't respond anymore. I have responded to anyone that contacted me by PM about it.

FWIW I ended up getting a G2 instead. The motherboards are visually identical aside from BIOS chip size, but I didn't do a chip-by-chip comparison to figure out if there were other chip differences. I believe there are some minor layout differences as I later discovered some HD Audio weirdness with the new BIOS on G1.

Hmmm...is the G2 100% backwards compatible with the G1, as in, will it take the Bristol Ridge chips with no issues at all? Yeah, it could be something Agesa related. The question is how you’ll be able to find out...

 

[jmsq]

Hmmm...is the G2 100% backwards compatible with the G1, as in, will it take the Bristol Ridge chips with no issues at all? Yeah, it could be something Agesa related. The question is how you’ll be able to find out...

Yes it is, Lenovo still sells the G2 with Bristol Ridge chips on the lower end models. The only B300 board I'm aware of that has multi-generation CPU support from the start is the ASRock A300M-STX and its AGESA string mentions "ComboAm4PI." If this HP only mentions Stoney/BristolPI, that's a very bad sign short of actually testing a Zen CPU in the machine. If it mentions RavenPI then it should work as well (RavenPI is what the Lenovo G2 w/Raven+Bristol compatibility uses.)

 

[WANg]

For essentially the same cost I picked up one of these a few days ago: Hp Elite Desk 800 G1 SFF Intel i7-4770 3.4GHz 8GB RAM 500GB HDD | eBay
It's still in the mail, comes with an i7 Haswell, 8GB RAM and a half-TB of spinning rust. It's a bit bigger form factor than the one in the OP but it doesn't bother me much. I'm going to build my new cloud around it.
It has 4 PCIe expansion slots (1x16, 1x4, 2x1) all half-height which opens a lot of possibilities.

*sigh*. Please tell me you paid substantially less than listing price - considering that there are 800G2 (Skylake) SFFs also on sale for around that ballpark, which has an HEVC capable Quicksync SoC... There was also this recent thread about a Coffee Lake SFF Celeron machine going for 90 dollars - I am pretty sure that's done as-is.

 

[WANg]

Yes it is, Lenovo still sells the G2 with Bristol Ridge chips on the lower end models. The only B300 board I'm aware of that has multi-generation CPU support from the start is the ASRock A300M-STX and its AGESA string mentions "ComboAm4PI." If this HP only mentions Stoney/BristolPI, that's a very bad sign short of actually testing a Zen CPU in the machine. If it mentions RavenPI then it should work as well (RavenPI is what the Lenovo G2 w/Raven+Bristol compatibility uses.)

Hmmm...Do you have both a G1 and a G2 and can do a live test? We can look at AGESA strings all day, but it really needs to be tested live to make a good determination. The pricing difference between a Bristol and Raven m715q doesn't really justify buying a G1 now and swapping out the Ryzen....unless you have a Ryzen 2 APU sitting around.

I am more interested in the Ryzen5 2400GE equipped G2 since it performs almost the same as the HP t740 thin client and is almost 1-200 dollars cheaper short of valid best offers (none on evilBay at the moment) - the one big benefit of the t740 is the PCIe slot, but as an HTPC or as a hypervisor node, it's not that bad. Of course, this can also be compared against the HP t640 (the APU is weaker and embedded, it comes with much less RAM and much smaller eMMC, but that has the benefit of supporting 2 NICs...and it's cheaper to-boot)

 

[stamasd]

*sigh*. Please tell me you paid substantially less than listing price - considering that there are 800G2 (Skylake) SFFs also on sale for around that ballpark, which has an HEVC capable Quicksync SoC... There was also this recent thread about a Coffee Lake SFF Celeron machine going for 90 dollars - I am pretty sure that's done as-is.

No, that's what I paid. It's an i7, vs an i5 in the G2 and for my application that matters (8 threads > 4 threads for heavy compilations). $155 is only a little bit more than the CPU itself is worth. I received it today, set it up and it's perfectly adequate for the task.

 

[jmsq]

Hmmm...Do you have both a G1 and a G2 and can do a live test? We can look at AGESA strings all day, but it really needs to be tested live to make a good determination. The pricing difference between a Bristol and Raven m715q doesn't really justify buying a G1 now and swapping out the Ryzen....unless you have a Ryzen 2 APU sitting around.

I am more interested in the Ryzen5 2400GE equipped G2 since it performs almost the same as the HP t740 thin client and is almost 1-200 dollars cheaper short of valid best offers (none on evilBay at the moment) - the one big benefit of the t740 is the PCIe slot, but as an HTPC or as a hypervisor node, it's not that bad. Of course, this can also be compared against the HP t640 (the APU is weaker and embedded, it comes with much less RAM and much smaller eMMC, but that has the benefit of supporting 2 NICs...and it's cheaper to-boot)

I no longer have the G1, but based on actual testing I did:

G1: Bristol Ridge only, BIOS hacks will not fix.
G2: Bristol Ridge (shipped with 9700E) and Raven Ridge (2400GE non-PRO tested); Picasso untested.

Based on this I wouldn't recommend getting a G1 unless you already have it. G2 should be good for anything up to Raven Ridge, but I'd stick to Lenovo's supported processor list to be safe.

 

[WANg]

I no longer have the G1, but based on actual testing I did:

G1: Bristol Ridge only, BIOS hacks will not fix.
G2: Bristol Ridge (shipped with 9700E) and Raven Ridge (2400GE non-PRO tested); Picasso untested.

Based on this I wouldn't recommend getting a G1 unless you already have it. G2 should be good for anything up to Raven Ridge, but I'd stick to Lenovo's supported processor list to be safe.

Hmm...Okay. We can defiitely check PSRef, which is Lenovo’s specifications reference (something left over from the IBM days).

The Gen 1 machines with the Bristol Ridge CPUs (8 (early Bristol) or 9 (late Bristol) series) are the 10M2/10M3 models.
The Gen 2 machines are 10VG, which are 9 series (late Bristol) or Ryzen 2xxx (Raven) based.

The odd-man-out is their m715q gen2 based thin client models, which are 10VL. Those have early Bristol and Athlon 200GE (Raven) models. If anyone shops for a m715q, knowing the model # will be super-useful, since it looks to me that most sellers are not that saavy with the distinction

Then the more interesting question: can we take advantage of the 10VL weirdness?

My guess is that the 10VL might have the bigger BIOS...or maybe it uses a different ROM setup that will fit the early Bristols and a Athlon 200GE in their support list so they can re-use the 8MB boards from the 10M2/M3 machines...It's a possibility.

Thin clients also don't have much of a secondary market so they are dumped rather quickly during liquidations (provided that many changed hands...HP certainly did, but I am not sure about Lenovo. it's still a good idea to put up an eBay alert for this)....