Introduction to the HP t740 Thin client - the little box that could but better

[physx]

A Radeon W6400 fits well but I don't think anything significantly bigger could be squeezed in there.

Also, mind you that you have 8 PCIe lanes to work with, so if you want four m.2 slots, you'll need something that has an integrated PCIe switch.

 

[Da_Techie]

Thanks for the info. A quick search shows the W6400 Pro to be 168mm.

One of the quad port nvme cards I was looking at (GLOTRENDS PA40) was 175mm iirc. It was that long because of the PCIe switch chip and support of 110mm nvme cards.

One thing I thought of also was the height of the nvme connectors on the back side of the card, as the quad card has nvme connectors on both sides. The dual (GLOTRENDS PA20) has them on one side only.

 

[physx]

I think you could take a Dremel and cut off the end of the card if you don't need support for 110mm SSDs, although the extra thickness could be a problem. I've never tried thicker cards in my T740s.

 

[WANg]

Any body know what the maximum length of the card the pcie slot/chassis can take? I looked through HP docs and did not find it listed.

I was thinking of adding a quad pcie nvme adapter and use the T740 as a storage server.

Low profile/half-height, single slot, basically anything that fits into ~168mm x 69cm x 20cm, around 45w max power draw over PCIe 3.0x8. You'll need a low form factor blower on both sides to keep the NVMe cards cool or else it'll cook off...

 

[zzzoooom]

Does it have PCIe IGPU passthrough for proxmox, and transcoding support?

 

[Samir]

If you look at robert's site about the t740, he installs a w6400 in the pci slot and it looks like it might have just 1cm left of clearance. According to the details on the w6400 spec sheet the length of the card is 168mm. So I would guess 175mm would be the max or just shy of 7".

 

[WANg]

Does it have PCIe IGPU passthrough for proxmox, and transcoding support?

No. The Vega iGPUs (t540/640/740/755) cannot do passthrough at all, and even if it can, it’s VCN1 or VCN2 only (no AV1 encode/decode). As for PCIe passthrough of an external card? Not cleanly on the t740 (no PCIe ARI support in AGESA firmware so VFIO isn’t “safe”), strong maybe (tested currently functional but no guarantee of future support) for its t755 successor. You probably need something low draw like a single slot, low form factor Intel Arc A380, which can at least do AV1 encodes.