NEW HP T640 Thin Client Ryzen R1505G 4GB 16GF - NO KB/MOUSE, NO OS INSTALLED - $109

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WANg

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staph said:
@WANg it seems to be rated for 2400 ram but you’ve tested it with 2600 - any noticeable issues?

Have you tried stress testing the ram in the system?

I’m curious if 64GB of 2600 is contributing to the unexpected power downs...even a couple watts more than rated is nearly 10% of the total power draw...
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Well, to be honest, that USB-PD to HP Slim-barrel adapter is...not officially sanctioned, so if it works, great. If not, no big deal.
As soon as I switched it back to the official brick the issue went away. To be honest, even on the 96w Apple PD-brick it was showing signs of throttling (performance seemed "off").

As for stress testing the RAM - the RAM is known good because it was stressed tested already for at least 6 hours in the past on my t740. I actually felt more brave testing it on the t740 since it’s an actively cooled machine (with a blower), while the 640 depends on its passive heatpipe/heatsink setup. That being said, 2666 seems fine - I am not even sure if that DDR4-2400 specification was due to it being a hard limit, or the most economical RAM available for validation during the product announcement in 2018, and the same goes for the "32GB max" on the official documents. It's still fundamentally a Raven Ridge and is most similar in specs to a Ryzen 3 2200U/3200U, and those APUs can accept faster RAM. The machine is shipped by default from HP with DDR4-3200 memory, so I am sure it is fine.
 
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patrick80

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WANg said:
Well, to be honest, that USB-PD to HP Slim-barrel adapter is...not officially sanctioned, so if it works, great. If not, no big deal.
As soon as I switched it back to the official brick the issue went away. To be honest, even on the 96w Apple PD-brick it was showing signs of throttling (performance seemed "off").

As for stress testing the RAM...no - the RAM is known good because it was stressed tested already for 6 hours on my t740. I actually felt more brave testing it on the t740 since it was an actively cooled machine, while the 640 depends on its passive heatpipe/heatsink setup. That being said, 2666 seems fine - I am not even sure if that DDR4-2400 specification was due to it being the most economical RAM available during the product announcement in 2018, and the same goes for the "32GB max" on the official documents. It's still fundamentally a Raven Ridge and is most similar in specs to a Ryzen 3 2200U/3200U, and those APUs can accept faster RAM. The machine is shipped by default from HP with DDR4-3200 memory, so I am sure it is fine.
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Have you tried powering it directly through the USB-C port? I power my Lenovo P1 at home with an Apple USB-C power supply and at work with a lenovo brick that plugs into the proprietary power jack.
 
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WANg

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patrick80 said:
Have you tried powering it directly through the USB-C port? I power my Lenovo P1 at home with an Apple USB-C power supply and at work with a lenovo brick that plugs into the proprietary power jack.
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No - that’s a USB-C 3.1 port up front, not a USB-PD capable port. If it’s a PD port they’ll need to beef the circuitry up (which they didn’t) and run it to the back. It does not inject power into the thin client with my 60w brick, the 87w Apple brick or the 130w Dell brick that I have for an XPS15.

Eh, also, when you use the Apple brick with the P1, didn’t you have to disable the “slow charger” warning on the Lenovo Vantage app? I have an X1 Extreme Gen2 (the non-Xeon/non-EEC version of the P1), and while it can run off the Lenovo 130w box tip charger or the TB3 port on the left side via USB-PD, it’ll pop a slow charger warning, even with a Dell brick theoretically capable of pushing enough power to it. It certainly throttled the i7 on PD until I plug in the Lenovo box tip brick. My WD15 docking station will not push power to it even though it can do USB-PD to charge Apple MBP13s.
 
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radian23

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Planning to use this for pfsense. Any recommendations on a good nic card so I can have 2 RJ45s?
 
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RTM

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radian23 said:
Planning to use this for pfsense. Any recommendations on a good nic card so I can have 2 RJ45s?
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The options with this is quite limited.
HP has a fiber based m.2 card that you can use (I believe it is limited to 100Mbps), else you can use a USB based card.
Neither are great options and the built-in Realtek is not great either (you will probably want to use the Realtek driver discussed on the pfSense forum for better stability).

Honestly I believe you are better off getting a HP T730.
 
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patrick80

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WANg said:
No - that’s a USB-C 3.1 port up front, not a USB-PD capable port. If it’s a PD port they’ll need to beef the circuitry up (which they didn’t) and run it to the back. It does not inject power into the thin client with my 60w brick, the 87w Apple brick or the 130w Dell brick that I have for an XPS15.

Eh, also, when you use the Apple brick with the P1, didn’t you have to disable the “slow charger” warning on the Lenovo Vantage app? I have an X1 Extreme Gen2 (the non-Xeon/non-EEC version of the P1), and while it can run off the Lenovo 130w box tip charger or the TB3 port on the left side via USB-PD, it’ll pop a slow charger warning, even with a Dell brick theoretically capable of pushing enough power to it. It certainly throttled the i7 on PD until I plug in the Lenovo box tip brick. My WD15 docking station will not push power to it even though it can do USB-PD to charge Apple MBP13s.
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I get a warning in from the system tray, I just dismiss it. I think it's generated by Windows 10 rather than Lenovo Vantage, but I am subject to being mistaken. This is a P1 Gen 2, so very similar to your system as you said. I haven't notice a performance hit, but I'm mostly just browsing the web when I'm at home.
 
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patrick80

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RTM said:
The options with this is quite limited.
HP has a fiber based m.2 card that you can use (I believe it is limited to 100Mbps), else you can use a USB based card.
Neither are great options and the built-in Realtek is not great either (you will probably want to use the Realtek driver discussed on the pfSense forum for better stability).

Honestly I believe you are better off getting a HP T730.
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Something like this might fit, but the reviews state that it requires a jumper to be soldered in to work properly. The port RJ45 also faces the wrong way, so connecting a cable would be weird.

edit: Forgot the link to the adapter I was talking about: Amazon.com: Ableconn M2-NW107R M.2 Gigabit Ethernet Module (Right Angle RJ-45) - GigaLAN 1000BASE-T PCIe x1 M.2 A-E Key: Computers & Accessories
 
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radian23

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Too funny. I just canceled an order I had for an HP T730 thinking this would be a better fit. I'm glad I asked before order the T640.
 
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WANg

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RTM said:
The options with this is quite limited.
HP has a fiber based m.2 card that you can use (I believe it is limited to 100Mbps), else you can use a USB based card.
Neither are great options and the built-in Realtek is not great either (you will probably want to use the Realtek driver discussed on the pfSense forum for better stability).

Honestly I believe you are better off getting a HP T730.
Click to expand...
The fiber M2 is a Gigabit card (AT29M2-SC or LC), and it's based on the Broadcom Tigon (tg3) chipset - the SC is multimode, and the LC should be singlemode. It's time tested and not too bad - I am using it on my t730 (it's compatible with the t630, 730 and 640) so I can get a dedicated management port for ESXi. As for t730 being a viable option, it depends. If you threw a quad-port Intel i340 PCIe card and don't expect to do anything fancy like SRIOV, it's workable. It is getting a bit long in the tooth, though - the CPU is not that powerful for the power consumption figures, it needs DDR3 SODIMMs (16GB modules being stupidly expensive), and the video decoder can't do HEVC, so recycling it later for HTPC purposes won't work well, either.

If you want to have a bit more bang for the buck, gun for the t740 (which is the more powerful, Ryzen powered t730), but I don't think the prices will drop below 400 for the foreseeable future. Don't forget that the main NIC on the t730/t740 is also the Realtek 8111C. Your other choice is a Dell-Wyse 5070, but their PCIe ports are only x4 so less bandwidth to play with.
 
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WANg

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patrick80 said:
Something like this might fit, but the reviews state that it requires a jumper to be soldered in to work properly. The port RJ45 also faces the wrong way, so connecting a cable would be weird.
Click to expand...
Wait. You need a jumper soldered in....for which machine? And how is the RJ45 port facing the wrong way?
 
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ealvar

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patrick80 said:
Crap, I got distracted and forgot to paste the link: Amazon.com: Ableconn M2-NW107R M.2 Gigabit Ethernet Module (Right Angle RJ-45) - GigaLAN 1000BASE-T PCIe x1 M.2 A-E Key: Computers & Accessories It's a different adapter than the one you were talking about.
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Something like this might work better since it has the physical ethernet port separate from the PCIe card itself. Looks like it's a Realtek 8111H from the screenshot in the listing.

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radian23

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WANg said:
The fiber M2 is a Gigabit card (AT29M2-SC or LC), and it's based on the Broadcom Tigon (tg3) chipset - the SC is multimode, and the LC should be singlemode. It's time tested and not too bad - I am using it on my t730 (it's compatible with the t630, 730 and 640) so I can get a dedicated management port for ESXi. As for t730 being a viable option, it depends. If you threw a quad-port Intel i340 PCIe card and don't expect to do anything fancy like SRIOV, it's workable. It is getting a bit long in the tooth, though - the CPU is not that powerful, it needs DDR3 SODIMMs (16GB modules being stupidly expensive), and the video decoder can't do HEVC, so recycling it later for HTPC purposes won't work well, either.

If you want to have a bit more bang for the buck, gun for the t740 (which is the more powerful, Ryzen powered t730), but I don't think the prices will drop below 400 for the foreseeable future. Don't forget that the main NIC on the t730/t740 is also the Realtek 8111C. Your other choice is a Dell-Wyse 5070, but their PCIe ports are only x4 so less bandwidth to play with.
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I appreciate the info. Trying to keep this sub $200 for the time being. I'm just looking to run pfsense on a home network with about 30 clients at any given time. I'm planning to throw in an intel quad NIC that has lower power consumption. I'm doing crypto mining and wanted something a bit more robust compared to what I was previously using. Increased security and the ability to prioritize traffic will come in handy. Look like the t730 should fit the bill well.
 
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WANg

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radian23 said:
I appreciate the info. Trying to keep this sub $200 for the time being. I'm just looking to run pfsense on a home network with about 30 clients at any given time. I'm planning to throw in an intel quad NIC that has lower power consumption. I'm doing crypto mining and wanted something a bit more robust compared to what I was previously using. Increased security and the ability to prioritize traffic will come in handy. Look like the t730 should fit the bill well.
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You can probably go cheaper than the t730 if all you need is flip packets for about 30 machines - look for the t620 plus (which can also take a quadport card). the GX420CA APU is fine for up to, say, 500Mbit, and uses less power than the RX427BB. The RX427BB can pull up to 45 watts off the taps.
 
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WANg

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patrick80 said:
Something like this might fit, but the reviews state that it requires a jumper to be soldered in to work properly. The port RJ45 also faces the wrong way, so connecting a cable would be weird.

edit: Forgot the link to the adapter I was talking about: Amazon.com: Ableconn M2-NW107R M.2 Gigabit Ethernet Module (Right Angle RJ-45) - GigaLAN 1000BASE-T PCIe x1 M.2 A-E Key: Computers & Accessories
Click to expand...
The regular NW107 has the RJ45 socket pointing up, but in situations like that you might be better off using a Commell M2-210 NIC. I think there are also sellers on Aliexpress shrilling for M2 based i217LM NICs...
 
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radian23

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WANg said:
You can probably go cheaper than the t730 if all you need is flip packets for about 30 machines - look for the t620 plus (which can also take a quadport card). the GX420CA APU is fine for up to, say, 500Mbit, and uses less power than the RX427BB. The RX427BB can pull up to 45 watts off the taps.
Click to expand...
It looks like the T730 will consume about 10 to 15 watts over the T620 plus. Initially I said no big deal but that adds up to around $10.50 a year. Crazy to think about.

Now I'm thinking of a netgate SG-1100...
 
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