Tiny/Mini/Micro PC experiences

[mobilenvidia]

I think there is also a shift to notebooks in the industry this year given the move to remote work.

There must be a way to glue a LCD display to the lid and run a LVDS connection back into the system, wireless mouse and keyboard
Battery power will be a little harder

I've updated above chart
Added lowest pricing as per Ebay
Pricing is for a system with Buynow and complete with CPU/RAM/Drive
Again for Lenovo's only
The Patient should be able to do better than those prices, also if you have spare parts again you can do better
Added P340 as well for 10th Gen happiness

 

[mobilenvidia]

I've shifted the BIOS modding to another thread over here
Will make doing it for those brave enough easier to find and work with

 

[Parallax]

Just to note there is also a Lenovo M75-1q model as well, with a Ryzen 3400GE processor. I'm struggling to find it on the Lenovo site now although it was there a couple of months ago - but I know they exist because I own one.

 

[serverian]

Can't seem to find the difference between Prodesk 600 G4 and Elitedesk 800 G5 other than 8XXX and 9XXX series CPU support.

Are the USB ports the same? Anyone knows?

Does Prodesk 600 G4 have 2 x M.2 PCI-E SSD slot like Elitedesk 800 G5?

Thanks

 

[paf]

Prodesk 600 G4 PDF specs:
https://www8.hp.com/h20195/V2/GetPDF.aspx/4aa7-2965eee

Elitedesk 800 G5 PDF Specs:
https://www8.hp.com/h20195/v2/GetPDF.aspx/4AA7-5436EEAP.pdf

Important stuff for me:

-Yes, they both have 2 x M.2 PCI-E SSD slots.
-The Q270 chipset on the 600 supports vPro but don't know if the BIOS or other parts will support it (the specs have some references). My bet is that the 600 series do not support vPro.
-The 800 series supports vPro.
-On the list of optional ports for the 800 G5 there is a "1 HP Fiber NIC Port Flex I/O"!

I believe it is something like this (page 15):
http://h20195.www2.hp.com/v2/getpdf.aspx/c06042607.pdf?ver=1.0

P.S.: I will not buy one, but will place one to buy, on my calendar in 5 years time, if they are cheaper by then !

 

[djsteveh]

Not sure if this is the right place to post this but I wanted to share my experience with the EliteDesk 800 G2 i7-6700T. I've had a home lab for quite some time and wanted to remove my space heater Xeon workstation with something smaller. I don't need a lot of horse power just fast storage and a good amount of memory. That's when I found the STH mini micro project but I needed something with 64GB of RAM. Turns out even though the specs list 32GB as the max you can use 64GB.

If you look on the spec sheet for the CPU you can see it does support 64GB:

Product Specifications

quick reference guide including specifications, features, pricing, compatibility, design documentation, ordering codes, spec codes and more.

ark.intel.com

Forgive me if this has been posted somewhere already. I believe it's only the i7-6700T version which supports the full 64GB.

I have been running TimeTec DDR4 inside it now for a little bit and it works great. For about $650 I got the following:

- EliteDesk 800 G2 i7-6700T - 8GB - 128GB SSD - ebay ~300 shipped
- 64GB TimeTec DDR4 2666 kit - amazon ~ 220
- 1TB TeamGroup SSD - amazon ~115
- 1TB TeamGroup NVMe - amazon ~115

ESXi 7.0 installed with out any custom NIC drivers and recognizes everything. I will be looking for more to add to my lab.

 

[mobilenvidia]

Added M75q Gen2 AMD Ryzen 4000 series Tiny

 

[serverian]

I know this is a long shot but, has anyone installed P4801X in a Prodesk 600 G4?

 

[dhoffman]

I recently bought an HP EliteDesk 705 G2 and it has served me very well so far. I only needed a web browsing node and a thin client to connect to other servers. My rationale for purchasing this was it had the most external monitors per dollar and desk space is something I hold dearly (as well as noise). I have 16GB of RAM and a SATA SSD and it works well. Looking into running VMware ESXi on a more powerful machine and using this to connect to it. The internal speaker is very bad but that is to be expected.

 

[jetsofly]

Hiya, first post to the forums but I'm a longtime youtube commenter of the channel and appreciator of USFF/TMM desktops. To that end, I bought myself a new do-it-all 1L, a Dell Opti 5080 Micro. I've only had it the past day but my initial impressions of it are overall pretty good, though the thermals are.. poor. Very poor, if I'm honest. Like "David does Hardware"'s new XPS poor.

I have a 10500T (35w) and it steps into the 80*C+ range if I ask it to play a decade old video game or do two intensive tasks. It's brand new inside, no dust etc, and I've replaced the thermal paste with Noctua but it didn't make any difference. It seems like the heat sink is all aluminum with no copper in it at all, and the only fan is quite weak.

Any advice? I'd be willing to upgrade the cooling solution if it's a possibility, though I understand these things are manufactured to tolerance spec for the OEMs and might not be able to take an upgrade.

 

[BlueFox]

80C is not a problem, so I wouldn't worry about high temperatures. There's not really any disadvantage to running that hot. The limit is 100C on that CPU and it will throttle before it hits that. The cooling setup will become more effective as the delta between CPU and ambient temperature increases anyway.

 

[bimp]

First time post here, but I actually posed this comment/question at Lenovo ThinkCentre M75q Gen2 Tiny AMD Ryzen Based Review - YouTube

When specing out a new ThinkCentre M90q config, how do you ensure the build you order from Lenovo comes with two, usable M.2 slots? I’ll probably get one with the base 128GB and 4GB as I have the spare parts to spec it up after.

Or does the M90q, regardless of what config, always has two usable M.2 slots?

 

[nddulac]

I had an interesting (perhaps) experience with a Dell 3060 micro (i5-8500T) which I purchased on eBay. It came with a 128 MB SATA m.2 drive. I upgraded the memory to 32 GB (since my plan was to install Proxmox and use this a home lab for experimentation.) I also replaced the m.2 drive with a 1 TB Crucial NVMe drive. I was able to install Windows on the machine and test the read/write speeds to the new drive - they were tripled compared to the SATA m.2. "Cool!", thought I. "Let's install Proxmox!"

Well, the Proxmox installer would not recognize the drive. Nor would a Debian 10 install (not surprising since I believe Proxmox is built on Debian.) Anyhow, I swapped the NVMe with a 1TB WD Blue Sata M.2, and everything is working fine now.

I did some poking around, and thought I saw that the 3060 micro would support NVMe (and clearly it does for the purposes of running Windows), but I didn't save my work. I found it odd that the drive was recognized with one operating system, but not another, since I assumed that whether or not the drive was supported would be determined at the BIOS level. Shows you what I know . .

I did find this discussion. Optiplex 3060 1tb m.2 Nvme not supported It just all seems odd to me.

 

[stecky]

Great post!

Quick question about vPro. Patrick has mentioned it in several of his TMM posts and videos, but I think I may be missing the point. Is it just about having a remote kvm?

I am wanting to build a k8s cluster home lab so I don't think kvm will really buy me much. I'm thinking I am better off (budget-wise) with the lower-end chipsets.

My goal is a k8s cluster running kube-plex and various home-automation type things. Totally overkill, but I also want to learn k8s so as they say... two-birds, one-stone.

Would anyone care to weigh in on what level of machines I should be looking at? I see that some of the thin clients have processors that are on the Quick Sync compatibility list. I think I can pick those up pretty cheap (~$100 US?), should I be looking at those and just get a bunch of them or will they struggle with transcoding?

Budget is a major concern so I was thinking more, lower power nodes vs fewer, higher power ones would be better because it would let me start out small and ramp up as I have the money.

 

[Jeggs101]

If they're going to be at home, then no vPro is fine. A feature you might want from AMT and vPro is that they've got power on/ off remotely with vPro.

If you don't want that (or set to power on and off with a home plug) then you're fine getting cheaper levels of machines. If i'm looking at like the low/ midrange like the Dell 3050 and 5050, I'd get the 7050 instead if it was a few dollars (like $10) more just to have the functionality.

 

[Jeggs101]

When specing out a new ThinkCentre M90q config, how do you ensure the build you order from Lenovo comes with two, usable M.2 slots? I’ll probably get one with the base 128GB and 4GB as I have the spare parts to spec it up after.

Or does the M90q, regardless of what config, always has two usable M.2 slots?

I think it's regardless unless maybe you get the GPU option. At work they've all been 2 M.2s.

 

[stecky]

If they're going to be at home, then no vPro is fine. A feature you might want from AMT and vPro is that they've got power on/ off remotely with vPro.

If you don't want that (or set to power on and off with a home plug) then you're fine getting cheaper levels of machines. If i'm looking at like the low/ midrange like the Dell 3050 and 5050, I'd get the 7050 instead if it was a few dollars (like $10) more just to have the functionality.

Remote power on/off sounds cool. How would you use that exactly? It would be cool if they could turn on and off as the cluster workloads increase and decrease.

 

[tinfoil3d]

I think it's regardless unless maybe you get the GPU option. At work they've all been 2 M.2s.

Why would GPU matter, if both m2 slots are on the back of mb?

 

[Jeggs101]

Why would GPU matter, if both m2 slots are on the back of mb?

Not sure but I'm thinking pcie lanes maybe. No idea since I haven't used it.

 

[tinfoil3d]

Thought I'd share a little knowledge on Lenovo P330 tiny, first of all according to documentation it's never gonna offer x16 pcie, specs say only x8 is addressable whatever that means. the adaptor is custom and PN for that is 01AJ940 you can find it on encompass if you're in US. That may or may not fit p340 tiny as well. You may need to check on that. P330 at the time never came with a riser card unless you ordered it with i350 or GPU. For i350 i believe they'd deliver it with only x1 riser(yep, there's x1 riser card out there too). Many sellers on ebay offer it for around $50 but it's actually around 20 at encompass.
Anyway you shouldn't really expect a riser unless you order a PCIE card of the appropriate size.
I'm currently waiting for my P340, I specifically bought that with GPU so that I'll get a riser. GPU can be later used as a spare part, I'm planning on putting a fiber NIC in there instead, with some hacking around the custom bracket I guess.
I'll further update this if anyone is interested what's inside. I've big plans for this baby but bought it in a minimum possible config, only adding a GPU.