TinyMiniMicro - Dell Precision 3240 Compact Workstation

[lmm7425]

I'm considering buying one of these for my Proxmox homelab.

Precision 3240 AI & Compact Desktop Workstation | Dell USA

The only small form factor workstation with AI-based optimization. Featuring VR-ready NVIDIA graphics, the latest Intel Xeon processors and Dell Optimizer for Precision.

www.dell.com

The main thing I'm looking for is ECC memory, and these offer ECC support with Xeon CPUs:

• Intel Xeon W-1250
• Intel Xeon W-1270
• Intel Xeon W-1290

I would probably get the cheapest model, strip off the OS and all the extras, choose the Xeon W-1250, then buy the ECC and SSD separately (to avoid the Dell markup).

It's ~2.3L (bigger than the typical 1L TinyMiniMicro nodes), but I'm curious how this performs thermally. I've found a few posts saying the thermal performance is bad, but apparently there are two different heatsinks (pages 61 and 62 of this guide). I'm wondering if the bigger heatsink on the Xeon makes up for that?

Love the series, looking forward to more!

 

[Navy_BOFH]

Following up on this since I've been seeing videos/posts of people stuffing the RTX A2000 card in these. Seems like they get a bit toasty but with BIOS performance/cooling settings not set to "quiet" it seems to hold CPU under 80 and GPU around 80 as well. I am tempted to pick one up as a compact "PC gaming console" and seeing if its TMM worthy as well!

My only gripe is with the "Compact/Ultra" format (Lenovo P360 Ultra is the same form factor) it is not quite TMM territory but not SFF either. In this case it means that I either get a GPU, or 10GbE - not both. At least with something like the SFF models I can stuff more components in it, but at the sake of now going up to a ~10L case.