(US) 90 dollar Wyse 5070 Thin client/mini-server?

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cageek

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HI all, I joined to get involved with the 5070 thread here, I currently run home assistant but have like many others have, been plagued with sd fails, so we are looking to migrate to an alternative, after much study these wyse machines seem to be the best bang for buck, out pricing the Lenovo m600 and nuc. I found out about this machine today (i brought mine from ebay UK) and it seems there is not much known about these machines as a viable step up from pi. Would like to ask you all if you could share any information about the 5070 that i can report back to the home assistant group it would be great, all the best
OK, I'll give it a shot. A used "slim" one is nominally 1.5x to 2.5x as expensive as pi with a case and PSU. Maybe at some point, large companies start to blow them out, but that doesn't appear to be happening yet. It doesn't have the same user group support, but than again, it's much closer to a PC. Its really feels like a laptop someone put in a server box.

You can't really expand the I/O on the slims - theoretically there are options, but they really don't exist in the aftermarket. You might be able to add wireless, but you're better off buying one already configured (instead of running wires to antennas, etc.) - the antennas are standard RP-SMA. The power brick is ubiquitous (the same as current Dell laptops). The base ram is 4GB. You'll probably want to add an SSD, but the emmc reads at about half? the speed of an SSD and there is a minimum of 16GB on board (no idea about endurance on that). Multiple displays, USB, etc. Oh, and the BIOS can be locked up, which might want to check before you make a large buy.

I have a pi running as a general server box: DNS, dhcp, time, plex, nextcloud, etc., and I'm going to be changing over, and hopefully adding a few things.
 
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Samir

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The base ram is 4GB. You'll probably want to add an SSD, but the emmc reads at about half? the speed of an SSD and there is a minimum of 16GB on board (no idea about endurance on that). Multiple displays, USB, etc. Oh, and the BIOS can be locked up, which might want to check before you make a large buy.
The base ram varies based on what it originally came with. You can purchase these in various configurations so the ram can be as low as 2GB or as high as 8GB, or maxed out or none at all if it's ebay--basically, there is no 'base ram'.

The built in ssd is made for high endurance. I think this applies to almost any thin client. I have original neoware thin clients still running on their original doms, which are closing in on 20yrs of being on 24x7. I don't think the speeds would be slower than a sata ssd--if anything they would be faster. And like the ram, sizes vary.

As far as the bios, most Wyse units bios had the password 'Fireport'. But if the user change this, it is a minor issue--there is a jumper on the motherboard to clear it:
 

cageek

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The base ram varies based on what it originally came with. You can purchase these in various configurations so the ram can be as low as 2GB or as high as 8GB, or maxed out or none at all if it's ebay--basically, there is no 'base ram'.
I agree. I meant from Dell - I haven't seen less than 4GB.

The built in ssd is made for high endurance. I think this applies to almost any thin client. I have original neoware thin clients still running on their original doms, which are closing in on 20yrs of being on 24x7. I don't think the speeds would be slower than a sata ssd--if anything they would be faster. And like the ram, sizes vary.
I was talking about the 16GB or 32GB built-in emmc (not an M.2 SATA SSD). It's read speed is about 275MB/s vs. ~500+ MB/s for a typical SSD.
 

Samir

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I agree. I meant from Dell - I haven't seen less than 4GB.


I was talking about the 16GB or 32GB built-in emmc (not an M.2 SATA SSD). It's read speed is about 275MB/s vs. ~500+ MB/s for a typical SSD.
Gotcha. I used to see 2GB on the thinpro models, but maybe they're 4GB now too. I dunno as I'm usually only looking seriously at the windows versions of these things.

Interesting. I've never benched one so I could see that being the case since endurance is more important to Dell than the speeds. I don't think any of my thin client ssds are terribly fast, but they usually work fairly snappy in stock form. :)
 

WANg

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HI all, I joined to get involved with the 5070 thread here, I currently run home assistant but have like many others have, been plagued with sd fails, so we are looking to migrate to an alternative, after much study these wyse machines seem to be the best bang for buck, out pricing the Lenovo m600 and nuc. I found out about this machine today (i brought mine from ebay UK) and it seems there is not much known about these machines as a viable step up from pi. Would like to ask you all if you could share any information about the 5070 that i can report back to the home assistant group it would be great, all the best
What's "Home Assistant"? Some Linux distribution designed for home automation purposes? You want us to do the research to tell you what you'll need to run it?

Seriously if it's used by us home-lab guys it'll probably run on a self-contained VM (probably imported VDI) in our hypervisor environments instead of actual dedicated hardware, unless you need to interface with sensors.
Then either do USB passthrough on the hypervisor or get a real machine. The same line of reasoning regarding the use of thin clients also works for Wyse 5060 or HP t520/t530/t620/t630 thin client (with older AMD APUs) - stateside it's about 30-60 USD for one. If all you need is 2GB RAM, 8/16/32GB eMMC (both soldered and not upgradeable) and x86/x64, you can go lower and probably use a Wyse 3040 (Cherry Trail Atom), the HP t420 (gimped Jaguar) or t430 thin client (Gemini Lake Atom, 6w TDP versus 10w on the Wyse 5070). Those things are stupid cheap (40 dollars accepted including shipping on eBay best offers for US buyers). They are probably more than enough for the task at hand, unless the software have heavy lifting plugins running locally like AI inferencing based on camera screen captures or something ridiculous like that - in which case - use a real server or a Jetson with inferencing hardware.

If it's longevity you want, buy appropriate media for the device in question - I only use Sandisk/Samsung Class U3/A2/V20 SDXC drives in my devices (Rpi2/3/4s and a few dashcams/security cams), and those machines generate signals data for SDR playback, write ADS-B data to archives and do weekly-overwritten HD camera footage, and I haven't had issues with media failures for the past 12-18 months. However, I did have to tell people to pull "Microcenter checkout specials" (those are the cheap class 4/6/10 generic cards sold at the checkout line at the local (US) MicroCenter computer stores for a small amount of money) out of their dashcams and RPis. Those are slow and tend to have low service life. I get the usual noise from cheapskates about blowing 20 dollars to run a 35 dollar device...until I point out the equal absurdity of expecting a 35 dollar device with a 5 dollar SD card to reliably capture and store video footage on a security camera keeping tabs on a million dollar home, or monitoring the road for a Bimmer worth 80,000 USD.

Of course, the question is also whether the OS in question (HassOS) implements copy-on-write via memory based filesystems for the OS and keeping writes to a minimum like HP ThinPro or Wyse TermOS...I ran it on a VM and don't see it happening. There's also quite a bit that I don't like about HassOS (starting with their gimped userland, the odd greeting screen in Chinese (whaaaa...?) and the kernel, which is in that Linux kernel 5 danger zone for Gemini lake machines), but that's a different subject altogether.

What exactly are you planning to do on it? The Wyse 5070s are efficient little quadcore Atoms, and this is the case even for the base model J4105 model. Those are Goldmont atom cores - individually they might be a bit weak, but collectively they are quite decent, at least performant against the AMD embedded cores (except the Ryzen embedded stuff). Power usage on the 5070 is around 4w idle, 12-13w maxed out (4k VP9 playback on Google Chrome in Windows 10). The 5070 has 2 DDR4 SODIMM slots (the same as the ones found in most post-Haswell laptops) and will support up to 16GB of RAM in Windows 10, and 32GB in Linux. Then of course, what's the benefit of running x86 instead of ARM for something like this? I have no idea. What don't they have compared to the Pi? GPIO pins and hats that use them (which is a big thing for the RPi folks). If you need them, the Dell won't support it (and neither would their fellow thin client cousins, the NUCs, TinyMiniMicro boxes and etc) Of course, the 5070 does have, what, 6 USB 3.0 Type A ports? If your ZigBee/X10/IRDA dongle are USB, it'll be do just fine.

The 5070 has a SATA M2 slot but you'll need at least 2280 - the 2242 drives don't fit. I don't consider storage speed to be that much of an issue. Frankly, I kept my eMMC untouched and went directly to the M2. If th M2 wears out I can toss it. If the eMMC wears out, I'll have to toss the machine (even though eMMC is surprisingly resilient. My Lenovo tablet from 2013 is still doing just fine with its 32GB chip...although it's always been rather slow)

If cheap and cheerful is all you need just for a home automation gateway, yeah, it'll be just fine. Of course, just spin up a VM for the task instead.
 
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lopgok

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Why is it that windows only supports 16gb of ram while linux supports 32gb of ram. I currently have two 4gb sticks and I am thinking of upgrading.
 
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WANg

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Why is it that windows only supports 16gb of ram while linux supports 32gb of ram. I currently have two 4gb sticks and I am thinking of upgrading.
Intel driver issues (probably). The same hardware works just fine on 32GB of RAM (2x16GB SODIMM) in Linux, but when it’s on Win10 Pro x64 would either simply fail to boot, or boot up really slowly to the point where it takes several hours to see a login screen. Pull a single 16GB SODIMM and the machine works just fine again. Intel never officially validated this machine to work beyond 8GB of RAM on Windows, so 16 is pushing it, and 32 is probably a bridge too far. Considering that the HP t640/740s (much better machines) can do 64GB just fine, I didn’t really need to bother with this.
 
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hass.io

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Cheers all for your input on this, and Wang you know your stuff, I am glad you guys gave good feedback on the unit, it's a rugged machine which will perform with ease its intended task, cheers all for your advice best of luck :)
 
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hk92doom

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After my last adventure with BIOS update I decided to collect the flash memory content. It turned out that there are several flash memory chips on the motherboard.

U2501
- 128M-bit/16 MiB Winbond W25Q128FW
BIOS

U2402 - 4M-bit/512KiB Winbond W25X40CL
flash chip for IT8739 - Super I/O chip w/LPC interface

U5502 - 2M-bit/256 KiB Winbond W25X20CL
flash chip for PS181 - Dual-mode DisplayPort Source enablement for a native DisplayPort-only GPUs

U9502 - 1M-bit/128 KiB Gigadevice GD25D10BT
U9602 - 1M-bit/128 KiB Gigadevice GD25D10BT
flash chip for Embedded Controller (EC)


During the process, I also took notes on how to recover the BIOS

Restart the computer.
Press and hold the CTRL key + ESC key on the keyboard until the BIOS Recovery page appears.
From the menu it is possible to reset BIOS or enter BIOS recovery

BIOS recovery images are located on eMMC drive partition 4 - /EFI/Dell/Bios/Recovery
BIOS recovery files:
BIOS_CUR.RCV
BIOS_PREV.RCV

Alternatively, it is possible to recover the BIOS using a USB stick and place the BIOS file there renamed as BIOS_IMG.RCV
Boot menu is accesible by holding the F12 key.
 

arglebargle

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Okay, anyone got some ideas on how to torture a 5070 for...science? Keep in mind that this is a 5070, not a 5070 extended, so it’s not like I can pelt it with 40GbE traffic until it dies...
Throw PLEX on it and see how many transcodes you can get out of J5005 simultaneously. That was my original thought for mine, but I don't have space/time to work on it right now. The base 5070 (not extended) could be a fantastic sleeper PLEX transcode box if you can figure out how to stick more bandwidth in it.
 
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WANg

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Throw PLEX on it and see how many transcodes you can get out of J5005 simultaneously. That was my original thought for mine, but I don't have space/time to work on it right now. The base 5070 (not extended) could be a fantastic sleeper PLEX transcode box if you can figure out how to stick more bandwidth in it.
Well, I only have the J4105, but I don't think the performance delta versus the J5005 is that much (~10-12%?)
It'll probably make a pretty good Plex box considering that it runs a Kaby Lake GT1 GPU, which supports more hardware transcoding than the GCN5 Vegas on the Zen+ APUs. If my limited testing on Handbrake (using Quicksync) is reflective of general trends it'll do 1k resolution H265 at ~15w at almost-real-time. Not super-fast, but good enough for most needs.
 
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hk92doom

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This subject has been bothering me for a while. What kind of transfer rate can I get from this device? As a reminder, the Wyse5070 is equipped with PCIe 2.0 x4

PCIe 2.0 x4 effective data transfer rate after inefficient 8b/10b en/decoding (other overhead not included):
500MB/s * x4 = 2.0GB/s * 8 = 16Gb/s

I ran some quick tests, no tuning was used, just the default values on the Debian-based box.



TEST 1
Two 10GbE dual-port cards (SFN5162F-R7 and Qlogic BCM57810) connected by two separate fiber optic cables. Two instances of iperf3. MTU 9000.

One port in use. 9.90 Gb/s achieved
Code:
[  5]   7.00-8.00   sec  1.15 GBytes  9.90 Gbits/sec               
[  5]   8.00-9.00   sec  1.15 GBytes  9.90 Gbits/sec               
[  5]   9.00-10.00  sec  1.15 GBytes  9.90 Gbits/sec
Two ports in use. ~7Gb/s on each. Combined output ~14.3Gb/s
Code:
[  5]  70.00-71.00  sec   842 MBytes  7.06 Gbits/sec

[  5]  70.00-71.00  sec   865 MBytes  7.25 Gbits/sec
CPU usage on Wyse5070 as a server.
Code:
  PID USER      PR  NI    VIRT    RES    SHR S  %CPU  %MEM     TIME+ COMMAND
22071 root      20   0    7876   4708   4188 R  88.7   0.1   1:20.81 iperf3 -s 192.168.6.26 -p 5200                                                                                        
22123 root      20   0    7876   4684   4172 R  88.7   0.1   1:13.66 iperf3 -s 192.168.7.25 -p 5300


TEST 2
Two Mellanox Connectx-3 configurations in 40GbE mode. PC and thin client connected via AOC. In the PC the card occupied PCIe 3.0 x8 slot(63Gb/s) vs Wyse 5070 PCIe 2.0 x4(16Gb/s). Both reported 40GbE link. One problem on Wyse 5070, once inserted the Mellanox card knocks out my M.2 SSD. I had to use USB Ubuntu Live to run the test.
The rate reported by iperf3 after the test was done 14.1 Gb/s
 

Samir

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Awesome work on the bandwidth testing. :)

The difference in single thread performance betwen the j4105 and j5005 isn't much, but it's about 10% or so:

And there's a whole bunch of these with the j5005 or the j4105 that will eventually hit the $90 price point for those interested:

And if someone spots one with windows on it versus thinos/pcoip/etc, I would love to know so I can have an upgrade. :)

Be sure to call in your order and have them allocate the cdw part number to your order right then--otherwise you may not get it if it gets allocated to someone else's order.

Oh and if anyone wants a brand new open box 8TB exos sas for $108 +ship +tax, this is your lucky day: ;)

But call it in or you'll be in line with the other online orders...
 
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cageek

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My quest to add a second ethernet to a slim model has been somewhat trying. I got this M.2. A/E-key Ethernet card about a week ago:

IOCREST 22x30mm M.2 A Key and E Key to 1 Port 10/100/1000Mbps Gigabit Ethernet NIC Network Card

but it was not recognized by the BIOS or OS. Of course, it might just be DOA - it is a new product. The daughter board can be mounted in plastic, just barely fits, the biggest problem is that the cabling is a little large (hits top of case) so the headers would have to be swapped to right angle ones.

Anyway, since that's out, I'm moving on to another adapter, probably the Commell M2-210. It has the advantage of being smaller and seems to have a lower-profile cable from the literature, but it is more expensive.

If anyone has any experience using non-WIFI cards in the A/E-key slot (especially ethernet), I'd be interested in hearing pro or con. I've use the OEM Intel WIFI card as a client , and I'm currently using a Qualcomm QCNFA364A as a WAP (a little low power, but otherwise great), so WIFI cards seem to have no problems.
 
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naseto

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I have the Wyse Extended version, and I was planning to use it as a very low power backup solution. I knew that there are no sata slots on the board itself so I knew I had to buy a card for one of the M2 slots. Since I already have the sata ssd slot populated I started looking for a card that fits the A + E slot. I got this one from aliexpress:


And surprisingly it worked out of the box and was recognised in ESXi (6.7). I could even pass it throgh to FreeNas which recognies it immediately.


My setup is a bit wierd since I will run FreeNas Virtualized and will attach the hard drives using a Sata to Esata cable + dock, and I am still waiting for a cable which I can route through the internals so that I can close the enclosure, but I am pretty happy since everything worked out of the box.

@cageek this item might also be of interest to you since it will allow you to try a bunch of more cards.

Pics:

IMG_4436.jpg

IMG_4437.jpg

IMG_4438.jpg
 
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cageek

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@cageek this item might also be of interest to you since it will allow you to try a bunch of more cards.

Pics:
...
Thanks for replying. That's an interesting setup. It's good to see another card working. Would you happen to know what the BIOS says on the M.2 slot entry in the information section?

Your link to the other item didn't make it thru intact.
 
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cageek

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BIOS stuff...
If you're on Linux you can install BIOS updates via 'fwupd'. A summary page is here is as good as any:

fwupd - ArchWiki

I've never had a system that got BIOS updates delivered in that way, and I suspect many of us are running headless and would not see it otherwise. It seems quite nice. It essentially goes thru all the steps you described, and just automates the delivery.
 
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hk92doom

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If you're on Linux you can install BIOS updates via 'fwupd'. A summary page is here is as good as any:

fwupd - ArchWiki

I've never had a system that got BIOS updates delivered in that way, and I suspect many of us are running headless and would not see it otherwise. It seems quite nice. It essentially goes thru all the steps you described, and just automates the delivery.
Thanks. I will take a closer look.
Recently, when I was running Ubuntu Live on one of my Dell Optliplex systems with software updates being postponed, I received a notification about a new firmware available. Perhaps it is running this fwupd service.
 
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naseto

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@cageek

Sorry for the broken link. This should work:

Also here is the bios screen under system information

EC19139A-72F5-440E-A19D-998E713F4228.jpeg

Also worth noting, my BIOS version is 1.13 and the “2nd NIC (RJ-45/SFP)“ is set to Enabled w/PXE

Let me know if I can help you further.
 
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