Dell Wyse 3040 Thin Client | Power Mod, Teardown, UEFI/BIOS Quirks | Homelab Operations Center

Casually tearing down the Dell Wyse 3040 Thin Client that I bought because clearly I don't have enough thin clients already. Hopefully someone finds this useful, since these machines show up for sale on eBay all the time. It's not nearly as powerful as the 5060 I played with before, and it feels sluggish to use (the 5060 was perfectly usable as a web browsing machine). It didn't come with a power supply, and although it only needs 5V/3A, it doesn't use any common sized barrel jacks that I could find, so I soldered a USB lead to it. I underestimated the voltage drop at 3A, so you definitely need to use a beefier or much shorter USB cable than I did, or reduce your power consumption (less USB, less DisplayPort, and/or less GPU usage).

Blog Link w/ lscpu, lspci, vainfo results for the curious:

tl;dr the CPU supports VT-x and AES-NI (not that you really have enough RAM to think about virtualization), the GPU supports H264 transcode, and it has a Realtek NIC

If you want to buy one, check out this eBay search:

This Thin Client would still make a good home server or Home Assistant host, but it's a pain to find the power supply if it isn't included. Make sure you know what you're buying in a thin client (CPU, RAM, Storage, power supply included?) and if it's sufficient for your use case. The deals on eBay change all the time, and although the 3040 is usually available for around the price of a Raspberry Pi, you can occasionally get deals on much better units.

All of that said, I'm going to be using this as my go-to Raspberry Pi equivalent in all of my Pi videos going forward, since you can usually find them on ebay, power mod them, and get them functional for about the same price as a mid tier Pi 4 (which you can't find anyways).

My Discord server:

Timestamps:
00:00 - Intro
00:26 - Teardown
01:26 - USB Power Mod
03:58 - Reassembly
04:53 - BIOS Configuration
06:24 - Trying Xubuntu
08:02 - Install Home Assistant
09:21 - UEFI Boot Errors
12:12 - My Thoughts

Some links to products may be affiliate links, which may earn a commission for me.

#ThinClient
#Linux
#Teardown
#Homelab

[kyoksh]

Power cable connector is 1.7 x 4.0mm and are super cheap. No need to open this up, just get the right connector

[justinmiller]

Thank you, very helpful in getting my 3040 to install home assistant.

[Rockshoes]

Thank you! I have been struggling getting Debian on this thing for a few days now🎉

[szymonszczurek]

After some tinkering I was able to install alpine Linux and successfully stream games using moonlight with hardware decoding. Even with xfce installed and chromium there are 3gigs of 8 left on device. Thanks for detailed review of this device and I look forward to see even more useful content 😊

[titanit]

If we ignore the lack of GPIO support (ofc thin client), it is the best price performance alternative to Atomic Pi.

[nbensa]

A thin client with a quad core CPU and 2GB of RAM and 8GB of storage? That's a fat client in my dictionary 🙂 Please, continue the VDI series (Raspberry Pi + Proxmox). I'm already using it and it rocks 🙂

[stefaniemcmanus]

I have no idea what I'm doing, but I couldn't figure out why Ubuntu wasn't booting from USB and just seeing your screens was helpful. I have progress!
I have a Wyse3040 that I thought would be a great media box on the family TV - Netflix, and checking out documents on Google Drive, etc. No memory needed - But certainly needs a OS

[BrianThomas]

That WIFI slot would be great for a Tensor Flow card for some machine learning for vision recognition.

[kjakobsen]

I think we have a few of these at work decommissioned. Never thought about this.

[JoeyMoreland]

4.0x1.7mm barrel connector is what the power supply uses.

[stephenrichardson]

I'm sat here wondering if you could run Samsung DEX fully on this to utilise all the inputs and get it functioning as a DEX dock? Tried searching YouTube and nobody has thought of doing this or its not possible. Whats your thoughts? Thanks for the video.

[iandawg]

I used PSP power supply fits perfectly and its 5v great vid im just doing some research for a neighbour who want me to check it out for him gave me a 3030 and 3040 to look at

[ramazanaktas]

Half the price of a 5 4gb here.. Would it worth for a mini cluster setup?

[pkf]

We have so many of these at work all being decommissioned currently. They work great for PXE and remote client based systems.

[ItsJustElenore]

Weird thing I found with my 3040 is that if I plugged a USB 3 hub into the USB 3 port, it would boot from almost any bootable media I would plug into the hub without having to change any settings in the BIOS or play with boot partitions. Even OSes I could not get to boot otherwise, like Ubuntu or, heck, even Windows 10 on an external SSD.

It's just some cheap 4 port hub I got on Amazon.

I also modded the power connector on mine! I added a USB-C port so I can run it off a phone charger and even a Sata power port, so I could run it from an ATX PSU if I wanted to.

[capocchione]

I've bought this thin client too. I've also found some 5V/3A pover supply with USB-C plug. Do you think it will be better to solder on the main board a USB-C female plug or directly the wires as you did in the video?

[jjjjulian]

jsut got one for a dollar + shipping of ebay 💀. still thinking on what ic an do with it for projects.
cool video btw

[shizuxo]

its availabe for 15 dollars, is it worth it? for a simple server

[studiobuma]

I bought this a couple of weeks ago as it was under $25 with a pouwer supply, to run as an octoprint server for my 3D printer (as Pi's are nowhere to be found), but got stymied at getting it to boot to something other than the preinstalled thinlinux. Fingers crossed your walkthru will get me booted and I can install some light version of linux on it!

[zarozumialy]

What power supply do you use? Mine boots only with original one and on other ones it just blinks.