Do These CHEAP PCs Live Up To The Hype?

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Music (in order):
"If You Want To" - Me
"CRENSHAW VIBES" - GARRISON
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🎥 Curious About the equipment I use to make my videos?
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Timestamps:
0:00 Dell Wyse Thin Clients
0:33 Sponsor - UGreen
1:49 What Are These
2:49 Specs - 7010
3:35 Specs - 5060
3:49 Specs - 3040
4:16 First Boot and Operating Systems
5:28 Teardowns and Potential Upgrades
7:32 Debian 12 install
8:31 CPU benchmarks
8:57 Power Draw
9:56 M.2 sockets and RAM upgrade
11:06 Simple home server with 7010
11:38 Minecraft server with the 5060
12:17 HAOS woes
13:00 Using thin clients as thin clients
14:17 Are these worth buying?

[KibaTheBarbarian]

These computers are quite thin should you install mint on them then they'll be thin mints

[alexanderthegray]

When I started IT in 2010s thin clients were DA BOMB for business clients. But ever since the Intel NUC came out, we all jumped ship because the cost didn’t outweigh the benefits anymore.

[therandomdot]

Late to the party, but one reason these thin clients are so "popular" in the US is due to financial industry using them for a lot of things after regulations passed from the housing crash. There were issues with folks keeping financial files on laptops, local pc's, etc. So, gov't told financial companies (at least loan services) all financial info had to be stored on secure servers, and employees had to thin-client into the systems. This had these little things flying off shelves for businesses like crazy. And, since it was so cheap to upgrade them, they'd chuck them out on a bit faster depreciation life cycle than, say, a normal work pc or laptop.

[rainerwahnsinn]

I'm running a 3040 as a dedicated proxmox backup server (PBS). Backing up a 170GB LXC takes about 1h30 min (full backup).
Validating that backup does take about 1h5 min.
Installing PBS is not easy (PBS doesn't allow install to flash by default) but absolutely worth it. Small, quiet, draws next to no power and looks good.

[macphile]

I picked up a couple of 5060s from my local IT recycling shop for next to nothing last year. One has been running CasaOS on Debian with pi-hole (now adguard) non-stop, and the other is running a long-term time-lapse capture of my new work building. As long as you don't ask them to do too much, they're amazing little machines!

[nanianmichaels]

The 3040s are a nice option to use as an Octoprint server, too. In some printers, you can even slot it below the print bed, making it so that you don't need to increase the printer footprint at all.

As for me, I've been running a 5060 competitor (aka an HP t630) as a test homelab server: it's the one I first deploy stuff to, to check things out, before moving them to the main server.

[wuzado]

Quick note about the Minecraft server you tried on 5060 - most Minecraft servers are heavily single-threaded due to the original Minecraft server design. Customizing your settings and Java flags could help a bit, but they definitely benefit from very fast cores and fast and large memory (avoiding garbage collection pauses).

[marcimon]

I'm using Wyse 7020 as my home server for "stuff". It has some lovely features: 1. It's cooled passively, no fans at all, and this was important for me. 2. Performance-wise it's decent, I got 946 and 3779 evts/s in sysbench for 1 and 4 threaded loads, respectively. 3. I was able to find this dreaded SATA power cable, so I have a 1TB 2.5" HDD connected to it - using it as a crude NAS and a media server. 4. It uses x86 architecture, which, contrary to Pi, allows for some hardware (e.g. printers, scanners) to work easily. My Brother printer just plain refused to work on Pi, but I'm having no issues whatsoever on Wyse. 5. It was dirt cheap - overall I paid around 60 USD for Wyse+SATA cable+power brick+HDD. It's an awesome machine for my particular needs.

[jburnash]

This was really interesting - I especially liked that you compared it to the Raspberrry Pi 5 for contrast! I really like these small form factor PCs, and I've focused on the 6th Gen and higher Intel CPU's because from that generation onward they seem to have more power and less power draw. Keep up the good content, and props for the quality of your whole sound/lighting/editing - you make a quality video!

[jackconway]

I purchased one of those Dell Wyse systems off of Amazon.

I was overjoyed with what I received. In the box was the Wyse system, a throwaway mouse, and a BEAUTIFUL OLD STYLE MECHANICAL KEYBOARD 🎉🎉🎉


I never powered up the Wyse system but that keyboard has been my daily driver for many months.

[tsukisplayroom]

I had 2 3040 both with diet pi x86_64 ufei installed running pihole and unbound and they do make for a great high availability alternative during the rpi shortage a few years ago.

[g-is-me]

I'm using 3 5060s for a proxmox cluster. Two with 16GB of ram and one with 8GB. They're working great. I even have ceph running well. It's a great environment to test out ideas before committing them to my larger cluster and works for my more modest home needs. I'm slowly adding tasks to it and I've not had any issues. I used USB for system boot and a sata ssd to host ceph for all the vms. The cost of three systems upgraded to meet my needs was under $200.

I also have 2 7010s and they are working great as low load web servers in another location. They're okay and meet my needs. I also had plenty of old ram to stuff into them. They're not as good a value as the 5060s but they meet my needs and have been running non-stop without issue for roughly 9 months.

These have been more reliable than my raspis. They reboot cleanly every time, even the remote the boxes. All of my raspis have hung at reboot at one time or another and every so often I've had one freeze.

[sycoclownx]

So if you want to get a much better system, the Wyse 5070 runs a J4105 or J5005 with 8 GB RAM. There is a slot for a m2 sata drive and power draw is pretty low on them. They also tend to cost the same as the 5060 you were showcasing.

[chumbawumba]

Prolly older than you, Wyse started back in the 1980's as third-party VT1xx terminal devices in the era of VAX computer systems. At one time, they were considered best of breed of that era for those products. Sadly, as the world of terminals morphed into PC software terminal emulators and eventually just faded out, Wyze moved to thin-client devices (the Citrix-era) and eventually Dell acquired them and the brand. Quite a hoot to see them mentioned here :)

[darkpalidin]

The company I work for has a couple of clients that use these. It's crazy that for the price of a new thin client, you can get a (fairly) cheap laptop that can do so much more and is so much easier to troubleshoot. I loath having to fix any thin-client problems because they are so uncooperative. Even the management software is just terrible and unhelpful. I ousted them from our internal use over the course of a few years and no one regrets moving to docked laptops from them, even with the higher cost.

[DigitalJedi]

I wish Dell would bring back the 3040 form factor with Alder Lake-N chips. Imagine a modernized version that could be powered over USB-C, boot from a Gen3 x2 drive, and use an N100 CPU. That would be an awesome little form factor.

[ltpinecone]

I recently got the 5060. It's awesome for low power homelab stuff like a website, nginx proxy manager, docker containers, etc. I barely use 2% of the CPU while running all 8 of my docker containers. The RAM and storage were upgradeable, so I added a 500GB SSD inside, and my OS of choice is ubuntu server.

[scrungyy]

hey man great video i'm glad to see my suggestion was good enough, keep up the good work!!

[spillsndebris]

I've built Batocera gaming machines with those 5060s. Worked great for low end 8 and 16 bit games.

[Jah_Rastafari_ORIG]

About the 3040; I was using one for a headless (eventually) ROIP Allstar radioless node machine and it works beautifully bolted under a table. Also, when I was buying mine I noticed there's 2 different power supply versions for those; one is 5V and the other is (I forget which) 12v or 19V, so pay attention so you avoid crispiness...