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I started on Elitedesk 800 G1s when Raspberry Pis got hard to find and expensive, and I now feel they are better in every respect if you don't need the GPIO pins.
Every time I open them up to upgrade something I'm impressed with the level of engineering. There are quality manufacturer manuals for them, the cooling is good and they look great
How's the power usage?
I normally only run one unless I'm doing some dev work, but one G2 plus a 4 bay NAS, a switch, a WAP, and a wireless modem and it sits on 30-55W. This is definitely part of the magic - I assume the i7 6700T is a laptop variant? The other two are i5 6500Ts
We used these machines in production for years, some still out there. Great hardware.
I have one of these for my media server. And because it's got an i5 in it, it can handle transcoding and heavier demands when needed.
I haven't ever figured out how to pass in the QuickSync to my Jellyfin, but also have never had the need - seems to sit around 10-15% of two cores if it has to transcode something.
o0o0o i used to use a lot of these little things... rdp endpoints... can they be flashed with linux?
Yep! You can run almost anything on them, these are just x86 machines. However there are much smaller ones that aren't x86 and are actually proprietary ARM-based endpoints, but those are easy to spot usually as they don't have a lot of IO.
As for these ones though, people often repurpose them as low-power servers or firewall boxes.
There's an entire video series & articles called "Project TinyMiniMicro" where a server/homelab outlet ServeTheHome compares multiple popular models, looking at things like performance, cooling, upgradeability (some of these have half height PCIe slots inside), fan noise, thermal throttling, and a lot more.
Definitely worth a watch or a read if you're considering getting one of these, it's pretty comprehensive.
ive tossed hundreds, but i thunk ive got a box with a few around here somewhere. when i was using them i seeeemed to remember specifically picking the ones with a native windows rdp client, which would indicate x86. (win7 era)
im just looking to setup little media clients to connect to in-house flatscreens.
I have an HP 800 G4 arriving in the mail any day now. Right now I run most of my stuff on a pi3, including openvpn, transmission, minidlna, grafana, backuppc, and postgresql. I'm looking forward to porting all of that, plus suricata and dnsmasq, onto the G4 when it arrives.
You'll have so much more room for activities!
I have something very similar from Lenovo, bought refurbished and it's a very capable i5 home server. And it's practically silent.
I tossed up about the Lenovo's and probably only went with the HP's 'cause they were cheaper on ebay that week. I quite like how the Lenovo's look stood up.
Been running Home Assistant and several other apps on a G1 Mini for the last 4 years. Upgraded from a Pi and while I still love Pis the performance difference is night and day..
I had 3 HP Elitedesk 705 g4s and every single one of them after 100 hours would disconnect the SATA disk. Not sure if they newer ones are any better, but I kinda lost trust in HP mini pcs.