This 10-Year-Old Mini PC SURPRISED Me!

this is the HP t620 a 10 year old Thin Client that I picked up for just 20 dollars now I would love to tell you that it's surprisingly powerful for its age or that it's incredibly efficient and a great addition to your home lab but the truth is it's not but that's okay because while it didn't blow my mind in terms of performance this decade-old machine took me on a surprising Adventure filled with plenty of twists and turns believe it or not this little Underdog of a PC might still have some fight left in it thank you the HP t620 Thin Client was released in late 2013 and features either a dual core or quad core AMD g-series CPU there's also a t620 plus that's a fair bit bigger and includes a pcie slot for expansion I picked up the dual core variant with four gigabytes of RAM on Facebook Marketplace for just twenty dollars like I said in the intro this thing surprised me in a lot of ways with the first being its size it's definitely not big but for being a Thin Client I was expecting something a bit smaller you can hopefully get an idea of its size here when compared to an HP 600 G3 small form factor the elite desk 800 G3 mini and a Raspberry Pi 4. while it takes up more desk space than most mini PCS it's still relatively thin and could tuck into plenty of places around your house or in a home lab the second surprise came when I initially turned it on at first I thought I got screwed over again on Facebook Marketplace because nothing happened when I hit the power button no fan spin no display nothing but after making sure my capture card was actually plugged in all the way I realized that it had booted up without any issues and without any fan noise see I hadn't done a ton of research on this thing and it turns out that it's completely passive and uses flash storage making it dead silent the guy who sold it to me was awesome and actually did a fresh install of lubuntu which the t620 seemed to handle without any issues plus I noticed that it only drew around 8 watts total when it idle for a 10 year old PC the t620 was showing a fair amount of potential things got even more exciting when I cracked it open before that though I'd like to take just a second to talk about the sponsor of today's video manscaped and their handy dandy little handyman this compact face shaver is Tiny so it's perfect to take on the go or just toss in your carry-on with an up to 6 60 Minute run time you'll barely have to worry about charging it but when you do all you need is a standard USBC cable no annoying proprietary junk it has a unique dual blade design with a long hair leveler blade to knock down longer stubble as well as a standard foil shaver to provide a nice smooth shave it's water resistant with an ipx7 rating so you can rinse it off to keep it clean and even use it in the shower whether you need something to take on the go or are just looking for a convenient and quick way to handle your grooming needs you should definitely check out the handyman from manscaped when you decide to pull the trigger you can use code Hardware Haven at checkout to get 20 off plus free shipping so go check out the handyman today your face will thank you it took me a second to figure things out but opening the case was dead simple and the process was even tool-less you just unclip the i o cover flip a locking switch and Slide the bottom off this gives access to the surprising amount of internal i o that I was not expecting including an msata socket m.2 socket two internal USB 2.0 ports and a mini pcie slot I couldn't immediately tell if the m.2 socket only supported SATA or pcie as well but it came with a 16 gigabyte SanDisk SSD installed this was way more expandability than I had expected I honestly thought this was just going to be a cheap PC for running some lightweight services but having mini pcie as well as potentially four lanes of pcie on the m.2 slot meant that this could possibly be a budget tinkerer's Paradise I was honestly getting a lot of ideas in my head at this point I mean you could mod this case to have multiple Nicks or attach external storage or use the two internal USB ports to run an OS off of USB and raid just lots of cool ideas but I'll get to all that in a bit on a side note there was a hole drilled into the bottom of the case that seemed to be for access to the H sense header which I believe is the hood sensor I'm not exactly sure what that hole was for but it did come in handy later on after filming while looking at a website called Barky Towers which was very helpful I found felt that not all of the t620s come with an M SATA slot some of them only have the m.2 socket fortunately mine has both the ram was accessible after removing a couple of them the ram was accessible after removing a couple of thumb screws and while I could have added in a second four gigabyte stick of ddr3l memory I decided to just stick with the single 4 gigabyte stick for the time being the PC wasn't super Dusty or anything probably thanks to the lack of any fans it was rather sticky on the outside for some reason so I wanted to give the whole system a solid cleaning although getting into the case was easy completely disassembling it was a bit of a pain involving the removal of various sizes of Torx screws and unclipping the plastic side cover eventually I got the motherboard out which was attached to a pretty elaborate cooling system it consisted of one long snaking heat pipe that connected the heatsink to a bunch of fins and there were also thermal pads that bridge the fin stack to the outer case I didn't have any replacement thermal pads and wanted to make sure I could reuse the existing ones so I set them aside on some aluminum foil and then dusted out and cleaned all the components and pieces of the case [Music] foreign once it was all cleaned up and much less sticky I put everything back together twice because the first time I forgot the thermal pads towards the end of the reassembly process I noticed that the power button had been bent backward probably something I did I was able to bend it back into place but I had a feeling it might have been broken my suspicion was confirmed when I tried booting it up again oh well nothing a little solder can't fix at some point I might try to repair this properly but for a quick fix I just soldered two wires to the pads underneath the switch then I ran the wires out through that convenient little hole in the case I mentioned earlier giving myself a janky but functioning power button janky but functioning that should be my new slogan with the system now able to turn on I decided to swap out the existing 16 gigabyte SSD for something a bit bigger first I tried out a 256 gigabyte nvme drive but that wasn't recognized which was confirmation that the m.2 socket sadly doesn't support nvme next I tried out the old emmc module from my steam deck but realized that was also not SATA and therefore not recognized so I dug out a 128 gig SATA m.2 SSD that worked without issue the BIOS showed a setting for a pcie by four slot so I was still holding out hope that that m.2 might support pcie devices but I'll get to that I started installing Windows 10 which in hindsight was probably a bit ambitious for a 10 year old low power system but I was hoping to at least run some benchmarks so that I could compare it to some other use systems I've looked at in the past the installation took around an hour which probably should have been a major red flag but I pushed through I usually make sure all drivers and updates are finished installing before doing any testing with the t620 this apparently meant leaving it on overnight because that's how long it took before the CPU usage finally settled and even then just moving the mouse in the task manager was enough to push the CPU up to 40 utilization obviously Windows was not a good experience but I still ran cinebench R15 and got a three run average of only 59 which is surprisingly not the worst score I've ever gotten the t620 was at least able to outperform an old AMD E350 which only scored a 46 but this PC wasn't ever meant to be a CPU Powerhouse even back in its day realistically I was just hoping for something that could compete with single board computers and such so I decided to move to Linux I dropped in a 256 gigabyte msata SSD to test out that slot and reinstall Ubuntu I figured that would give this machine a fighting chance for desktop usage the install was much faster and the desktop wasn't extremely laggy or anything but browsing the web was still fairly unpleasant web pages took a while to load and some contents just didn't load at all it was pretty clear at this point that the t620 just doesn't make sense as a desktop PC in 2023 but that wasn't where I figured it would have a chance at being useful anyway what I really wanted to see was how it would handle things like hosting Docker containers or emulating retro games functioning as a budget firewall or remote streaming starting with that last one I've been a big fan of parsec for remote streaming so I thought I'd give it a go unfortunately I couldn't get parsec running in lubuntu so I installed Debian with xfce as the desktop environment parsec ran but not very well even at lower resolutions like 720p looking for a win I decided to shift my focus to something that I believed would be better suited for the t620 like running some containers just because I've been a fan of how easy it is to get up and running I installed Casa OS on top of Debian and spun up some containers like pie hole and home assistant both of which ran without any issues it even ran jellyfin just fine as long as I didn't need to transcode anything which for many people is totally fine it wouldn't be able to handle anything much more demanding but it at least ran those lightweight containers while only drawing around 9 Watts or so clearly you can find newer machines that do the same even more efficiently but it's not bad for twenty dollars I flashed a badassera to an SSD to check out some retro emulation and was pretty disappointed when Super Mario Brothers on the NES was a little bit stuttery at times surprisingly though other games that I tested ran just fine including Mario Kart 64 on the Nintendo 64. so maybe I just had something weird going on with my NES emulator or the ROM I don't really know but with its thin profile and decent performance running older retro titles I guess this could make for a cheap little emulation system in a living room or something to set this up as a firewall with something like open sense or pfSense it would be ideal to have at least two network interfaces so I decided to start messing around with the mini pcie and m.2 sockets sadly I could never get the m.2 slot to work with pcie devices like this one gigabit Ethernet Nick which was really frustrating considering the setting I saw in the Bios after a bit of looking into it though I realized that the pcie by 4 setting I saw in BIOS was probably referring to the unpopulated Riser that would have been used in the t620 plus model that version like I said earlier actually includes a full-size by four pcie slot so sadly the m.2 slot really is just for SATA ssds the mini pcie slot might still offer some hope though I plugged in a mini pcie to pcie adapter with a one gigabit Nik card installed and it worked although the VGA header on the motherboard gets in the way of screwing the card in so it kind of just flops around a little bit I also found this mini pcie to m.2e key adapter this let me use some of the cards I bought in my m.2e key video which if you want to learn more about that you can check out that video here to test it out I plugged in a dual SATA card and it popped up with no issue in Hardware info 64. as expected the mini pcie slot is limited to a single Lane but it works and it's also capable of pcie gen 3 speeds that means you could theoretically run something like two two and a half gigabit nics or two SATA ssds from that single slot without any bandwidth issues to test this out as a firewall I installed pfSense 2.7 and was surprised to see it recognize the onboard real Technic as pfSense doesn't include certain real-tech drivers by default I guess maybe that only applies to some of the two and a half gigabit Knicks though I'm not really sure using the m.2 to mini pcie adapter I dropped in a two and a half gigabit Nic which did need the correct drivers installed but after doing that the t620 worked just as expected and there's some more good news for the t620 here the AMD gx217ga supports the AES ni instruction set meaning the CPU can accelerate encryption and decryption workloads this makes it a much more useful and effective firewall as it can better handle things like SSL and VPN traffic so in 2023 is the HP t620 a good bar can find well like I said at the very beginning of this video probably not there are some potential use cases where it might make sense but those rely heavily on factors like how cheap you can get it what Hardware you already own and how much time you're willing to spend tinkering if you can get one of these for a really good price it can be a decent option for just running some basic containers and services or if you want to Tinker a bit and you can get a Nick for the mini pcie slot this could work well for a budget PF sensor open sense box I mean you could technically turn this into a two Bay Nas using a SATA card but figuring out the power distribution for that would definitely take some know-how really what I've noticed is the biggest issue with this is that most of the add-in cards required to do more useful things with it can get pretty expensive by the time you buy the t620 plus the right adapters you might already be spending more than if you just bought the system that already had the capabilities you need in the first place so is this thing worthless well at this point in writing the script I asked myself assuming I wasn't making a video on it would I spend 20 on this again and the answer is yes I honestly might spend 40 on this because while this might not be a great option for a lot of things in 2023 I had more fun working on this than I have in months and maybe it's just because it's different from a lot of the desktops and mini PCS I've been working on or maybe it's because it has some weird quirks and older things like the mini pcie slot but this kind of gave me that same feeling I had way back when I first turned my parents Old Dell Inspiron into a file server or the time I finally got that old Mac any well the time I got this Old Mac Mini to run some retro game emulation there's just something exciting and rewarding about getting machines like this to do what 99.9 of people would never think to because yeah it's not the best option it doesn't really make sense but it's fun and that's what I love about tinkering with hardware and what I want this channel to always be about I had a great time messing around with this thing and I really hope you enjoyed tacking along for the adventure if you want to see more videos like this make sure to hit the like button subscribe and hey maybe even check out the patreon or become a YouTube member I actually just worked on some more bonus content if you want to go check that out I think that's about it for this one though so as always thank you guys so much for watching stay curious and I can't wait to see you in the next one [Music]

Channel: Hardware Haven

Views: 280,582

Keywords: batocera, budget mini pc for home server, budget pc, casaos, cheap thin client, docker, home assistant, home lab mini pc, home server, home-lab, homelab, hp mini pc, hp t620, hp t620 pfsense, hp t620 router, hp thin client, is the hp t620 good, linux, nas, old mini pcs, what to do with my old PC, what to do with old mini pc

Id: 17xFghnu74A

Length: 16min 6sec (966 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 23 2023