Hello folks, today, we’re taking a look
at a system that, as we’ll soon see, might be the perfect answer to your home lab needs. It’s powerful, but power efficient, and
has some really great features and upgrade potential in a tiny form factor. And here it is, it’s this little computer
from HP, and it’s one of the best low power systems that you can buy right now for your
home lab. We’re going to take a close look into the
hardware, as well setting up Proxmox to do some virtualisation and run a Minecraft server. This is the HP Prodesk 400 G3 Mini that I
picked up on eBay for less than 80 US dollars. And before you run to the comments to correct
me on the price, remember that I don’t live in the US, and don’t buy things in US dollars. Anyway, why do these systems exist and who
buys them new? Well, they’re for businesses. Really big businesses, who need a whole load
of computers that perform well but consume very little power and don’t take up much
space. They’re basically thin clients, but aren’t
terrible and underpowered because they don’t need a virtualised environment on the network
to do any actual serious computing tasks. We’re not talking about a system this size
with an integrated Celeron or Pentium, no this has an entire Intel desktop
processor in a one litre form factor. These systems keep the power bills down while
still providing decent performance for everyday tasks, and even though the target audience
is very clearly businesses, it doesn’t mean they can’t be a great addition to your homelab. You can use them as something like a media
server, virtualisation node, or they can even fill more important roles within your home
network as something like a router, firewall and DNS server, all in one. The whole system draws as little as eight
watts of power at idle, meaning, for at least the power consumption, it’s comparable to
Raspberry Pis and other single board computers. I have an older Pi 2B somewhere that I used
for quite a few years, but I don’t know where it is, so you’ll just have to imagine
that I’ve got it here. I’ve used a variety of Pis over the last
few years, and, like the 2B, they all typically consume around 2-3 watts of power at idle, so
the increase of 5 watts for the HP system is pretty much nothing. That is basically as much as charging a
phone. In terms of power bills, it would cost me
around 9 or 10 dollars to run this system 24/7 for an entire year, or basically the price of
two McChickens. That’s pretty much nothing, and is surprisingly
quite a bit less than the router provided by my ISP. Coming back to single board computers, I really
do like Raspberry Pis, but I haven’t had much interest in them recently because I’ve
found them to be a bit limited, especially in terms of features and expandability. Don’t get me wrong, I spent many years using
my Pi 2B for retro gaming and web server stuff, and it was great, but it really wasn’t perfect. They definitely have their uses for some people,
but they’re just not cheap anymore like they used to be. I remember when they were meant to be
around $30, and now you’d be hard pressed to get a Pi 5 for less than like $90, at least
where I live. It gets worse though, because the problem
with buying Pi’s on their own is that they don’t include a power supply, case or any
cooling at all, so many people go for a bundle, which, of course, costs more. Starter kits that include all the necessary
components are cool and very useful, but you still need add-on boards, or Pi hats, to get
support for features like M.2 storage. That’s why I’ve found myself really liking
this mini PC, because having an Intel processor with M.2 and upgradable memory in a compact
size is really useful, and is actually really affordable too. While it is substantially larger than a Raspberry Pi, I think the features and performance make up for the size. So, what hardware did I get? While there are many different configurations
for these HP systems, this Prodesk 400 G3 has an Intel Kaby Lake i3 7100T dual core
processor. It’s not a particularly powerful processor,
which is something I think is important to keep in mind. If you want more cores, you’ll end up spending
a bit more, but older generations of these systems can often be quite a bit cheaper. While it definitely isn’t difficult to get
a more powerful computer for the same price, if you want something that’s compact and actually
power efficient, then this, so far, seems to be a really good way to go. The third generation of these HP systems support
both 6th and 7th generation processors, but we are limited to the 35 watt processors in
the Prodesk 400. There’s a 65 watt version of the Elitedesk,
which supports up to the i7 7700, but the immediate question is, how do they cool it? For starters, the CPU cooler in the 65w model is copper
instead of aluminium, which is great, but they also just stamped a bunch of holes in the
top panel because that’s where the laptop style blower fan draws in the air. Too bad they didn’t do that for all the
other models. The processor we got with this system is an
odd one, because, while it does have hyperthreading, it doesn’t support, or even actually need
turbo boost. To keep the TDP at only 35 watts, the more
powerful processors like the i5s and i7s have reduced base clocks, but then use turbo boost
to bring the speeds up, and as a consequence, the power draw is increased too, but only
for short time periods. The i3 7100T doesn’t need to do that because
it only has two cores and can run at 3.4 gigahertz all the time. It also doesn’t produce much heat for that extra speed. My prodesk came with four gigabytes of DDR4
SODIMM memory, which I know isn’t much, but it doesn’t really matter for my needs. The included module is actually rated for
up to 2666 megahertz, which this processor isn’t compatible with. Like the majority of the non-HEDT Kaby Lake
processors, the 7100T’s memory support maxes out at 2400 megahertz, so the included memory
will just run a little bit slower than it’s meant to. The system’s support maxes out at 32 gigabytes,
using two 16 gigabyte modules, although that does go up to 64 gigabytes in the newer generations. This system didn’t come with any storage
or a WIFI card, because I asked the eBay seller if they would remove both before sending it to me, and they offered a reduced price for that. It’s always worth asking for something like that, because I’d
rather not pay for features and hardware that I’m not going to use. The WIFI antennas are still installed in this system, so
I could get a WIFI card later on if I want. I also have plenty of storage that is faster
and more reliable than a functionally useless SATA laptop hard drive, even something as cheap
as a WD green SSD would do. I understand the need for the hard drive so
a copy of Windows can come preinstalled for the average user, but I’d rather not contribute
to E-waste any more than I already do. One really important thing to keep in mind when buying these
on eBay is that many of them are sold as barebones, which means they don’t include processors
or memory, and often don’t include the proprietary and mandatory power brick either. I’d steer clear of these kinds of listings,
because it tends to mean that eBay seller has taken all the good parts to resell them. That kind of system could be good if you already have a processor
and memory, but it can also affect your ability to get a refund if the system is faulty and
the seller decides to be less than honest about whose problem it is. Moving on, it’s time to take a look at the
design and the hardware features. I really like the styling of this generation
of HP mini PCs because they come in this good looking little chassis, that I think contrasts
the angled vents on the front with the silver accent for the ports and power button quite
well. Compared to the other options from around
the same time, I think the HP systems look the best, mostly because the Thinkcentres
use cheap feeling shiny plastic, and although the Optiplexes are a bit better, I still think they look quite dated too. You might not agree with me on that, but I
do think the latest models from all three companies are a big step up, it’s just that
the HPs looked better for longer. The build quality is really nice too. The entire chassis and top panel of the Prodesk are made from metal with a very nice black
paint finish. Even the front panel feels nice, although
it is still clealy painted plastic. One downside for these is that the vents on
the front are mostly fake, with tiny slits in some of them to let air through. I don’t know how much actual vents would
do, because the fan doesn’t really draw air from the front of the system anyway. Speaking of the fan though, it was kind of
loud at 50% speed, but kept the processor at reasonable temperatures under a 100% load. Next up is the ports and the hardware. On the front of the system, we’ve got two
USB 3.1 ports, as well as the typical 3.5mm audio jacks. There’s one thing missing that the higher
end models get, and that’s the USB C port, but, as someone who doesn’t use USB C, I’m
not bothered by the lack of it. Moving to the rear of the system, we get a
single DisplayPort connector, as well as a serial connector, FlexIO expansion with a
VGA port, two more USB 3 ports, two USB 2 ports, a single gigabit Ethernet nic and
a barrel power jack. There is some variation in the ports you get
on the different models, but even here on the Prodesk 400, it’s an alright selection
for most uses. The serial port is normally replaced with
Displayport or HDMI on the higher end systems though, and with the integrated HD 630 GPU, you can
run three monitors at once. The major feature we don’t get on this Prodesk
400 is Intel vPro, which isn’t a big deal for me, but if you do want it, you’ll need
a compatible system and processor. The easiest way to tell if your system has
it is that the Intel sticker will say vPro on it, provided the sticker is original, of
course. vPro gives you access to remote management features
that allow you to control and configure the system, over the network, similar to IPMI on a server motherboard. I don’t think vPro is as good as IPMI in
most cases, and it can be a serious security risk on some incorrectly configured systems with outdated firmware. I don’t use it on any of my systems because
I really don’t have much hardware to manage, but, like most of the things I don’t use,
it might actually be really useful for you. Now we’re going to take a look at the internals. To open the system up, we just undo the single
thumbscrew on the rear, and slide the top cover off. The thumbscrew is retained in the back of the system, which
is really great because it means I can't lose it. Inside, we find what is basically a laptop
fan, along with this tiny heatsink that exhausts hot air out the back. Under the fan, we find the two SODIMM memory
slots, only one of which is populated at the moment, but the 7100T does support dual channel
memory for extra bandwidth. The memory in this system is just regular
laptop memory, and while it is good being able to upgrade it, the board doesn’t support
ECC. There is space for a 2.5 inch hard drive or
SSD on the left side of the system, connected with a flexible ribbon cable that combines
SATA power and data into a single connector. The hard drive tray and all four screws to
mount a drive were included with my system, but that unfortunately isn’t going to be
the case for all of the systems on eBay. The big problem is that many of these, especially
the newer ones, were optioned to only have an M.2 drive and won’t have the metal tray, screws or
even the sata cable. We do get a single HP FlexIO V1 expansion bay in
the rear, which has a card installed that gives us a VGA connector, for whatever reason
you’d need or want that. The expansion bay does allow us to install
one of a variety of small modules that add extra ports, but there isn’t much available for
it. I did a bit of looking, and all I could really
find was USB and video connectors, as well a serial port for the higher end models that don’t
already have it. There’s a much better range of cards for
the two newer versions of FlexIO, since they’ve released 2.5 and 10 gigabit Ethernet options,
as well as thunderbolt and a gigabit fibre module, as well as extra USB and video connectors, as mentioned before. By removing the VGA card that I already have,
we’ve got this open space to put things in, and I have a much better, and cheaper,
option that I’m going to be taking a look at in the future. There’s definitely room for some pretty
good hardware upgrades in this system, even though there isn’t much space for storage. The storage is a big trade off when you go
with a system this small, but if you actually need full sized hard drives, this isn’t
really the system to go with. sata connector is only wired for the 5 volts
required by laptop drives, and doesn’t have the 12 volts required for desktop hard drives, if you could even fit one in. I’m going to be using a 256 gigabyte
M.2 SSD from an old laptop. The drive saw around two or three thousand hours of use, but barely
any significant writes at all and should have a lot of life left in it. Keep in mind that this system only supports
M.2 NVMe, and not M.2 sata drives, which are slower but often significantly cheaper. HP didn’t wire the connector up for sata,
since they probably didn’t expect anyone to want to use it for that. The drive I selected gave a perfect result
from a SMART test, without any bad sectors and barely any terabytes written. I’ve removed the cooler to replace the thermal
paste because I don’t know how old it is, but it does seem like the seller had already
replaced it. It would’ve worked fine, even though they
made a small mess of it by using way too much. I have a bit of this Deepcool z5 left over
from another video, so I’ll just put a little blob in the middle of the heat spreader and
reinstall the heatsink. The air guide goes in behind it and then the
fan slides back into place in front of it. Now, let’s take a look at the kinds of things
we can do with a system like this. My first thought was maybe that we could install
TrueNAS, but that wouldn’t really be practical because there’s only one sata drive connection. There are newer models that have dual M.2
slots for SSDs, and they would probably make great flash servers, but this one is a bit
too old for that. There are a few ways to get around the storage
limitation, but they’re a bit janky and involve M.2 cards with either sata or SAS connectors and
an external power supply. It is completely possible to add external drives to these mini PCs, and might even work quite well, but really, why? I think it would be better if you need a storage server, to just get the larger small form factor models that have actual hard drive bays and low profile PCIe slots. You can easily setup two mirrored drives in
those, which is pretty much the bare minimum for a NAS, and with those PCIe slots, you could also install a graphics card for video encoding. Unfortunately, the prodesk mini doesn’t
have any of those options, but it can do plenty of other things, so let’s take a look. Figuring out what to do with it was just a
little bit more difficult than it should’ve been, because I only normally use a TrueNAS
as a file server, and haven’t put much thought into anything else. The answer turned out to be virtualisation,
although this won’t be a tutorial, but I thought it was quite interesting to figure
out how it all works. I started by installing Proxmox on the system
so we can virtualise Debian linux and run a basic Minecraft server. The main reason I chose Debian is because
it’s the distro I’m the most familiar with, mostly because of the Raspberry
Pi’s custom version called Raspbian, but I don’t want to get into Linux distros because
that tends to anger some people. Debian is great for a server because the installer
includes an option to just not install a desktop environment at all, meaning we can use remote
access to control it via the terminal and the GUI won’t take up all the system resources. With Proxmox installed, I went to the web
interface, uploaded the ISO file, went through the setup and configuration for the VM and
booted it. Once we got into it, I downloaded the packages
for the Minecraft Spigot server, which, is way better optimised than the vanilla server,
but still pretty much keeps the normal gameplay that we all know and love. I know everyone has their own preferences
for Minecraft servers, but the biggest problem I’ve had with the vanilla version is its
performance, even on systems that really should be able to handle it. And here it is, we’re in the game and it
seems to be running decently without any lag, although the server had all the available
memory assigned to it. An extra four gigabytes really doesn’t cost
very much, and more memory would probably help with lag from having extra players, although
we still only have two cores. With only two cores, we wouldn’t want to
run anything else at the same time, but can at least handle a single Minecraft server
pretty well. There’s definitely more advanced things
we can do, like port forwarding so people outside of your home network can play, or we could've installed mods
or plugins. I don’t plan on actually running a Minecraft
server regularly because I don’t really play it anymore, but it was interesting to figure out how Proxmox works and see what we can do with it. There’s also plenty more you can do with
Proxmox, it’s not just limited to Minecraft. As it currently is, I don’t think this system
would be able to run more than one or two VMs like this at once, but we have plenty
of storage left, so we can have others that don’t have to run all the time. We definitely don’t have the crazy core
counts of platforms like X99, but that’s why mini PCs like these have become very popular
for clustered Proxmox and other virtualisation setups. My fairly limited understanding of it is that you have a controller, along with multiple worker nodes that actually run the services and VMs. What that means is that if one node fails,
the services are easily moved to and run on a different one, and then the failed node
can be fixed. That gives better availability of services
and reliability of the cluster overall, and with systems like this, the power consumption
is still kept at a minimum. That’s really why these systems are so great
for homelabs, because they keep power consumption at a minimum, so your power bill doesn’t
look like the entire US defence budget, even with multiple system running at once. You get great performance for running software
and services without breaking the bank, and it’s super easy to get virtualisation set
up and running, even if you’ve never done it before, and before this video, I hadn't. The minecraft server is all we’re going
to be taking a look at in terms of virtualisation today, although I have a couple of very interesting
things planned for this system in the future. So you don’t miss out on future content,
make sure to subscribe to the channel and turn on notifications with the bell icon. Also, if you’d like me to take a look at
other models of mini PCs in the future, let me know which ones in the comments. Thanks for watching, I’ll see you all next
time.
