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:
https://www.apalrd.net/posts/2022/wys...

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:
https://ebay.us/xXE5kw

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).

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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

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#ThinClient
#Linux
#Teardown
#Homelab