"Mini" form factor Dell/HP/Lenovo systems on Ebay

[craighazan]

Bingo!, 6600 is supported!.

 

[pastrychef]

R.I.P i7 7700t . I’m fairly certain that’s what’s happened, failing to boot on H110 and this. I do have a 6600 spare!.

Wow! I wonder how it died...

 

[craighazan]

Wow! I wonder how it died...

Not certain!, but on the H110 it occasionally go into boot loop mode. I assumed it was the motherboard. But it seems the same thing is happening on the hp mini. Won’t post into BIOS.

 

[pastrychef]

Bingo!, 6600 is supported!.

View attachment 562903

65W CPUs will probably require the 90W power adaptor.

 

[pastrychef]

I've been playing around with the ProDesk (w/i7-7700T) a bit in Batocera. Here's some FYI info for anyone looking to use it for emulation.

• Obviously, all the older 8 and 16 bit consoles will not be a problem.
• Always use Vulcan whenever possible!
• Use dual channel memory!
• I don't know if it makes any difference, but I maxed out the video memory setting in BIOS.
• All the PSP games I tested ran great upscaled to 1080p.
• For PS2, some games ran at full speed with 2x upscaling and some needed to be set to native resolution, but everything I tested ran at full speed.
• Some easier to emulate PS3 games will run fine. Forget about upscaling. Forget about God of War 3. Oblivion and Skyrim ran well enough that I fell in to the rabbit hole and ended up playing for hours. (Note: the CPU fan will be screaming during any "precompiles")
• All the N64 games I tested ran great at 1080p.
• GameCube and Wii games run great on the Dolphin emulator. Everything I tested ran fine upscaled to 720p. Some games work at 1080p, but if you're lazy, just set to 720p and forget about it.
• The Wii U stuff I tested ran really well at native resolution.
• Sega Saturn and Naomi stuff ran great at 2x upscaling. I didn't test further.
• Using Redream, all the Dreamcast stuff I tested ran great at 1440p.

For the most part, the system stays very quiet, not silent, but unobtrusive enough and the sounds from the games you play will drown out any fan noise. The one exception is when running RPCS3. That really pushes the CPU...

Overall, I think it's a great little box to toss your entire collection of retro games in to. While you won't be able to upscale everything to the max, most can be upscaled at least a bit. It's certainly a far better solution than Raspberry Pis.

 

[pastrychef]

Since my ProDesk G3 Mini will be running 24/7 as my Docker server, I picked up another mini to play with. This time, I got an EliteDesk 800 G4 with i7-8700T for $300. It came with 32GB RAM, 256GB NVMe SSD, Windows 10, and even the original HP keyboard, mouse, and original box.

Advantages of this EliteDesk G4 Mini over the ProDesk G3 mini are:

• Coffee Lake vs Kaby Lake.
• Two USB-C connectors. (I think one of them is 10Gb, but I haven't tested it yet.)
• Two NVMe SSD slots instead of just one. (Both also have one SATA connector.)
• Two DisplayPort video outs instead of just one.
• Sleep/wake works when using IGPU only in macOS on Coffee Lake. It doesn't on Skylake or Kaby Lake. (Edit: HibernationFixup.kext fixes sleep/wake on Skylake/Kaby Lake.)

I plan to use this to replace my old HP SFF desktop as my Batocera machine.



I've been very impressed with its performance, however, to unlock its full potential, I had to purchase a 150W power adaptor ($20 from eBay). With the included 65W power adaptor, Geekbench multi-core score was only ~4750 and Metal score was only ~3630. During the Geekbench benchmarks, I saw the system touch 116W for a split second. Under normal use, it usually stays under 60W.

As per usual, I delidded the CPU. The hottest I saw the CPU get was 80C. Considering it has a 100C TJMax, I have plenty of headroom and don't expect it to ever thermal throttle.

With the 150W power adaptor, here's what it can do in Batocera:

• PSP upscaling can pretty much be maxed out.
• All the PS2 stuff I tested ran at full speed with 3x upscaling.
• Not all, but a lot of PS3 games will run at native resolution.
• GameCube went to 3x upscaling.
• I only tested 2x for Wii but it all ran great.
• Xbox can only upscale to 2x.
• All the lower end systems can pretty much go to the max upscaling.

 

[pastrychef]

FYI, those with Skylake and/or Kaby Lake systems can install HiberationFixup.kext to get sleep/wake working.

Also, I saw a few i7-8700T based systems in the neighborhood of ~$200 on eBay.

 

[pastrychef]

I upgraded my EliteDesk 800 DM G4 with an RX 560. Batocera benefitted greatly from this upgrade. Getting macOS to work with it was tricky. The keys are (1) use Macmini8,1 system definition and (2) disable WhateverGreen. I was not able to get video from the RX 560 using any other system definition.

And yes, God of War 3 is now very playable at native resolution in RPCS3 in Batocera. Lots of Xbox 360 games also run great now.


RX 560 is on the right (with copper heatsink).

 

[scottkendall]

I upgraded my EliteDesk 800 DM G4 with an RX 560. Batocera benefitted greatly from this upgrade. Getting macOS to work with it was tricky. The keys are (1) use Macmini8,1 system definition and (2) disable WhateverGreen. I was not able to get video from the RX 560 using any other system definition.

View attachment 567211
RX 560 is on the right (with copper heatsink).

Did you try flashing the bios to the card to a say Asus 560 Bios? I was always more of a fan of using the headless Mac systems, Mac mini, Mac Pro. Mostly because they did not require WEG and just seemed like they worked the best for all features Mac.

 

[pastrychef]

Did you try flashing the bios to the card to a say Asus 560 Bios? I was always more of a fan of using the headless Mac systems, Mac mini, Mac Pro. Mostly because they did not require WEG and just seemed like they worked the best for all features Mac.

Before I managed to get macOS working with the RX 560 installed, I tried just about everything including flashing an alternate vBIOS. I tried the vBIOS from a Lenovo because the clocks and thermal settings were the same. I reverted back to the original vBIOS because it made no difference.

It was really, really strange... Using anything other than Macmini8,1 system definition resulted in black screen from the RX 560 in macOS whether I had WhateverGreen enabled or not. I suspect that it might be because with Macmini8,1, it's treated as a Thunderbolt attached GPU.

Anyway, I'm just glad that I got it working. It spends most of the time in Batocera and I only really boot in to macOS when I need to do any file management for the Batocera folders.

I briefly had Windows installed... On a 100% fresh install with only 7zip, Rufus, and RPCS3 on the system, I tried launching RPCS3 and it already complained about missing DLLs. I was like, "WTF???" I'm not going to deal with this and deleted Windows immediately.