In October 2013 I heard from Rob Dark who had used a t5730 as the basis for a Music Centre. You can read about that here.
In May 2025 I heard from Nijiura on using the t5730 for running old XP era games. You can read about it here.
As you know, t5730/t5730w is a great model for XP gaming because of its upgradeable AMD cpu, but it does have awful onboard video. Unfortunately the apparent onboard PCI/PCIe slot is non standard and relies on the riser (part of the HP t5730/t5735 Expansion Module) to map the appropriate lines to the 4x PCIe socket on the riser. Without the correct riser the socket on the t5730 is useless. These days the chance of finding a riser or expansion module is close to zero.
Thanks to a mention in the "Mods" section on this site I discovered that there is a standard mPCIe slot on the bottom of the motherboard. I instantly thought of the many boards produced for the bitcoin mining community which connect a PCIe socket mounted on a small circuit board to a mPCIe socket on the host computer. These boards are also cheap and easy to find.
These mining cards are usually referred to as "risers" and come with a variety of ways of interconnecting the "riser" board and the mPCIe interface board and of providing power to the "riser". Usually the data connection between the card and riser uses a standard USB3.0 cable. However I found that with a USB-A connector on the interface card there was insufficient clearance below the motherboard and I couldn't refit it to the case. The answer was to search for "mining riser laptop" or similar to find one that was fitted with a more compact connector. Such cards are 5-7 bucks on Ali/eBay.
The next item on the list is the Video card selection. Bearing in mind that the operating system (Windows XP) dates from 2001, the t5730 from 2008 and the CPU in t5730 you don't need to get carried away in selecting a video card to use. If you do it will just give you grief and likely overload your power supply. Looking out a fanless low-profile card such as GeoForce 1030 or GeForce 210 would be fine. They are cheap (~10-20 bucks used), low power and have enough performance to not be a bottleneck.
To finish off I attached the riser cable to adapter, routed it under the motherboard between the mounting pillars and tightened screws. To bring cable outside, I drilled a hole on the thin client's backplate, slightly below the VGA connector. The cable is 60cm length and about half of it appears outside, allowing plenty of freedom in where you can position the riser/video card near the t5730.
Surprisingly, I found that everything worked just out of the box! (My card uses the same driver that the internal one).
To sum up this was a cheap and easy solution compared to the alternative of designing a custom riser to deal with the proprietary PCIe slot or, alternatively, tracking down an original expansion module.
A final comment on flash storage for the installed OS.
