In March 2022 I heard from Brandon who described what he'd been up to with a R90L and the R90LE.
SATA
His R90L had the SATA data socket fitted and he had added a SATA Hyperdisk
to the R90L. Checking on eBay today (April 2022) I find that almost all the hits are for IDE DOMs but there was a similar
SATA one from China. This example plugs straight into the SATA Data socket and has a separate power supply lead with a
connector style to match a 3.5" floppy drive. (Remember them?).
Brandon wrote:
With the power lead I removed the 2 pins from the shell of floppy connector and found that they fitted snugly on the
5v and GND pins of the nearby unused USB header. The DOM powered up just fine.
I installed Windows 98 on the expanded version of this thin client. I installed a Radeon x600 PCIe video card and
mounted two Raspberry Pi fans onto the case to provide some modest cooling of the video card. These I powered off the
USB header. (In this instance I just used a 16 GB IDE disk-on-module rather than the SATA one described previously).
For audio I used a cheap generic USB sound card that you can get on Amazon for $10. This makes for a rather powerful
Windows 98 unit.
He also added:
When powering anything off of a USB's 5v power pins, be sure to go into the power management tab of the USB hub in the
device manager within Windows and uncheck the box that allows Windows to turn off the device to save power.
Windows XP
In December 2023 I heard from Matt in Texas who had got hold of a R10L (April 2011 vintage) and a R90L (July 2010).
These were later models fitted with the 1.5GHz CPU.
Whilst they both were given a simple SSD/RAM upgrade and an installation of Windows XP the R90L was also
upgraded with a Video card to improve the graphics performance.
Over to Matt:
R10L - While I ran into nothing but problems trying to install Windows 98, I did successfully install Windows XP
with all working drivers. Graphics and sound are working great! My unit came with 1GB ram and a 4GB IDE DOM. I
successfully replaced the DOM with an IDE to mSATA adapter fitted with a 32GB mSATA drive. This adapter is connected
to the R10L using a short female to female 44pin cable. I also swapped the 1GB PC2-5300 ram module with a 2GB PC2-6400
ram module. XP runs snappy, and the older games I tested run really well on it.
R90L - My unit came with 2GB IDE DOM and a 1GB PC2-5300 ram module. I replaced the ram module with a 2GB PC2-6400
and added a 128GB SATA SSD powered via the CN15 connector next to the SATA port. I measured 5V on the first two pins
and the next two pins appear to be ground. To connect the power I bought a cheap 4-pack of molex to SATA power adapters
along with the male micro JST connectors (w/leads). Having cut off the Molex connectors I wired pin 1 of the JST to
5v red wire of the SATA connector and pin 3 to the black ground wire. In testing I discovered that the unit recognizes
both the SATA (IDE4) and IDE (IDE0) connected drives. I was able to change the boot order and successfully tested
booting from either drive.
Next came my attempt to improve on the so-so integrated graphics by using the PCIe slot to add an external graphics
card. Having seen that someone used a Radeon X600 with this thin client I looked at graphics card with the same TDP
or lower. I settled on the NVS 510, the HD 7570, or the HD 8490 since these are cheap and use around 35w max.
Due the physical size of the card(s) and the layout of the basic Rx0 I decided to extend the PCIe bus to a socket
fitted to the outside of the cover of the R90L where there would be no problem fitting the graphics card. Perhaps
not a particulary elegant approach but a practical solution to fit with the hardware I was working with. To this end
I purchased some heavy duty shelf brackets, an M3 machine screw kit, and an X4 to X8 PCIe adapter cable. All parts
were sourced from Amazon.
Example of a PCIe extender that you can find on Amazon or eBay. The one I sourced had a cable length of 14cm,
came from Amazon and was described as 10Gtek PCIE 3.0 Extension Cable, X8 to X4,
F to M, Straight to Straight, Cable Length 14cm, P332FM1115
To begin the modification to the case to mount a PCIe graphics card, I plugged in the PCIe adapter and measured where
the cable needed to rise straight up through the side cover without any distortion. Since the X8 PCIe connector end
is wide, I used wire snips to cut away the plastic and shielding for 14 rows in two columns. I then fed the cable
through the side cover through the hole I made and began by mounting the shelf brackets to the PCIe socket using 8mm M3
screws washers and nuts. After that I secured the brackets to the cover using 12mm M3 screws, washers and nuts.
I plugged in a graphics card and tightened everything down.
With the graphics card installed you don't see the cable feeding into the thin client. All in all it turned out to be
a reasonably neat solution to how to add the graphics card to the Rx0L. I tested this out using a Radeon HD 8490
and a Radeon HD 7570. If you do this mod, you will need to pick your graphics card wisely since the card needs to have
a low TDP. I haven't tested what TDP is the max possible yet, but a card that is around 35W or less is probably a safe bet.
