In May 2021 I heard from Steve who had picked
up a Dx0Q box for $15 a little while ago.
It is running Debian 10, and I'm using it as a Minecraft server,
Half Life 2:Deathmatch server and runs a small website. In addition it is also used for some
light network file sharing. It replaced an early 2009 Mac Mini
and delivers the goods about two times faster! (and without weird EFI issues that require
hacky workarounds.)
As far as the hardware is concerned he had installed 16GB of RAM
(2x Timetec 76TT16NUSL2R8-8G DDR3L-1600 as a kit from Amazon)
and two SSDs, and the result "...has been running rock solid without any issues ever since."
As far as the SSDs were concerned:
My setup gets inspiration from both Ammon and Daniel's
respective setups in that it uses the drive mounting trick on the side-cover from Daniel's but uses the
CN1700 power-tap mod from Ammon's.
The first SSD I fitted to my setup is a 500GB 860 Evo. I took this out of its case
and dropped it into the standard onboard SATA slot. It was slightly over-sized so I added
kaptontape underneath it to avoid any shorts and had
to carefully trim a corner where it was going to hit a standoff.
The second no-name SSD was mounted to the cover as per Daniel's approach. To connect this in I
used a SATA cable from a junked HP all-in-one. The data cable had a suitable right-angle connector
on the end and plugged straight in to other onboard SATA data connector. For the power connection
at the board end I adapted a cable off of a laptop PWM fan. This plugged into CN1700 to pick up the
necessary 5v supply. (The innermost two pins are ground and the outermost two are +5v).
Steve then moved on to temperatures:
Although you've never mentioned CPU temperatures, Daniel touched on it in his usage scenario.
I would strongly suggest anyone getting one of these replaces the thermal compound under the heatsink.
I guess it will depend on how heavily it has been used in the past but in my case I saw an improvement
of 8-10°C. When fully loaded I saw a temperature drop from 65°C to about 54°C and
when idling it sat around 46-47°C depending on the ambient temperature.
It takes almost no time at all to do this bit of maintenance and in my experience anything is better
than the stock paste. I used some of a tube of Arctic Silver Ceramique 2.
The thermal conductivity
of this is not given on their website, but I can hazard a guess of around 3.9-4W/(mK). This guess is
based on my usage of it for the past decade or so. My thin client was relatively dusty when I received
it so I can only assume it was a well used example, and the dry paste was a good indication of that fact.
His final comments related to BIOS updates:
As far as your section on the BIOS updates for these, you CAN flash them with the Windows SLIC
key-containing BIOS if you so desire, so long as you know what you're doing from Linux. Mine had the SLIC
code already present in the BIOS so I was okay in doing this, but there is a certain question of legality
of whether or not it should be done to any of these clients that do not already have it in place. it's
the utility used in the example that might make a fuss about it, and off-hand I can't remember what I
used to eventually update mine, but since it is an EFI BIOS it just did the usual thing of arming the
update for the next reboot anyway. When it does update, it clears the CMOS, so if you clear the factory
BIOS password from memory, you will need to use the factory password again and clear it a second time as
well as re-apply any other changes that were made last time around.
And in summary:
All in all this is a very robust system to play with and it runs admirably for what I'm doing with it.
It's the helpful information on parkytowers that made me press the buy button in the first place.