Hello! This time I’d like to talk about my Wyse RX0LE not-so-thin client. This passively cooled PC has a full height PCIe slot!
Coming in at a full height of 30cm and 8cm thick its not exactly a thin client. Containing a 4-lane PCIe slot and passive AMD Sempron adding a passive graphics card seemed like the perfect on the go CS:GO machine.
It has a 1.5Ghz AMD Sempron, a 16-lane PCIe slot via a riser card and a single DDR2 slot. I replaced the base 1GB RAM with a 2GB low profile stick, the 1GB disk on module also isn’t useful for anything. So bought a small laptop IDE extension cable mostly used for Commodore Amiga’s, and hooked that up with a 32GB SD card adapter instead.
Graphics took some trial and error what would be the most powerful it can safely take without crashing. This turned out to be a Radeon HD 4550 from XFX. Also a passive card.
3DMark 2001 benchmark details.
This is aslso by far the most playable age of games this system can run at all resolutions. Benchmark is on 1024×768. default settings. Same for 2003.
As you can see abovem late DirectX 8 and early DirectX 9 games run fairly well on the system like this.
If you ever get your hands on it, you can also choose a Geforce 6000 series card, which will allow you to run Windows 98! Do note, total power draw is max 65 watts. Cards that go above 25 watts are unstable. As I’ve also tried a HD 4670.
Conclusion
So, if you ever get your hands on one of these machines with the right graphics card they can make excellent retro gaming systems. The radeon HD 4550 1GB is about the best card you can fit in it. You even get HDMI! Then I would go for GeForce 6000 series if you plan on using Windows 98. Plus an laptop SD card holder as storage of course. The built in storage module is pretty useless at only 2GB.