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I noticed that Phobos, my mid-tower ATX desktop with a Ryzen 7 5700X and an RX 6650 XT, was consuming a lot of power. Combining this with my dual monitor setup I use for it, it can pull up to 150W just watching YouTube and doing general tasks like browsing the internet or running LibreOffice Writer. Yikes!
So I began a quick search to find something lower power. Of course, the lower the consumption the worse the performance would be. But just *how* low could I go? Well... this low.
The Wyse 5020, also known as the Dx0Q, is a thin client manufactured by Wyse, a subsidiary of Dell. It is an ultra low power consumption machine, with its CPU boasting a TDP of just 15 watts. It's also very small, measuring in at 170 x 40 x 185mm (height, width, depth) - it's bigger than Callisto and Europa, but way, WAY smaller than Phobos.
Its original purpose was to be a remote desktop box that connects to a central server, which allows it to consume so little power and also be so small.
I bought this particular unit brand new in box, still sealed, for £35 on eBay. Mine came without the vertical foot, so it stands vertically but without much stabilisation. My unit was manufactured in November of 2017.
There's two USB 3.0 ports on the back alongside two USB 2.0 ports. It has gigabit Ethernet, DisplayPort and DVI-I. On the front is two more USB 2.0 ports and a combo headphones/microphone jack. The power button and an 'activity light' are also on the front panel, with the former glowing blue and the latter multicoloured. It's meant to show the 'cloud desktop' status, but in reality may as well just be an indicator for whether it's passed POST or not, or is sleeping or not.
So... the specs. It has an AMD GX-415GA system-on-chip for the CPU, with built in Radeon HD 8330E graphics. The CPU is clocked at 1.5GHz and has four Jaguar-based cores, along with four threads. It shipped by default with 4GB of DDR3L 1600MHz RAM in the form of one 4GB SODIMM, meaning it's running in single channel. It's also fanless, with a large passive heatsink installed on the SoC. It has a 32GB disk-on-module installed into a restrictive SATA port.
To test things out I installed Linux Mint 21.2 'Victoria' onto the 32GB DOM, with the Xfce desktop.
To say that its performance is lacking is... an understatement. It takes effort for it to simply run Nala (a frontend for APT), and it takes a significant amount of time to open the Linux Mint software store. It struggles to load YouTube, but its integrated GPU can mostly effortlessly play back 720p 60 FPS video from YouTube and Twitch.
I have to keep most Firefox tabs unloaded, as it consumes a lot of RAM and I have very little of it to work with. They also put a strain on the CPU. Gemini pages load quickly in Lagrange due to their extremely lightweight and simplistic nature. It can effortlessly play the Radio Free Fedi Comfy MP3 stream using Audacious. LibreOffice Calc does not perform all that well while editing a spreadsheet on my SMB share, and takes a very noticable amount of time to save.
Playing games is essentially impossible. It struggles even with Minecraft's Better Than Adventure modded version, which is not very hard to run. You'll be able to run 2048 or maybe Age of Empires II through Wine, but that's really about it. Cookie Clicker runs okay in the browser.
You might be wondering what kind of upgrades could happen here. Well, the SoC is soldered to the motherboard, so that can't be replaced without some serious work, and the BIOS would have to have explicit support for it. So, consider that impossible.
There's two RAM slots on the motherboard, with the top one in use from the factory. It won't boot with one stick installed in the bottom slot and the top slot empty. To get at the bottom one you have to unplug, unscrew and remove the front I/O board, which holds the power button, activity light, USB ports and 3.5mm combo jack. Then you can insert the stick into the bottom slot. The maximum capacity is 16GB.
The SATA DOM slot is very restrictive, with it being positioned by the edge of the board, and being sandwiched between the I/O board connector and double-stacked RAM sockets. I think very, very few SATA SSD PCBs will fit into this. You'll have better luck with the next upgrade.
There is a second SATA port on the motherboard for a 2.5" SSD or hard drive. You wouldn't spot a power connector unless you knew what to look for - the 1.25mm micro JST connector marked CN1700 has 5 volts and ground, enabling it to be used to power a 2.5" drive. There is no mounting hardware provided, but a 3D printed bracket was created by a person called Ammon and sent to ParkyTowers, the go-to thin client info site. If you can't get it 3D printed, you'll have to get creative. I'm just using a 256GB Kingston DataTraveler Max SSD-on-a-Stick for now.
That's about it for upgrades.
Overall, the Wyse 5020 / Dx0Q is a competent ultra low power machine that is ultimately NOT suited for desktop use in 2023 due to its very low power SoC that cannot really handle the modern internet, paired with its very weak GPU. It is more suited to server applications, perhaps running an Apache or Nginx web server, or serving up files over FTP, SMB, etcetera.
I'm still trialling it as of the time of writing, but it's definitely not for people who expect the best.