Seems you’ve found the speed that slot is capable of, regardless of whether a drive installed is faster. I do not recall exactly but there’s a solid chance the slot is limited to two lanes instead of the more typical four, which would put the maximum rate of the slot at 2 GB/s (under perfect conditions) which means the 1.6 GB/s measured speed is pretty much in line. I wouldn’t have any concerns about a PC with those transfer rates, it’s highly unlikely to ever hit that limit in a problematic way.
Agreed, and thank you for the reply! I was wondering about the 2 vs 4 lanes but in the back of my mind I was thinking I had built a similar system previously and did not run into that bottleneck. He will still be getting a blazing fast system compared to his 10-year-old AMD Phenom II.
Hey, I am running into bottlenecks with my CPU in my HP 290 due to the subtitle transcodes/burns required by certain subtitle formats [Official] HP 290-p0043w Owner's Thread - #668 by Radio. My machine has the Intel(R) Celeron(R) G4930 CPU @ 3.20GHz
For me, subtitles is a must, and I actually prefer image based subtitles in things like anime. So since subtitle burn is a requirement for me, it looks like the only option I have is to upgrade the CPU. What are my best CPU upgrade options while still getting QuickSync, and staying under the power supply/CPU cooler capabilities? I guess upgrading the CPU cooler wouldn’t be a deal-breaker, but I’d prefer not to.
Currently:
- Supports ~1 or 2 simultaneous x265 1080p transcodes with subtitles
Requirements:
- Supports ~8 (ideally 10) x265 1080p transcodes with subtitles
Has anyone successfully installed an i3-8100T on the HP 290? I have updated the BIOS and having no luck. I am just wondering if I have a dud processor. It has 3 long beeps and two short ones and does not post. I am able to still boot on the original Celeron.
Looks most likely I have a dud processor. I got a full refund from the eBay seller I got it from.
It’s a dud. I doubt that CPU has anything special compared to the other 8th gens we’ve been installing
i5-8500T should breeze through that workload.
I can’t find the i5-8500T being sold anywhere. But I did find the i5-9600k. Would that be decent? Why recommend the T?
Edit: or what about the i5-9600T? Really wondering whether to get the T or K. K seems to be much higher TDP than T (95W vs 35W), which seems ubelievable? That must come at a huge tradeoff for performance, right?
The “T” CPUs have a lower max TDP for use in mobile and embeded applications where power and cooling may be limited. This also means that have a lower max
clock and won’t be able to achieve as much single threaded performance under load.
Unless you don’t have adequate cooling in your case you don’t need to get the T version.
The “K” CPUs are the opposite. They are unlocked for overclocking so you can ramp the TDP and hence the performance up beyond spec at the price of more power draw and heat.
For a server you are probably not going to be overclocking so I would recommend getting the regular versions of the CPU with no letters at the end.
There is nothing wrong with getting a K (or at T for that matter), but I wouldn’t pay more for one. For a standard Plex / Homeserver workload they will all be approximately the same. So really go with which ever you can find the best price on.
I ended up going with an i5-8500 (no letter) that I found on ebay for $50. My choices were
- i5 8500: $50
- i5 8600: $60
- i5 9500: $72
- i5 9600: $80
Ended up going with the 8500 since it has passmark scores within 1k of the top choice (9580 for the 8500 vs 10331 for the 9600). For a 60% increase in price, I would need more of an improvement in performance. All the CPUs have a TDP of 65W.
I think you made the correct choice.
The 9th gens probably have 5% - 9% more performance for 44% - 60% more cost.
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What relative power draw numbers are people seeing with different CPUs? In other words, how much does it change at “idle” going from the stock Celeron to something like an i5-9xxx vs. i9-9900T vs. the i9-9900K?
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Power draw is definitely my main concern because my lab runs off solar, batteries, and backup generator. Generators are wildly inefficient, so my per/kW electricity costs (gasoline) are like 10x the us average. It would be easy to say “buy more solar panels and batteries”, but that doesn’t solve the issue because for 3 months of the year there’s no direct sunlight at this location.
I have an HP 290 that’s been sitting around unused for a while because it was missing an NVME. Instead I’ve been using an HP T630 thin client to run my 24-7 docker containers. Somehow the T630 “idles” at almost 20W even with nothing but bone stock Home Assistant Supervised. 
The Z390 motherboard I’ve been using as a low-power-consumption workstation (Adobe Premiere , Fusion360) just died. It has an i5-9400 that I could move over to my HP 290. I had to use proxies in my 4K video editing workflow, but aside from that it’s been fine.
The death of the Z390 freed up an NVME drive for testing. With the stock Celeron, I installed Windows 11 on the 290 along with 32GB ram, a 5TB HDD, 1TB NVME, and 1TB SATA SSD. It draws about 11W from the wall at “idle”. That seems pretty respectable for Windows, and is almost half the T630 with Linux.
I’m toying with the idea of adding a spare Quadro P1000 GPU, replacing the Celeron, and repurposing the 290 as the primary home server. It would help immensely if it could also act as a low power video rendering box from time to time. It’s not quite the same as Plex transcoding, because some workloads are DNxHD/HR and ProRes, which don’t benefit from QuickSync.
A dual-purpose 290 would allow me to keep using [whatever low power workstation I end up rebuilding] while videos are rendering. One big downside I can think of is that I’d probably have to dual-boot since, IIRC, the HP’s BIOS can’t handle live switching between GPU and iGPU like the z390 can, and even though the Quadro TDP is something like 45W, I don’t want to power it 24-7.
Okay, the description of various hardware and potential use-cases might lead away from my original question. Having more information on the relative power draw of the 9th gen CPUs would help me decide how much of the 8/9th generation stuff I can mix and match and repurpose to avoid building an entire workstation with newer hardware.
If there isn’t much of a power draw penalty at “idle”, I might want to buy something like an i9-9900T for the 290, add another z390 motherboard for the i5-9400, and be done with it.
Have you looked at ebay?
Plex transcoding is most power efficient with Intel QSV. You can get ~20 transcodes with a low power Celeron CPU, max power draw will be around 20 watts.
I would love to see your setup if you’re willing to share pics. I’m super interested.
If anyone is looking to upgrade their RAM in the HP 290, I have verified that TeamGroup T-FORCE VULCAN Z 32GB (2 x 16GB) DDR4-3200 works fine on the machine. Got it on sale for $55 before tax at Microcenter. Setting up a Proxmox server after ugprading the CPU to the I5-8500.
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Yes, 64gb works on the HP 290!
Wow, still receives new version of bios (may 2023)
https://support.hp.com/us-en/drivers/hp-slim-290-p0000-desktop-pc-series/model/23205936 (Choose 843F)
Has anyone successfully ran an i7 8700 or i9 9900k in the HP 290? If so, did it require any additional cooling and/or a new CPU cooler?
Looking up upgrade my spare to run Proxmox, so figured I’d try to squeeze in as much power as possible.
One or two people have put in CPUs around the 8700 tier, not too sure about that 9900k though. They might have upgrade the fan to an Arctic but that’s about it. Can’t remember anyone actually putting in a different cooler. It’ll probably run hotter though.