Tally another one
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If you buy direct from VIPoutlet you can use the code 10VIPFIRST for 10%off. I got mine for $114.20 after tax and free shipping (NJ)
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For anyone who may need a little visual guidance on how to get inside and work in your new HP 290 hereās a pretty complete video on how to go about it:
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Did an idle power test with a kill-a-watt.
I swapped out the hdd for a 2.5" SSD
Idle with Ubuntu is 8-10 watts dipping as low as 7 watts on occasion.
Might be able to get even lower if you were to remove wifi and the disk drive, probably not much if any though. Also a m.2 drive might be less, but probably not even detectable.
Still very impressive.
I will be ordering 1-2 more for PFsense, and might even go the DAS route and replace my Unraid server. It gets very little use as is and the power savings would be worth it. Or at least build a backup box.
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I wish I didnāt live in Europe when I see deals like this. 
Iām from non-US continent too, and used mail forwarder company to bring it to me. Final price is $162 for me (when 290 was for $92)
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Same, final price after all forwarding and taxes around 180$ itās relatively very cheap
So few question, i bought the hp 290 and ordered 120 gb nvme ssd (still waiting for everything to arrive)
the computer is purposed to my parents house, my inital plan is making a plex box with several more containers.
side note, i have a T30 with OpenMediaVault that uses as NAS and plex box all together.
i want to do that with this pc in small scale (since they dont need much from it)
so: debian + OMV + few container (sonarr/radarr/transmission/plex/pihole/openvpn) is the plan.
i know it should work well, only 2 transcodes simultaneously with plex pass (quicksync/hw)
now i have a a though about trying pfsense for the first time.
my parents got last month fiber cables connection, so 1GB download speed.
the current router gives them around 300-400MB in total, i need to upgrade it.
since i didnāt use pfSense so far (used openwrt in my home up untill now) iād like to know two things:
- security wise, run pfSense with all the other containers (in same linux or different VM) is safe?
- performance wise, pfSense/plex should be okey in a server like that?
and a last one, even if i shouldnāt run it together, what kind of 4 ports nic card should i buy? 1Gb, if i can get few links/names since the links here wonāt ship to my country.
thanks!
any of this would work?
Does the integrated video on this thing drive 4K over the HDMI port ? I just need to drive a single monitor, 30Hz is fine.
The processor specs are here:
Where it states:
- 4K SupportYes, at 60Hz
- Max Resolution (HDMI 1.4)ā”4096x2304@24Hz
- Max Resolution (DP)ā”4096x2304@60Hz
I am guessing it should be good to go with driving a 4k display.
4K at 24Hz only most likely.
All, thanks for the info. Iāll hope I can get a DP to HDMI active converter that actually works properly. Iāve not had much luck so far. Or maybe the 24Hz will still be just about tolerable for bog standard browsing etc. Time will tell.
If you need 4K 60 output, the best route is a GPU, no doubt about it.
I had good luck with this one: Club 3D, CAC-2070, Active DisplayPort to HDMI 2.0 Adapter
https://www.amazon.com/CAC-2070-DisplayPort-Supports-displays-3840x2160/dp/B0775Z57H9/
It works well with an R9 Nano and a TCL tv
My machine does not have a Display Port output on it, only a HDMI and a VGA.
all 4 of mine had hdmi and vga only
Oh, sorry was thinking the opposite. The Intel iGPU can only do 4k@60 over DP, not HDMI - so if you donāt have a DP port, then you cannot get 4k@60 even though technically the iGPU is capable of it
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I just ordered 3 of these little systems. I plan on creating a proxmox cluster with ceph storage network. Will do the following upgrades (per node):
Add a connect-x dual port sfp+ card (picked up 3 for $20 ea)
Add an 8G or 16G stick of memory (Iāve read this system may be able to take a 16G dimm) ($30-60)
Upgrade the processor to an i3-8100 (also Iāve read with the latest bios 9th gen cpus also work) (~$100)
Add 500GB nvme drive for ceph (confirmed the m.2 while only 2x is pcie gen3) (~$50)
Replace hdd with a 250GB boot ssd (Iāve got a stack of these laying around)
Iām hoping this should make a nifty (and cheap) little low power virtualization cluster. I mostly run LXC containers so virtualization overhead is extremely low.
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If I get an 8gb stick of ram to add to the 4, will this still do dual channel? I thought you needed 2 matched pairs for dual channel?
Needs to be matched for dual channel. The way dual channel works is it interleaves each bankā¦ canāt interleave two different sized capacities. Some systems are even pickier requiring matched timings of the dimms.