Repurposing Thin Clients
parkytowers.me.uk
parkytowers.me.uk
It deserves more interest.
Even comes with a ANSI hanger, so you can mount if off the back of common LCD panels.
Avoid the HP version, half the memory bandwidth, half the memory capacity, and less USB ports.
It's a little more difficult to work with than most PCs because they come with ChromeOS with runs Coreboot. Thankfully Mr. Chromebox has done a bunch of work building UEFI and legacy boot bioses packaged with friendly install scripts - https://mrchromebox.tech/ - but it's still a bit of work. It's really a very interesting effort- earlier this year he started working on upgrading the firmware for the embedded controller too.
This definitely weened me off my crushes for HP thin clients & the AMD embedded processors. Interesting systems, but the price point even in secondary markets stayed pretty high, especially given the modest performance. Back then the small but very competent GPU was a decent differentiator, some old units are probably still better than many of the Chromeboxes (which from experience I can say need more GPU muscle to do an adequate 4k).
Consumer/commercial mini-PCs continue to show up and come down-market. Given how good $400 laptops are (really astoundingly good), it's hard to imagine the mini-PC market keeping what seem like it's plush margins intact. The pressure to go down-market is big, and frankly it seems like a cost saving measure to sell smaller PCs than bigger ones- as consumer adoption increases I look forward to seeing competitiveness among small PCs growing.