DFI GHF51 – Worlds Smallest AMD Ryzen SBC | Hacker News Reader

DFI GHF51 – Worlds Smallest AMD Ryzen SBC

williamlam.com

45 pointsjacquesm20 comments

This thing looks like it'd be great if I wanted to use it to support 3000 store fronts or if I wanted to deploy as a remotely managed network probe to all my SAAS customers on the premium tier, or some other industrial application.

Probably overkill for people who would otherwise play with a stack of plastic doodads that use some cheapo USB power supply.

Snap-on vs harbor freight house brand, but this is actually cheap for that semi-industrial purpose.

I didn't see anything about dust / moisture / vibration rating, but the passive cooling and screw on DC power supply look serious.

I bought my dad one of the other mentioned companies (OnLogic) computers - and it was very robust (the industrial fanless mini itx stuff) - passively cooled, no noise, small and powerful enough for his needs, and frankly the bulldozer yellow color scheme was appealing to someone that worked in construction.

I have long wished for an AMD based Raspberry Pi like device... or at least something of vaguely similar size and capability. Though I have to say at $368 this doesn't seem very appealing.

This is clearly intended for the industrial market, not for consumers. Price tends to be much less of an issue there.

No GPIO either. I am quite surprised that there are so few x86 boards that expose _native_ GPIO capabilities. Somehow it's more popular to add a companion Arduino-like microcontroller for that (but that type of boards is quite rare too).

If it's going into industrial computing, then it's not going to ship with on-board GPIO but will probably instead have interface card in its mini-pcie slot that will house a fieldbus controller - or it might even operate fieldbus from its main gigabit NIC. The fieldbus will then connect to relays, DI/DO, AI/AO etc. etc. including complex devices like motor controls, sensors, etc.

It has a 26-pin D-sub socket labelled "DIO + SMBus", which I can't find much about, but which may serve that purpose.

DIO should be the same as GPIO in uC world. At quick glance it does seem to provide 8 GPIOs

$368 is really cheap, just not consumer cheap.

If you want something reasonable and cheap it's worth looking at the second hand market for the Lenovo M-series "Tiny" PCs. They're small, well made, very reliable, have hefty CPUs, proper RAM, SATA or NVMe storage, boot headless and seem to work perfectly with Linux. I have previously used a couple of their M600 fanless Celerons as utility nodes.

The ASRock BOX-R1000M starts at $250 with a 2c/4t Zen APU, needs RAM and storage; $50 more for the one with 4c/8t. It's NUC-sized and has 2 gig-e NICs, several USB3 ports and both HDMI and DisplayPort. As an office desktop it's quite adequate, especially with enough RAM.

Thanks for this! These things look like pretty beefy machines for the price.

I've posted about this before on HN, there are some pretty nifty Asus chromeboxes with i7's in them that can be had for cheap. You'll need to reflash the bios to put Linux on them (or Windows, if you really want to). They tend to be pretty cheap second hand because people don't know what to do with them.

Agreed. They are generally very solid hardware compared to semi-generic Chinese systems. They even have an embedded CEC control which is not found in any other x86 sytems AFAIK. Open source firmware that can do EFI or BIOS payloads. Look up MrChromebox for details.

Do you recommend any specific models? Can you only do this with some Chromeboxes? If I could get one with a better iGPU than a mobile Haswell i7's, that would be useful.

This is the one I know works for sure:

https://www.asus.com/Displays-Desktops/Mini-PCs/Chrome-OS-de...

If you run into any trouble re-flashing mail me, I'll probably be able to help you out.

I'd take a look at https://mrchromebox.tech/#devices to check before purchasing any particular Chromebox. There are (or were) other firmwares you could flash, but MrChromebox seems like a pretty sold place to start.

It is quite steep, indeed. A direct competitor is the Odroid H2. A full system (including 4 GB RAM, 16 GB eMMC) costs around 180$; it's (likely) less performant than the DFI's Ryzen, but it's still good in comparison to the other typical ARM systems.

Sadly, the Odroid H2 (or rather its successor, the H2+) was discontinued a while back because of the ongoing parts shortage.

Its funny, embedded x86 SBCs cost a fortune when compared with their matx/mitx brothern. Arm SBC's OTOH, have some very inexpensive variants, but the matx/mitx versions cost a relative fortune.

The difference has to be a NRE/unit volume thing, but you would think that someone who needs a x86 in an embedded form factor like this would have the volume to get the price down. DFI has to know that they would sell those things like crazy if they cost $59.

Asus makes a similar product just a bit more expensive, the PF 51. Very small, very quiet and very good build quality. I'm using one to be the 'smarts' of my now dumb TV and it's excellent. It has a fan but I've never heard it and it runs a barely perceptible warm. Pair it will the Logitech Ergo MX wireless mouse and you'll never look back.

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