Dell FX170 thin client complete teardown

Overview

I had about 200 of these Dell FX170 thin clients, and this is one of the last ones before I sold them all. So I’m tearing down a defective unit to show you every component, chip, and design detail inside. Perfect for anyone curious about the internals of these Atom-based fanless computers.

Key Moments

• 0:00 Introduction and exterior overview
• 2:00 Removing screws and opening the case
• 3:30 Internal components: motherboard, heatsink, speaker
• 5:00 CMOS battery location and BIOS reset procedure
• 6:30 Front panel LEDs, power button, and headers
• 8:00 Removing the heatsink to reveal the chips
• 10:00 Intel Atom N270 CPU and Intel 945GSE chipset
• 11:30 Network chip (Realtek RTL8111), sound chip (VIA VT1708)
• 12:45 Bottom side chip identification and analysis
• 13:30 Closing thoughts and upcoming content

Full Transcript (Edited)

Hey there, YouTube. So today I thought I’d do a little short video going a little bit more in-depth into a teardown of a little Dell thin client. I had about, you know, probably a couple hundred of these, and I only have a couple left. So I thought before I sell the last couple, I’d tear one down that is defective and show you the actual components in close-up.

This is a little Dell FX 170, and it’s got an Atom CPU in it and it’s got an Intel chipset. In the back, what you have is the AC adapter input—it runs on 12 volts. It’s got a PS/2 keyboard connector, a DVI video port with also VGA in there, so it’s a DVI-I. And then I have two USB 2.0 ports and a gigabit ethernet adapter.

In the front I got the power button, the network activity light, headphone jack, microphone jack, and two more USB 2.0 ports.

So yeah, I’m gonna go ahead and fast forward to actually having it torn apart, and we’ll take a look.

All right, so here it is. The black screws are the ones for the case, and the white screws here, these guys, are the ones that were holding the motherboard assembly within the case.

Let me get close here and show you all the little components. These systems do have an onboard speaker, so it’s this little guy on the corner here. It’s like a small, very small speaker, and it plugs into, I believe, this connector right here.

The motherboard, the heatsink for the bottom of the motherboard is this guy right here. This is like a little insert that goes inside the case. Let me see if I can take it out. Let me just flip it. Yeah, there you go. And this is a heatsink that is for the chips that are on the lower side. I’ll show you that in a moment. This goes inside that part of the case, and it has these thermal pads that touch against those chips that I’ll show you and transfer the heat onto this heatsink. Also, there’s this other aluminum shield that also acts as a grounding plane, as you can see, to prevent static shocks and at the same time distribute some of this heat from this heatsink.

All right, so that’s just that side. In the front there is this little power button, which is just a piece of plastic with two little plastic tabs that are springy, like springs made out of plastic.

On this side, this is the top. It goes over the top of the unit with the motherboard, so you can see the airflow can go through it. This is all passive—there’s no fan in here. So they have all this mesh kind of design on it to allow some air to flow through it. The same thing is on this side. On this side we also have a heatsink with a large thermal pad, and it’s not as thick as the other one, but the thermal pad is kind of wide because this thermal pad basically lays on top of the main heatsink on the motherboard.

Okay, another thing I can show you here—so that’s pretty much it for that panel. Another thing I can show you here is the CMOS battery. So it’s a typical battery that you would find on most Dell devices, and you can actually buy these on eBay. They plug in using this small little plug over here.

On this system, since it has a battery, this would be—by removing this battery and letting this sit for a couple of minutes, that’s how you would reset any BIOS admin password on these units. Many thin clients don’t even have—if you remove the battery, they revert back to a master password. This one doesn’t have that. This one, if you remove the battery, it behaves very much like a normal computer.

All right, so let me show you around the motherboard now.

On the front here you have a couple of LEDs—that one and that one. And I think that one. This one is the power light, and that one is the network activity light. I don’t think this header is used. That header is probably for something like a diagnostic port or something that I have no idea about.

This is the power button right here. You have the ports that I showed you, which are shielded. There’s this other shielding on top of the other USB 2.0 ports. The motherboard is held in place by four screws—one of them is underneath this. So you can see down here, that’s the hole. Another one here, another one there, another one there.

Well, the main components for the motherboard are here. But this is the IDE solid-state disk, like a disk-on-module. So if I take this out—I already loosened it a little bit so it’s easier for me to show you—this is one of those IDE disk-on-modules. So you could take this out, and if you wanted to have more storage, you could—this is like a laptop-style connector. You could actually wire in a laptop hard drive if you power it from maybe a USB port or some other power supply, because you won’t get enough power out of this port right here. Or you can put a CompactFlash adapter and kind of hack it into the case somehow. Or just buy a larger capacity one of these.

On this side you have a DDR2 SODIMM laptop memory module. So if I were to take it out, I can just lift the clips like that and it comes out. This motherboard will support up to two gigs. This is a one gig unit. And it goes into the single slot there. It’s really nice that this is upgradeable. But yeah.

And then the last thing I’m going to show you is underneath this heatsink. So you can see it’s got a couple of areas here for these chips down here.

All right, so let’s see what we’re looking at here. So we are looking at the Atom CPU. This is a—let me put it upside down here so you can actually read the labels with me along with me. It’s a 1.6 gigahertz Atom CPU from the year 2007. So you can see here the numbers that I’m reading out—512K of cache and 533 megahertz front-side bus. And it’s an Atom N270. That’s it. And this is the die right here.

Underneath that, I don’t know what that chip is—I’d have to look it up. This is the main chipset. It’s an Intel—like G45—sorry, Intel GMA 950. That’s what this chipset is. And if I get something to wipe off the thermal paste, let me see if I can show you. All right, let me just wipe it off for that. Since this is a broken motherboard, I can’t—it powered up once and then I think I’m making a bigger mess. I shouldn’t have—I should have used alcohol. But yeah, it’s just a die. There are no numbers on this die that I can see through the camera here. And it’s an Intel G45—I’m sorry, keep on saying that—GMA 950 video, sorry, GMA 950, G45 chipset, I believe. Yeah.

And a bunch of, you know, additional stuff here. This is—what is this? Quantel? I have no idea what that is. This is the Realtek sound chip. Actually, no, I’m wrong there. This is the RTL8111 network chip, which is right next to the ethernet adapter. So this is the gigabit ethernet adapter chip right there. Looks like it has its own dedicated 25 megahertz clock, or maybe that’s a system clock and there’s a multiplier somewhere. Well, there are different clocks here. This is another one—14.318, so that sounds like something that would be for video, for the VGA signal.

And yeah, the sound chip—where’s the sound chip? I thought the sound chip was around here. All right, well, let’s flip it upside down and see what chips are on the other side.

All right, on this side I have another chip. This is an 82801GBM, so this is like the chipset itself. This must be the chip that has the video on it, and this must be the other pair for the I/O. And that takes up a lot of the back end here.

This is—what is this? I can’t tell what that chip is. Looks like maybe some kind of serial—F7105. I’d have to look—maybe some kind of security chip.

And this is the VIA—this is the sound chip right here. VT1708. And that is probably some SRAM, perhaps. I have to look up the chip on this one right here. I don’t know what that is.

But yeah, that’s pretty much the tour of this broken Intel Atom thin client. It’s pretty much an Atom laptop in a very small form factor. It’s bulkier than what would go in a laptop, but if you can imagine, like, you know, I’ve seen laptops nowadays where the motherboards are like this size, like this, and the rest of the space is just a big battery. So yeah, these thin clients, they make really nice little PCs.

Unfortunately, you can’t really easily expand the storage too much unless you start hacking together something with cables and power from either USB or from another dedicated power adapter just for the hard drive. But overall, they make nice little machines.

So yeah, if you like this kind of stuff, let me know in the comments what you think, and also please subscribe because I keep on posting content with all my retro and newish computers. I have a series on flipping computers that I’m going to start soon, where basically I have a box of about 40 laptops that I bought. I’m going to be going one by one and fixing the problem—usually it’s just missing hard drive or some other issue and an AC adapter is missing—and then I’m gonna try to flip it. I’ll show you how I do that, and then we can look together to see how effective it is to actually flip computers in 2022.

So yeah, let me know what you think. It was a pleasure doing this with you, and until next time!