Wyse thin client with AMD dual-core and ATI Radeon

Overview

This Wyse thin client packs more punch than you’d expect—a dual-core 1.4GHz AMD APU with an integrated ATI Radeon HD6250 GPU, all in a fanless palm-sized package. I’ve upgraded it to 2GB of RAM and a 16GB SSD, making it a surprisingly capable Windows XP retro gaming machine. Watch Medal of Honor gameplay to see what it can do!

Key Moments

• 0:00 Introduction to the Wyse thin client
• 1:15 Exterior ports: DisplayPort, DVI, PS/2, USB, Ethernet
• 2:30 Opening the case and internal teardown
• 4:00 Motherboard components: AMD APU, RAM slot, SATA SSD
• 5:45 Passive cooling design (no fans!)
• 7:00 First boot and Windows XP desktop
• 7:30 Medal of Honor 3D gaming demonstration
• 9:30 Performance analysis and recommendations

Full Transcript (Edited)

Hey there, YouTube. So this is another video where I show you another thin client, and this time it’s one of these little Wyse AMD dual-core thin clients. It’s got an ATI Radeon HD 6250 inside, and I built these out with Windows XP. They actually make some really cool little retro gaming PCs—very small. So you can see it’s like the size of the palm of your hand.

It’s got DisplayPort output, so you can stick this onto an HDMI screen or DVI-D or VGA with a DVI to VGA adapter like one of these. So yeah, let me show you a little bit around this unit, and then I’ll show you a couple of games that run on it, and you can make up your mind whether it makes a cool retro PC or not.

All right, let’s get started!

But before I jump into the computer, I want to share one way that you can actually support me in my channel, and that is by going to a website that I just launched called retromousepads.com. This is an example of the products that I sell there—I sell mouse pads with a retro-themed image on them. It could be a computer or a CPU or a vintage mouse or CGA color schemes or anything. Everything from Amigas, Commodores, IBMs, Macs. You can go check it out. The URL is retromousepads.com. Yeah, for like 10 bucks you can buy something like this, or for a little bit more you can buy an entire desk mat.

So yeah, if you think that’s cool, either leave a message below on this video and let me know what you think, or go ahead and buy one, and I will get a small cut of that. But it’s just my one way to show my appreciation for these vintage PCs, and it also makes a really cool companion to any of these computers that you may have at home.

All right, well now let’s get back to the video.

All right, now that we’re back, let me show you the internals. Okay, so to get inside of this machine, you would take off these screws back here, which I’ve already taken off. Then the top slides open like that. Then you lift this up, and then this is part of the cage. To remove this part, you remove four screws—one, two, well actually five—one, two, three, four, and five. This slides over like this.

Once you slide that out, you can lift this up. Be careful here because there’s a little speaker connected to the onboard sound card that has to be removed. So you remove that connector and you set that aside.

Now we can take a look inside. So the motherboard is very simple on this side because most of the supporting chips are on the other side of the board. On this side though, you have the CPU, which has an onboard ATI Radeon HD 6250. It’s one of those AMD dual-core APUs. You have this little daughterboard here, which has the front I/O.

In the front you have just a power button, two USB 2.0 ports, a headphone jack. In the back, like I mentioned, you have a DisplayPort, a DVI port that also supports VGA, two USB 2.0 ports, gigabit ethernet, and the 19-volt AC adapter jack.

Inside what I can show you is that there appears to be a PCI Express slot here where you can actually mount devices like a wireless card. Actually, these systems do come with wireless card support. Here you have these SATA disk-on-module drives. So this is a 16 gigabyte hard drive, basically, which has a standard SATA connection. So you technically could power a larger SSD if you have like a cable that brings this out and then you can plug in a larger drive. But for now, 16 gigs for a boot disk is perfectly fine.

So that goes right there. On this side over here, you have a 2 gigabyte DDR3 memory module. I believe these guys can support up to four gigs—I’m not sure about eight, but I wouldn’t be surprised if even eight. But two to four gigs—four gigs is probably more than enough, and two gigs for Windows XP 32-bit is perfectly fine.

And yeah, that’s the inside. There’s not much going on here, but it’s a very nicely integrated system. And notice that there are no fans! So that’s definitely a big plus because this is pretty much a laptop system with a huge passive cooler and some nice outputs.

The only thing that I don’t really like too much about this system is that it only has four USB 2.0 ports. So if you plug in a mouse and keyboard in the back, you’re pretty much done with that side. On the front you have some I/O, but usually people don’t plug much up here except maybe flash drives or USB CD-ROM drives when you’re loading stuff.

So that’s something to consider. I believe there is one I/O here, but I’m not sure what that is. But yeah, one way to remedy this—and I would do this with any thin client—you don’t want to with like 19 volts with like 80 watts or 40 watts power supply, you don’t want to overpower the USB ports by adding stuff in there. So you might want to get like a USB hub and go that route if you want to add a bunch of devices.

But yeah, let me put this back together, and I’m gonna boot it up and we’re gonna try loading a couple of games and see how it performs.

All right, so this is a little 3D demo on the HD 6250-based Wyse machine. It’s a game called Medal of Honor, and it shows some of the 3D performance that you can expect from the onboard ATI Radeon GPU. So it does a pretty good job. As you can see, this computer does a great job with other games like Warcraft, StarCraft, you know, all those early Windows 98, XP games. But this is pushing the limits a little bit more.

All right, so this is a little bit of the gameplay, so you can see it’s fairly responsive in some areas, some scenes. But it does slow down every once in a while when the scenes get busy.

[Gameplay footage continues]

Well, that shows you a little bit of the gameplay on the little Wyse. It’s down here, that little guy. It’s getting a little bit warm because it’s a 3D accelerated game, but it performs really well. And yeah, you can still have a lot of fun. If you want to play the older games, like I said, like those Red Alert, Command and Conquer games, or Diablo 2, those will run even better.

So yeah, hope you like this. If you appreciate these kind of videos, make sure you subscribe and hit the like button below. I have more little systems like this that I’m going to be testing and showing you in the channel. Also check out some of my previous videos because they do show some other thin clients and systems that I’ve benchmarked in a similar way.

All right, well, until next time!