Wyse Thin Client: Sempron & ATI Radeon X1200

Overview

This Wyse thin client packs impressive specs for Windows XP retro gaming: a 1.5GHz AMD Sempron single-core CPU paired with an ATI Radeon X1200 GPU with 128MB shared RAM. I’ve upgraded it to 1GB RAM and an 8GB IDE flash disk. What makes this unit special is the dual-head DVI capability, completely passive cooling (no fans), and excellent port selection including serial ports, PS/2, and gigabit Ethernet. Perfect for early 3D gaming at 1024x768 with surprising performance.

Key Moments

• Dual DVI outputs (one supports VGA with adapter) for dual monitors
• Completely fanless design with passive heatsink
• ATI Radeon X1200 GPU with 128MB shared DDR2 RAM
• Upgraded to 1GB RAM and 8GB IDE flash disk
• Four USB 2.0 ports, two serial ports, PS/2 keyboard/mouse
• 3DMark 2001 testing shows 50 FPS at 1024x768
• Perfect for DirectX 8/9 era Windows XP games

Full Transcript (Edited)

Hey there YouTube, I’m here today about to show you one of my other thin clients. I bought probably like 20 of these and I’m setting them up with Windows XP. So I’m going to give you a little bit of an overview of this model. This is kind of a bulkier one, but it has a bunch of ports in the back. It’s made by Wyse and yeah, I’m gonna show you the outside and then I’ll tear it apart and show you what I’m doing. All right, let’s get started.

[Exterior tour]

All right, as you can see here, it’s a nice looking little thin tower. In the front of it we have the power switch, there’s two USB 2.0 ports. If we turn it around, it has a lot of nice little ports. It’s got two serial ports, it’s got PS/2 mouse and keyboard, it’s got two DVI ports. This one right here can actually output VGA as well with a DVI to VGA adapter. This one is DVI-D only. So this could actually have a dual head monitor setup.

It’s got headphone out and microphone input, gigabit Ethernet, four USB ports, the 19 volt power adapter socket, and a Kensington lock style slot there. So that’s pretty much for the outside. I really like that this one you can do a dual head, and that’s because inside of this thin client is an ATI Radeon X1200 GPU paired with a Sempron.

[Teardown]

All right, so let me tear it apart so you can see the motherboard. Okay, so to open this up you really all have to do is take off two screws, this one and this one. Then you lay it on the side. This part right here has some screws, so the other side is the top and the top cover basically slides off like this and then lifts up. And this is the motherboard.

Let’s start off with the heatsink here. This is a passive device. There’s no fan anywhere in this, which is really nice. Underneath this heatsink is a CPU and a GPU. I haven’t taken them apart so I don’t know which one is which, but I’m assuming the CPU’s over here closer to the RAM and then the GPU is over here closer to the video ports.

Like I said, this has a Sempron single core, I believe, running at 1.5 gigahertz, and this is an ATI Radeon X1200 underneath. It uses some of the memory from the DDR2 memory module here to run the video. I think it takes about 128 megabytes of RAM and dedicates it to the GPU.

This is a DDR2 memory module. This unit came with 512 and it’s upgradable up to two gigabytes. This one right now has a one gigabyte stick.

In terms of storage, there are several options. You can see here that there are some SATA ports on the motherboard, but they use this proprietary or different power adapter that I haven’t been able to figure out. I haven’t been able to find the cable online. But you should be able to mount a SATA drive in here if you wanted to.

However, I haven’t done that. What I did is I upgraded the IDE disk-on-module from 128 megabytes to an eight gigabyte model, and that’s enough to install Windows XP on here.

[Windows XP demonstration]

All right, so here I am now again and I have Windows XP installed. I’m going to show you hardware info here. This little computer has a Sempron 210U. It’s got 64 kilobyte level one cache, it’s a single core, it’s a 65 nanometer CPU. The base clock is 1.5 gigahertz.

The motherboard itself has an ATI M690G chipset with a Southbridge 600. I have one gig of DDR2 RAM installed. The hard drive, the solid state hard drive, is an eight gigabyte flash disk running at 66 megahertz UDMA.

This is the video card that is embedded on the motherboard: an ATI Mobility Radeon X1200. Basically something that you would find in a laptop. It’s got 128 megabytes of DDR2 RAM shared. It’s got a 400 megahertz GPU clock and memory clock.

[3DMark testing]

I have a little demo here using 3DMark 2001 where I can show you the 3D gaming performance of this before I let you go. The benchmark did work, so let’s try that out. There you go!

So you can see, it’s pretty good for some basic 3D gaming. Nothing high-res - this is like 50 frames per second at 1024x768. But for a lot of Windows XP games, early 3D games, it’s way more than enough. A DirectX game will work just fine.

If you like this kind of stuff, let me know what you think in the comment below. Subscribe and I will keep on putting videos of different thin clients that I have. I have a smaller version with a quad core AMD and a more modern ATI Radeon video card. It’s all passive, so it’s really kind of cool to have one of these gaming systems that fits neatly behind a monitor or something like that.

Hope that was something that you enjoyed. Let me know what you think. Thank you, until next time!