![]() This is about the generation where we saw Lenovo make a substantial jump in serviceability. The system itself has Dell’s normal build quality. Still, if you wanted to have a stack of these nodes in your office, that is possible with the 35W nodes whereas this would likely be too much noise and heat for that type of deployment. Having a single unit, especially at lower loads is not too bad, and it is certainly nice to have more performance. At the same time, we use more power, generate more heat, and thus also create more noise. We get a lot more performance by letting the CPUs hit higher clock speeds and use more power. After testing this Dell OptiPlex 7060 Micro with a 65W TDP CPU, and having tested many systems with the 35W “T” version of the same processor, the results are mixed, but about what you would expect. ![]() Part of the reason we purchased this node was to see if the higher power CPU is worth it. This is another caveat emptor Project TMM lesson, and there is a theme there. As a result, the key Project TinyMiniMicro lesson learned is to confirm that the adapter you are getting is sufficient for the unit you are purchasing. The seller’s response was “it came with a Dell power supply, the capacity was not stated in the listing”. If we had a 35W TDP CPU, this system would have expected a 90W PSU. With the 65W CPU, one needs a 130W power adapter to even boot with the system. Our unit was listed as coming with a “Dell power supply” but it was a 65W adapter. Having a single 8GB DIMM would have been better as that would be less expensive to upgrade. 6 cores and 8GB of memory feels a bit low when the goal of Project TinyMiniMicro is to have many small low-cost cluster nodes for virtualization or even as desktops/ stealth labs. The RAM was a disappointment as two 4GB DIMMs basically both need to be replaced in a system like this. Frankly the hard drive we expected to replace. We would not call this a top-tier deal, but it was far from poor. We also had the hard drive, RAM, the system with WiFi, and Windows 10 Pro. We had an Intel Core i5-8500 which at the time was around half of that price used. The configuration we received for $325 was not bad. Since we have already tested well over a dozen different models, we are taking away key pieces of advice from each that we wanted to share. In this series, we wanted to also focus on some key lessons learned. Next, we are going to discuss key lessons learned before getting to our final thoughts. Personally, I think it would be uncomfortable to have a stack of three of these systems on your desk running at 50-100% load all the time. This is certainly more noticeable than the 35W TDP versions. Under load, one can tell that the single fan was pushing more air through that upgraded heatsink due to the hotter CPU. Noise wise, at 1m idling, the system was similar to the lower-TDP units we tested. The 130W power supply is needed because beyond the CPU, one can add more devices than we have so 90W is not going to be sufficient. While tens of watts are not big differences in modern large servers, we are seeing a bit over a third more power used at the top end. Normally with a Core i5-8500T model, we might expect this to be around 60W. We were able to get power fairly easily to exceed 80W without extreme USB-C charging or other power-hungry features. This makes sense given the power consumption we saw. The power supplies are 130W Dell power adapters from the company’s notebook line. This was a bit higher than we were expecting, but that is what we saw. We generally assume these nodes will use 9-12W idle for a 35W TDP CPU unit. Idle power consumption on 120V power we saw just over 18W idle for the six-core units.
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