Campus Station 2025a

Team Compute compute station
1

HP EliteDesk 800 G3 Small Form Factor PC

For the year 2025, our reference Campus Stations are based on refurbished computers.

reduce-reuse-recycle
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Most computers produced since 2015 are suitable for REUSE as campus stations. The low-cost "HP EliteDesk 800 G3 Small Form Factor PC" is one such computer and we have selected it to be our Campus Station 2025a.

1. Models

There multiple models under the same "HP EliteDesk 800 G3 Small Form Factor PC" name. For example:

You can use the serial number to get the exact mode;
https://support.hp.com/au-en/drivers/desktops

They all seem to share the same BIOS, so the technical support should be the same.

2. Documentation

2

Prices

2024-12.08

As of 2024-12-18, refurbished units of the HP EliteDesk 800 G3 SFF model with i5-6600 CPU, 16GB RAM and 256GB SSD with 1 year warranty are available on eBay for just AU$115 (including tax and shipping).

That is CHEAPER and FASTER than Raspberry Pi 4 or 5 Model B with only 8GB RAM ... although the Raspberry Pi prices include wifi and bluetooth, the Raspberry Pis do NOT include computer case, heat sink, power supply, realtime clock, out-of-band remote management, disk storage etc.

The i5-6600 CPU is paired with a Q270 chipset. Only chipset that starts with Q supports AMT.

3

AMT BIOS

A major benefit of this model is the Intel AMT feature in the BIOS.

This make remote management much easier, you can remotely reboot the machine and look at the display out-of-band. Out-of-band means a separate management network that can be used while the main network is not available.

With remote access at such high level, engineers can perform almost all work on the computer as it they are physically there.

Mass deployment of Compute Stations is now possible even onto site WITHOUT on-site non-technical.

1. Displayport Dummy

For some AMT features e.g. display access a Displayport Dummy is required.

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2. Security

By enabling remote access AMT but it does come with more risk. If you decide to use AMT you must:

  1. Isolate AMT traffic to its own dedicate vlan and subnet.
  2. Make sure AMT is the latest with a BIOS update

3. Update

As of 2024-12-30, the BIOS versions updated from within the BIOS do NOT seemed to match the versions published on the HP website.

  • BIOS:
    02.50 (2024-07-17)
    instead of
    02.50 Rev.A (2024-08-12)

  • AMT:
    11.8.55 (2024-07-17)
    instead of
    11.8.92.4222 Rev.A (2022-04-19)

But it seems to be functioning, so we are leaving it.

4. References

4

SSD

The bundled SSD is typically from Crucial/Micron
with model number MTFDDAK256TBN-1AR15ABHA

The TBW on these SSDs is 120TB while the refurbished units we received normally has around 30TB already written.

5

Upgrades

The "standard" specifications are good enough to be used as is as a compute station, but if required upgrades can be done easily.

upgrade
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We normally perform the following 4 upgrades to these low-cost units:

  • add NVMe SSD for Containers to complement existing SATA SSD for OS.
  • add second RAM to use dual channel (so with 16GB or 32GB total) to double memory bandwidth.
  • add second ethernet (2.5Gbps PCIe) to separate network traffic and provide redundancy.
  • add DisplayPort dummy to enable remote console access.

M.2 E-Key

The M.2 E-Key slot can be used by a number of peripherals, but since the computer case does NOT have WiFi antennas, the typical use case of putting in WiFi/Bluetooth does not apply here. The slot can be used for other E-Key devices (e.g. Google AI) instead.

SATA

With the extra bandwidth provided by an additional 2.5Gbps ethernet card, it is an option to add extra SATA HDDs, so the machine can act as a storage node for other machines.