HP-T 5730 CPU Upgrade

The HP-T 5730 thinclient comes with a low power AMD Sempron 2100+ CPU. This kind of CPU has a TDP of 8 Watt at 1Ghz clock rate. For most tasks a thinclient is designed for this is fast enough, even today. As mentioned before I run thinlinc on my HP-T 5730 connected with two screens (each 1920*1200 pixel). The working speed is okay, but often not so smooth as it could be. Using the HP-T 5730 in such a dual head configuration the CPU seems to be the bottleneck. Surprisingly the CPU is not soldered and can be easily replaced by a more powerful one using the same socket (S1).

Mobile Sempron 2100+

As described on some pages I found in the web, a lot of different types of CPU would fit. I choose an AMD Athlon64 TF-20, which is a single core CPU running at 1.6 GHz (TDP 15 Watt) and is relative often offered on platforms like Ebay for around 10-15 Euro. However, there are faster (and of course also more economize) CPUs available that would fit, but they need extra cooling or are much more expensive. The 15 Watt TDP should be handled by the default passive cooling system.

Athlon 64 TF-20

If you like to have more speed and add some extra cooling – used AMD Turion X2 CPUs are dealt around 5-25 EUR depending of their clock rate (dual core, 1.6 – 2.4 GHz, TDP 31-35 Watt).

I do some benchmarks using the build-in benchmarks suite offered by hwinfo. However that's better than my subjective feeling but not as good as a 'real' benchmark, so results should handle with care.

Benchmark	Sempron 2100+	Athlon64 TF20
CPU BlowFish	36,59 sec	22,86 sec
CPU CryptoHash	34,9 Mb/sec	56 Mb/sec
CPU Fibbonacci	7,67 sec	8,15 sec
CPU N-Queens	20,32 sec	16,7 sec
FPU FTT	37,38 sec	23,25 sec
FPU RayTracing	27,94 sec	15,86 sec

The new CPU is about 50% faster than the previous one, it is an expected value. The increased power has the consequence that the CPU run in a low power mode at 800 Mhz clockspeed most of time.

With the last upgrade I have to think about the PSU again – 27 Watt of system (HP-T5730 + CPU upgrade) + 21 Watt of the external graphics adapter (NV-290) comes closely to the 50 Watt limitation of the original PSU. At last, to have more room when adding some USB devices I replace the original PSU (50 Watt) with a more powerful one (12V - 96 Watt) from my junk box.

12-96W PSU

After all the upgrades I did, my thinclient solution its not really cheap any more (around 50 Eur overall), but of course cheaper than buying a new one.