Replacing my Raspberry Pis with used thin clients
Raspberry Pis have gotten expensive enough that I’ve started replacing them with used corporate thin clients. These two came off eBay: a Dell Wyse 5070 (Celeron J4105) for $43 (+$15 for a power adapter it didn’t include), and a Dell OptiPlex 3000 thin client (Pentium Silver N6005) for $84. Both are fanless, both idle at 5W or less, and both cost a fraction of a Pi 5.
A Pi 5 16GB lists at $299.99 these days, and adding a power supply, a case, an SD card, and an NVMe HAT pushes it well past what I paid for either box. The OptiPlex came with 16GB of RAM and its power adapter for $84, with an M.2 slot for a real NVMe drive. Jeff Geerling called the hobbyist SBC market “dying, or at least on life support” in April 2026, and for a low-power box that sits in a closet the thin client is just better value now.
The thing to watch with used hardware is that it’s old, so run memtest86+ before you trust a box. The Wyse is why I say that: both its 4GB SK Hynix sticks failed memtest, so I swapped in one of the OptiPlex’s 8GB sticks.
My favorite thing about the Wyse 5070 is the USB-C port. It normally runs headless, but for setup and troubleshooting I can plug it into a USB-C hub and get video and USB over one cable.
The OptiPlex 3000 is the more annoying of the two. No USB-C, and its M.2 slot officially only takes a short 2230 SSD. A full-length 2280 fits, but I had to desolder a little standoff to make room. I tried to dodge the soldering iron with a Sintech M.2 extender cable first, and that was a mistake: the extra length wrecked PCIe signal integrity and dmesg filled with correctable errors:
AER: Correctable error message received
PCIe Bus Error: severity=Correctable, type=Physical Layer
What the OptiPlex has going for it is the newer processor. These make a capable little web server: with a low-latency home connection you can expose Docker containers to the public internet through a Cloudflare Tunnel with no port forwarding or static IP. (Other people run the 5070 as a fanless Linux home server too.)