I Paid Almost NOTHING For This PC... But What IS It?

0:00 I have a bad habit of browsing eBay really late at night and buying some weird random computers like well this one I actually know very little about this system but I have a feeling it's going to be fun to Tinker with I mean just look at all these ports and gizmos on the side in this video we're going to clean this thing up crack it open and see what all it can do granted that is assuming we can actually get this thing turned on and nothing [Music] this is the rt130 I3 a rugged PC that was designed for use in vehicles it's from the company Logic Supply which since has been rebranded to onlogic now

0:46 I have no way to know for sure but I have a feeling this was originally in a semi- or some sort of commercial vehicle and used for Fleet Tracking or something similar and while it might look like a similar PC I took a look at a while back which came from a fast food restaurant this is unlike any other system I've tested out on this channel because this was designed to operate inside a vehicle it has some features you wouldn't expect to see on a normal PC these might not be that helpful for everyday typical tasks but can be very useful for specific projects or just a lot of fun to Tinker with as I said earlier I found this while browsing eBay and won the auction for $30 although I paid about $55 with shipping so did I get a good deal or did I just completely waste my money well I honestly have no idea I don't even know if I can turn this thing on because what you might have noticed it doesn't have a

1:31 typical DC Barrel Jack for power now what I definitely know isn't a waste of money is the sponsor of this video private internet access a VPN like Pia is a great tool in your Tech tool belt to help maintain your digital privacy for example Pia helps to keep your connections private when on a shady public Wi-Fi network it also helps prevent your internet service provider from keeping tabs on what you're doing and potentially even throttling certain types of traffic now I know a lot of you watching this video are already thinking to yourself hey buddy I run my own VPN server and that's great me too even if you self-host your own VPN Pia can be a great compliment and there's a reason why it's my VPN service of choice first of all it works great as a backup but it also has a lot of features you won't want to miss out on even if you run your own VPN server pia has tons of servers across 91 different countries which gives me access to content I wouldn't

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3:03 that you'll get 83% off plus 4 months for free now before cleaning all of this up or diving into all of the interesting ports and quirks this system seems to have I want to make sure I can actually even turn it on this does have a DC input which can accept between 9 and 32 volts but it also has this third pin which is labeled IGN which I've done a little bit of research and I believe that ignition wire would actually be a signal that would well tell this PC whenever the ignition was on that way it wouldn't just be pulling power and draining the vehicle's battery now I did find the manual on on logic's website which was actually extremely detailed I mean it had pinouts of like every single connection basically on this system but there wasn't specific detail about how that ignition pin worked after some digging I believe that I can basically just short the positive terminal to this

3:49 ignition terminal with a resistor like a 1 kohm resistor and that should do the trick but I really don't know so I think before digging too far into this I'm going to go see if I can actually get this to turn on all right so I've got this 19v DC power supply and then I also have this little uh Barrel jack adapter that I've already made before and I should be able to just screw this adapter into these terminals real quick all right that's nice and snug let's see what happens really quick I'm just going to confirm I'm actually getting my 19 volts here and you probably can't see we are getting 19 volts hasn't powered on yet but I'm hoping press this power button and

4:36 nothing all right like I said I have a feeling by default at least this little ignition terminal needs to be shorted or needs to have a a signal there so I think I'm going to throw on a little 1 kohm resistor with a 1 kohm resistor 19 volts what's that like 20 milliamps shouldn't have the potential to hurt anything I don't believe definitely not ideal but let's see if it works okay nothing pop oh hey nothing blew up and I don't think you can see probably just yet but there is a oh it was power button was red now it's blue getting some beeps and yeah this ACC light is also lit up and we're in the bias so I would

5:21 say it works all right so now we know it works so let's talk about some of the specifics of this thing one of the first things I noticed after pulling inside of the box was that it came with some little extra goodies first of all I have this Wi-Fi antenna which definitely isn't broken it also came with this 90° VGA adapter which should be super helpful I imagine and it even came with a wireless mouse or keyboard dongle so things are looking up actually now that I think about it this could be a Wi-Fi or Bluetooth adapter okay so it turns out this is just a wireless USB receiver and it's not one of their unifying ones so probably not worth all that much but hey still it was free now the things I actually want to talk about are the I have to take this antenna off it's too annoying all right now we can talk about some of the things that are actually

6:07 interesting with this system first of all since this is designed as a rugged system it's in a passively cooled enclosure that can also be pretty easily mounted to whatever with these very loose but included mounts there's also a ton of IO on either side of this starting with the back there's that DC input I mentioned earlier as well as video outputs either through VGA DVI or display port there's also four comp ports for serial connections although the fourth is also labeled as video in I'm not really sure how this would work or what Hardware I would even be able to use with it I might have to hit up cath rude or something to figure out how that would work but it is interesting there's also another 9pin connector that looks like one of the other comp ports but it's labeled Dio which I'm assuming is digital IO so I'm curious to see what we

6:52 could potentially do with that there's also this six pin Molex connection which I believe is a power output so I'm pretty sure let's say you had 24 volts coming into this but you also wanted to power another device or system that needed 12 VTS you could run that 12 volts off of this and there's also these di1 and di2 connections which I believe are some sort of um input or GP or something I'm not really sure we'll have to look into that and then we also have two 3.5 mm audio jacks for line out and mic in on the front things get even more interesting first of all we have the power button which I guess we already took a look at as well as some indicator LEDs which they're labeled hard drive ACC w w and UPS so I'm not really sure what all of those well I can take some

7:38 guesses here I'm assuming HDD is hard drive activity and that the W Wan is for a cellular connection or something like that you probably also notice the 4 gbit interfaces so you could potentially turn this into a router or some other device that would use those which is pretty cool there's also four USB 3 ports I'm assuming I'm assuming with the age of the system these are going to be 5 GB per second and there's also two SIM card slots I mentioned earlier I think this wng connection is to double check that you have connection to a cellular network and yeah this has dual SIM card slots which is really interesting and sadly I don't have a way to test out because I don't have a spare cellular plan and SIM card to test this out but the other really cool thing that's on the front of this are these two little trays you might have noticed which have these captive screws this is actually a 2 and 1/2 in Bay for a hard driver SSD

8:26 and based on the information on the website I pulled up I believe these are actually hot swappable I think if these were used in like Fleet Tracking or something the idea is that you could like hot swap drives really quick to like pull data off of a truck or something I don't really know it's not my world um but yeah there's two Drive Bays which like I said I believe are hot swappable so this could be pretty cool so my first thoughts are you could put two ssds in here in raid mirror to run an operating system for something like pfSense or open sense and then use the 4 GB NYX to run your router and have a really tough reliable solid router apparently there's some sort of battery backup UPS functionality with this that I haven't really checked out I saw something in the manual and there's obviously that UPS light so I think you could potentially even have an internal battery backup so I'm thinking you could

9:12 like potentially build a really rugged reliable router that could like potentially power itself even without a external UPS or something and have redundant drives that are hot swappable like I don't know this thing could be pretty cool but there's even more to this on the inside that we haven't checked cheed out yet so I think now I'm going to try and crack this thing open one of the things I love about systems like these is that they're designed to be maintained with identical screws throughout and simple designs however it took me a little bit of work to get this cracked open I thought after removing the sides and the screws on the bottom the top of the case would come off but it seemed pretty stuck I had the idea to maybe try sliding it to the side and yeah it turns out that the top of the case was really just stuck onto the thermal pad that transmits heat from the

9:58 CPU to the metal chassis oops oops indeed fortunately it seems like the comport I massacred was already having some issues before I ripped it apart with the motherboard exposed I saw what seemed to be an internal battery too bad you can't see it because I forgot to refocus the camera there we go the battery was plugged into a port labeled UPS so clearly it would have provided some sort of backup power but I don't really know the specifics of how that would work I know very little when it comes to to batteries and I had no idea what type of battery it was or what condition it was in so I figured it might be safer to just set it aside the next thing I noticed was the RAM and sadly there was only a single sodm slot even though the CPU supports dual Channel memory oh yeah

10:43 I almost forgot to talk about the CPU in this thing the rt130 I3 features well an Intel I3 specifically the I3 3217 uee an embedded dual core 4 thread ivybridge CPU it has a base clock of just 1.6 GHz and can support up to 16 gig of either DDR3 or ddr3l and this system came with just a single 8 GB stick of DDR3 what was really interesting about the ram though was that it wasn't actually on the motherboard instead it was on this little compute module essentially along with the CPU if you remove the four screws that also hold on the heat spreader the entire module can disconnect from the motherboard the rt130 comes in a few different variants and I imagine this compute module would have been the only difference between those variants which is pretty cool the rest of the motherboard was even more

11:28 interesting there's not one not two not three but four mini pcie slots although later I did find out that one of these only supports a 3G Wireless module and isn't wired up for pcie there's also a SATA D port and a SATA power header as well the Dio port on the back was connected to a header labeled gpio so we might be able to have some fun with that there were also a variety of other things on the motherboard like this UPS header I mentioned earlier as well as a uart header and oh yeah corrosion lots of corrosion and not in just one spot it was pretty much all over the board which makes me think this might have been due more to high humidity rather than a single spill or something but I have no way of knowing for sure it's Times Like These when I wish I had an ultrasonic cleaner but I don't so I just sprayed

12:14 everything down with lots of isopropyl alcohol and did a lot of scrubbing the outside of this system wasn't ever going to look great but to at least get rid of some of the gunk buildup I used some more IPA and a nylon brush to clean out all of the grooves and such the previous thermal paste was really thick so I applied a ton to try and make sure there was good contact and after that I just needed to put all of this back together fortunately I'm a YouTuber so I can just do this to kick things off I screwed in a 2 and 1 half in SSD to one of the little Drive holder things plugged it in and then also plugged in a Windows installer but when I went to actually install Windows on the SSD nothing showed up it took me a bit to figure

13:00 this out but in the Bios the SATA controller was set to IDE rather than ahci so after switching that I was able to install Windows and then run Cent Oh and it crashed well at least it did during the second cabint run I was already having some weird Drive issues when messing around with this other than the IDE thing like the system not recognizing the SSD after a reboot so I figured this crash might also be driver related I tweaked a few more settings in the Bios like disabling aggressive LPM support and also setting the SATA device type to SSD this seemed to do the trick as I was able to get a few more cinebench runs in to see how well this ivybridge mobile CPU performs i r in cinebench R15 rather than R23 with this being an older CPU and as per usual I grabbed a few other results for some comparison the score of 141 put the rt130 with its I3 3217 uee

13:48 roughly between a j1900 and a j2900 and you can also see how it compares to a more modern n100 CPU and a typical Mini PC the rt130 drew around 14 watts at idle and jumped up to around 24 Watts when running cinch not really the greatest in terms of efficiency but it's probably what you should expect from a system that's around 12 years old I also noticed that even with the passively cool system the CPU managed to stay nice and cool I did want to see if the power usage would go down when not using this as a desktop system so I installed Debian 12 and ran the autotune command in powertop and this brought the idle system power down to 12 Watts while I was already in Debian I was also hoping to see if I could experiment a bit with that GPO header but whenever I ran gpio info it didn't seem to be recognized I

14:33 checked the BIOS to make sure there wasn't a setting that needed to be enabled or something but no luck there either maybe there was more that could be done here but if so it's outside the scope of what I could do without really digging into things which is a bummer because I had already bought this neat little breakout adapter oh well instead I moved on and actually installed Linux Mint while decade old CPUs might not be ideal for running something like Windows 10 I thought this system could still manage some light desktop tasks with the Linux distribution like LX mint paired with the mate desktop and it did just that handling it fairly well browsing the web was a little sluggish at times but still very much usable and even 1080p YouTube playback was totally fine although decoding the vp9 codec was a bit taxing on the CPU after enabling the h26 4i extension the CPU load was

15:19 reduced substantially even though it works it's clear that this wouldn't be the most practical choice for a desktop setup but as I mentioned before its unique features led me to believe it could be a pretty decent little router for this I plugged in two SATA ssds and then installed open sense in a ZFS mirror for some redundancy I labeled all of the interfaces connected the WAN Port hooked up a gigabit switch to the lanport and then configured all of the interfaces in open sense everything showed up as expected and while it was just handling traffic from my PC it still delivered impressive speeds managing a full gigabit connection without any issues I also configured a VPN connection to forward all of my outbound traffic through Pia and well performance here took a massive dip but that isn't Pia's fault you can see here when connecting to the exact same VPN server from my

16:05 desktop performance is much better and I think the issue here is that the ivybridge I3 doesn't support the AES ni instruction set these instructions drastically improve data encryption and decryption so this probably wouldn't be the best option if you're looking to Tunnel a lot of traffic through a VPN but for a simple gigabit router this seems like it could be a really solid option you obviously have flexibility with four interfaces you get reliability from two hot swapable ssds and it's completely silent and doesn't accumulate dust overtime thanks to the passively cool design and you could even add more interfaces with the mini PCI slots which I also tried out I swapped out the Wi-Fi card for a mini pcie to m.2 e adapter and then there I plugged in this 2 and2 GB Nick I was also able to screw that into where the com 3 Port was before I

16:51 demolished it and after getting the real Tech drivers installed the 2 and2 gig interface was listed and available while I already had the system opened up I also wanted to test out those Internal Sata connections the SATA D Port seemed pretty straightforward but I had also noticed in the manual that it appears the SATA power header supported 12 volts rather than just five so it seems like you could technically power a 3 and 1 half in hard drive now I have no idea where you would actually fit one of those in here but I still wanted to check it out after confirming the voltages I plugged in the only SATA adapter I had that would fit that adapter however was intended to go the other way now this wouldn't really be a hardware Haven video without some serious Jank so I hooked up both the adapter and an SSD to a SATA splitter which I thought should theoretically

17:36 work and well it did after confirming nothing was on fire I hooked up an actual hard drive powered the system on and well yeah it worked still I have no idea where or how you would actually add a hard drive to a system like this and that actually brings me to an issue it's really cool that there are a ton of features important available but because of how little space there is inside this chassis it's going to be really tricky to implement any upgrades or mods with some other systems you could alter the case to make things fit but because this case is actually the heat sink for the CPU that makes things much more difficult in fact I made sure not to run the system for very long with the top of the case removed because there was only so much heat that could be dissipated through just the heat spreader and the CPU would eventually really start to

18:23 heat up so if you do plan to pick up something like this to Tinker with it might be important to keep that in mind that being said I wasn't done tinkering this thing was originally meant to go inside a vehicle so I figure why not put it inside a vehicle it is burning up I need to turn the car on so I picked up this little 12volt adapter that I snipped off the ends and wired up to the power terminal block thing here and uh this also comes with a cool power switch which is kind of nice um feels pretty good so I figur we plug this in plug this in power it on and then hook it up to this portable display and uh we have a really janky carp PC setup of [Music] sorts you can never go wrong with some

19:09 command [Music] strips well okay well my command strips idea didn't work but we're going to go for it anyway here goes the power so we have a blue LED we're getting power to our monitor 1 hour later all right well that was annoying apparently this monitor will not work unless I'm using VGA for some reason so got a VGA adapter on we'll hit power I doubt you're going to have much luck diagnosing my PC you probably haven't seen much like this all right so it's going to be a little hard to see here but I have Windows running technically this does support a touchcreen it makes it a little bit more useful in the car yeah

19:54 that's kind of cool don't know how useful this really is okay so I actually just ran quick errand and the whole time this has just been running a c a bench I don't think you can see it cuz the screen's not that bright probably because it runs off of 5 volts from USB but oh well um it it works I don't know I don't know how useful it is uh I don't really know what all you could do with this that you couldn't just do with a laptop but I guess if you did need a permanent computer for some reason that you didn't have to like make sure and replug in and and such this could work I didn't dive too deep into this obviously but you probably could hook this up to the what's it called the OC D2 or something the diagnostic connector on a car and you could potentially do some cool software stuff I'm not really sure I'm not really a car person yeah this was really stupid I don't know how useful this was it's pretty awkward and

20:39 the screen just fell off again and uh my camera's almost dead so yeah it's a PC it works in cars like it was supposed to and uh I think I'm going to go back home now messing around with this little system was a lot of fun but also a huge pain in the butt first of all disassembling and reassembling it over and over was pretty timec consuming the Clapping trick doesn't actually work it was also a bit frustrating trying to sort out all of the bio settings and other quirks that the system has but there was a much bigger issue that I really haven't talked about that's because I don't think it's an issue with the rt130 but rather an issue with my rt130 this thing crashed a lot it also pretty much had every operating system installed spewing out errors and sometimes an SSD would boot but then

21:25 sometimes it wouldn't boot it was just a mess and while I'm not going to jump to any conclusions I wouldn't at all be surprised if this Behavior was due to liquid damage there was a lot of corrosion on this board and I didn't even notice all of it until I was cleaning it up so I didn't get a lot of it on film so this was a pretty big bummer for me but like I said I don't think the behavior I was seeing was indicative of how another rt130 or other similar system might perform when I wasn't dealing with crashes or errors or other weird issues the system was pretty awesome it's dead silent doesn't draw a ton of power has enough CP performance for pretty basic tasks and has some fun and unique features like the Dual hot Swap 2 and2 in Bays quad gigabit NYX and other ports for tinkering and expansion however it's

22:11 important to keep in mind that some of those features like the gpio may not be usable and you also might just be limited in general due to the form factor of the case if you try to go buy one of these right now odds are you won't find a great deal but if you're patient and you keep an eye out you might be able to snag one for next to nothing and for the 50 $5 I spent I think it was well worth it well minus the corrosion part if you were to get your hands on one of these I'm curious how you would put it to use so let me know down in the comments below also let me know if you have any ideas for more systems I should check out I'm always on the hunt for goofy little computers if you liked this video and you want to support me making more videos maybe consider becoming a raid member either here on YouTube or over on patreon as a raid member you get some cool perks like early access to ad free videos some bonus behind the scenes content and more

22:58 that's about it for this one though so as always thank you guys so much for watching stay curious and I really can't wait to see you in the next one [Music]