Posted on 24-11-2025
Is this the Raspberry Pi alternative?
Hello and welcome to my blog. This time I want to talk about a device that might be the best alternative for the Raspberry Pi. This kind of device is more of an alternative for the Raspberry Pi Zero/Zero 2 series but there also are models of this kind of device that are more powerful and therefore could compete with the Raspberry Pi 4. The kind of devices I am talking about that you could replace a Raspberry Pi with are thin clients. Thin clients are mostly used in business environments as that is their targeted audience. Though you mostly cannot (and should not) get them new, they can often be found on sites like eBay and local marketplaces for quite a low price. The thin client I've got my hands on is the Dell Wyse 3040. I see them being sold on eBay for about 20 to 30 euros. I've got mine for 15 euros which seems pretty good to me. So how is this a great Raspberry Pi Zero series alternative? I will tell you everything I've experienced in this post
Specs, I/O and design
A thin client mostly has slow hardware inside as they are meant to be used to connect remotely to another computer. I have benchmarked it on Geekbench 6 and it performed a little better than my Pi Zero 2W. But what specs does this thin client have? The thin client comes with 2GB of DDR3L RAM which is not upgradeable. It also has either 8 or 16GB of eMMC storage; mine came with 8GB. For the CPU and GPU we have an Intel Atom x5 Z-8350 from Q1 2016. This is a 2-watt Intel Cherry Trail–based processor with a basic iGPU that clocks up to 500MHz. For the I/O we've got some nice ports in my opinion. There are two USB ports at the front including a USB 3.0 port. There also is a combo audio jack and a power button. On the right side there is a Kensington lock and in the back we've got two more USB 2.0 ports, two DisplayPorts and a Gigabit Ethernet port. It also seems to have a new and smaller design than older Dell Wyse systems which I really like. The thin client is passively cooled and therefore completely quiet.
Speed of the system and my usecase
This Dell Wyse 3040 Thinclient is not that fast at all. I've tried using it with a lightweight distro called Q4OS to test it as a desktop and only with the built in browser Konqueror and webbrowsing was doable with some slowdowns. To install Spotify I had to uninstall any app I'd have installed myself because of the limited storage. While the interface was slow the music playback was smooth. After testing this I installed Debian 12 Bookworm on it without a DE (Desktop Environment). This helped a lot in terms of speed and broings me to my intended usecase to replace my Pi Zero 2W with it. My Raspberry Pi Zero 2W used to run a local website made with HTML and CSS linking to my most used self-hosted services and a DNS-Server. I wanted faster networking as that is useful in this scenario in my opinion and so I am also happy with the Gigabit Ethernet port I mentioned before. So after I installed Debian I did install just that, a Apache2 webserver and Pi-Hole. Everything runs smooth and fast cause of the faster ethernet port. The higher amount of memory compared to the 512MB from the Pi Zero 2W might also allow me to run a simple database in the future. So for me this does the tasks I need it to do really well and even better than the Pi Zero 2W, but what is the catch? Atleast the catch isn't the power draw. This thinclient only drew between 4 and 10 watts in my testing which is great as I love effecient devices. The only real downside compared to the Pi Zero 2W is that it is a bit bigger but for me that is fine. Another downside to some people might be that it is too slow to run anything graphically as even a really lightweight DE is too heavy on the 2 Watts CPU but this tiny box wasn't designed for that so that is pretty normal.
Conclusion
All with all this system runs pretty good as long as you run it without a GUI and you do not run too intensive tasks because of the limited recources. I can recommend this device for around the 15 euro mark I paid for it but when you want to do anything more than running a basic HTML/CSS webserver and/or DNS-Server or such easy tasks I do not think this is a great device to use. All with all to me this is a great alternative to my Raspberry Pi Zero 2W as it draws such low amount of power, is completely silent and is still fairly small while being about 3 times the size of a Raspberry Pi 4/5.
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