Dell OptiPlex 3050 Micro

Both ThinkPads are rated Complex, and the first flash on each needs a clip and an external programmer. This machine is rated Simple, and the difference is not marketing. Short a service jumper beside the memory, under the drive caddy, and internal flashing works — even from the factory Dell firmware. No soldering, no clip, no second computer.

It also skips a step the ThinkPads cannot. The network chip is a Realtek part rather than an Intel one, so there is no GbE region in the flash and the nvmutil MAC-address work does not exist here. Fewer steps, fewer ways to get it wrong.

From the Libreboot project’s own notes for this board, under its Issues heading, written once earlier bugs had been fixed: “A very nice machine, and inexpensive, plus very easy to set up for the average user. The ideal Libreboot desktop.”

We are quoting them, not ourselves. It is worth reading in context: that sentence sits under a list of problems, which is where a compliment is worth something.

On both ThinkPads you choose between a 2.5" drive and an M.2 stick. Here you do not. This chassis takes one 2.5" SATA drive and one M.2 PCIe SSD at the same time. Dell’s own service procedure has you lift the SATA caddy aside to reach the M.2 beneath it. That is a real advantage over both ThinkPads: a fast small system disk and a slow large data disk in one box.

There is no RAID and no PCIe slot of any kind. The two M.2 connectors, for the SSD and a WLAN card, are the whole expansion story.

Dell’s official processor list is 6th and 7th-generation Core, and every part on it is a 35 W T-series chip. The Libreboot project reports that quad-core 8th and 9th-generation Coffee Lake parts run on this board unmodified, and names the i3-9300T as confirmed. We report that as the project’s finding, not a guarantee from us.

Two things to know before you plan an upgrade. The pin modification that unlocks six and eight-core parts does not work on this board. And the parts upstream names, the i3-9100T and i3-9300T, are themselves 35 W quad-cores, so the upgrade path does not escape the chassis’s thermal envelope.

The processor drives a 4K display at 60 Hz. The HDMI port here is 1.4, which tops out at 4096×2304 at 24 Hz, so use DisplayPort for 4K at 60 Hz. At 1080p or 1440p, either port is fine.

One warning about VGA. Units fitted with the optional VGA port use a digital-to-analogue add-on board. It works under SeaBIOS and GRUB, then goes dark once Linux takes over the display. Treat this as a DisplayPort and HDMI machine.

Two, in fact: Dell documents a user-removable system fan and a CPU fan header. Anyone who has opened one already knows that. Upstream reports that PWM fan control works, so the fan tracks load rather than sitting at one speed all day. Dell publishes no acoustic figures for this chassis, and neither do we.

To do this on your own machine rather than buy one from us, the procedure is short: short the service jumper, flash internally, verify. One caution from upstream, and it matters. The factory firmware can write EFI variables to flash during shutdown, so once flashprog reports VERIFIED, pull the plug rather than shutting down cleanly.

Use a recent release. Revisions before 20241206 rev3 had an NVMe hot-unplug bug that could lose data. We ship 26.01, well past it.