Lenovo ThinkCentre M75q Tiny Gen5 Power Consumption and Noise
The included power adapter is a standard Lenovo 90W unit. Again, this seems like a strange thing to point out, but Apple is now delivering internal power supplies on sub $600 mini PCs. An advantage here is that Lenovo’s power adapter is swappable and there are so many of these adapters available. We do not love this being proprietary, and external, but at least there are plenty of them out there.
The idle power consumption on this system at the Lenovo Windows 11 Pro desktop ranged from just over 5W to just under 15W in a fairly wide range. At idle, the noise was great in that 34-36dba range from 1m in our 34dba noise floor studio. Under load, the first 30 seconds or so the system would jump to 62-65W and 37-39dba. Over two minutes under load, we would get power consumption still in the 63-66W range, but the noise would get to 47-48dba. So the system held the higher power level, but the price was being paid in the fan ramping and higher noise. It would have been nice if this was quieter, but we generally prefer when systems have this behavior and stay at a constant performance level instead of dropping quickly.
Key Lessons Learned
On our key lessons learned, we have something new. Lenovo’s specs for the machine suggest a maximum supported memory configuration of 64GB. We tried that and it worked. Still, the question was whether we could go higher. We installed Our Top 96GB DDR5-5600 SODIMM Kit Crucial 2x 48GB Kit and sure enough, the system booted at 96GB. We thought this would work, and it did.
The next step was using the new 64GB modules in a 2x 64GB DDR5-5600 kit. (Amazon Affiliate Link.)
These were not cheap, as of last Friday the price for the 96GB kit was under $210 and the 128GB kit was around $365. You are certainly paying a premium for the capacity. On the other hand, if you just want 128GB of memory in this, then you can at least get it. While you only get two DDR5 channels and DIMM slots, the memory bandwidth is more than the 4-channel Xeon E5 V1-V4 series single socket. If you have an older and lower-core count Xeon E5 server with 128GB of RAM running as a virtualization host, it is now very possible to replace it with a 1L PC. You may lose cores, but the cores here will be >2x the performance of Xeon E5 generation cores.
Further, there is a lot integrated now. The AMD Radeon 780M graphics is constrained by the 35W TDP, but it is enough to play e-sports titles at 4K, which is neat. When we first started the Project TinyMiniMicro series and were looking at the Core 6000 series systems, the Intel integrated graphics were nowhere near this level of performance. You also get the 16 TOPS NPU in the 8700GE for a bit of AI offload.
Final Words
On the one hand, we miss the old Lenovo design with the SODIMM slots and the M.2 slots on the back. On the other hand, with hotter drives and memory, maybe this design makes more sense. There are many mini PCs out there, but this one comes from Lenovo. Whereas support might be a challenge for smaller brands, this is still a system you can get next onsite support for, while also including a solid Ryzen platform.
It is a bit hard to quantify, but this is a very useful mini PC. There enough integrated GPU performance to be a nice desktop today, even enough to play some games. The added NPU is an extra bonus as we see an increasing push to roll-out AI applications. Really though, the game-changer, and what caused us to hold this review over the weekend, was the discovery of being able to put 128GB of RAM into this system. With eight cores, 128GB of RAM, an integrated GPU and NPU, there is a lot going on in this system. We just wish Lenovo had better expansion capabilities in this one.
Still, this is such a big leap in the overall system, that it felt right to bring back Project TinyMiniMicro for this.
The mini systems are neat, but pretty niche.
You are at what, $1200+ if you want 128GB RAM in it by the time you get a couple drives? And still only 1 low speed NIC?
I think the systems are neat from an academic standpoint, but poor choices in any situation where you have room for something a BIT bigger.
If you’re adventurous, then I believe this part would allow powering this unit with a generic usb-c power supply that uis sufficiently rated for required A at 20V:
Lenovo 4X90U45346
Tiny systems without Intel/QuickSync have no use case for my lab.
Good tip by @frank.
Using the same adapter, one can achieve “UPS” using a power bank that has pass through capabilities.
I have a couple of such power banks mainly for my homelab and i bring with me one such for charging Thinkpad laptops.
The latest HP Elite 805 DM has a USB-C port with PD. This I miss in these Lenovos. That is a very nice option if you have a display with USB dock.
I have 4 of these exact systems running in my home along with an older generation of the m75q.
This one is louder than the old ones under load. However they make great PCs for general use, kids workstations and light gaming, and various server/lab workloads that don’t demand ECC.
I have one running as an NVR for an analog encoder because I have a bunch of old BTC cameras and it runs fantastic. Also have one running proxmox with various VMs and containers running. As somebody pointed out, there are better Emby/Plex/Jellyfin options because of the lack of quicksync, but they are still really solid boxes.
The also often go on sale. The last one I bought was just over $600 from Lenovo direct with 32GB or RAM and a 1TB SSD. Pretty hard to beat the value prop. Personally, I prefer these over the Dell/Intel options, of which we deploy a ton of at work. The Lenovo is just a really solid option.