Lenovo ThinkCentre neo 50q Tiny QC Review a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Based 1L PC

Lenovo ThinkCentre Neo 50q QC Power Consumption and Noise

Built from a platform first and foremost designed for laptops – and including laptop-like design tradeoffs such as soldered-down LPDDR5X memory – the ThinkCentre neo 50q QC is well positioned to deliver on energy efficiency. Especially with a low peak CPU clockspeed and few external controllers to add to the power load, the 50q QC fares very well.

At idle, we measured power consumption in the range of 5W to 9W while Windows was bouncing around. Meanwhile under a full load with CPU-Z’s stress test, we saw power consumption peak at just 26W.

Even by mini-PC standards, this is a very low amount of power consumption. It is the kind of figures we are more accustomed to seeing on things like Core i3 boxes, or low-end boxes based on the N305. In that respect, at times it is more like the Snapdragon X chip in the 50q QC is competing with Intel’s E cores on power, rather than their P cores. Consequently, if not for the need to power multiple USB powers, the 65W power adapter included with the mini-PC would be grossly overpowered for this system.

And the bigger benefit to that low power consumption is arguably acoustics. Or perhaps the lack thereof. Even with a petite 1L chassis, the 50q QC has no problem keeping up with the cooling needs of the SoC and the rest of the system. At idle the system is right along the 34dBa noise floor of our studio, and under full load it is still only nearly 36dBa. While not outright silent, in practice it is effectively unnoticeable when under use.

Key Lessons Learned

With every review we like to end with a look at some key lessons learned; and that is certainly applicable here to our first Windows-on-ARM/Snapdragon X-based mini-PC.

At a high level, what we learned is that the Windows-on-ARM ecosystem can handle most of what we throw at it. Lenovo’s ThinkCentre neo 50q QC had no problem running most of our workloads – and even more out there, we can even get things like WSL running on it, bringing it very close to parity with traditional x86 boxes.

But “very close” is not identical. It is not a frictionless experience – at least not quite yet. The hang-ups we did encounter were far more nuanced than high-level problems such as binary compatibility, which is both a boon and a hindrance. A boon because it shows how good compatibility for the Prism x86 emulator has become over the past several years, and a hindrance because some of these remaining issues are not things that can just be fixed by a better emulator.

On a side note, our issues here with MLPerf Client and memory capacity reinforced the importance of carefully selecting the amount of memory in advance for a system with soldered-down memory, something that is common in the smallest of these mini-PCs. There is no option to upgrade later, so maybe aim a bit higher than your immediate needs in order to make sure you have some headroom. Or enough memory at all to run MLPerf, as was our situation.

Finally, the lackluster state of the Linux ecosystem for Snapdragon X devices means that the 50q QC is a poor choice for running a native Linux installation. This is a task that some of our other mini-PCs have been assigned to, so it is a use case we like to take a look at. But at least for now, the 50q QC is strictly a Windows machine – though with a dash of WSL thrown on top.

Though conversely, this is the first ARM-based mini-PC that has crossed our desks that can even run Windows. Which gives it a big leg up in some respects since it can run our Windows applications, something the more widely popular ARM-based Mac Mini family could not do.

Final Words

Ultimately, Lenovo’s ThinkCentre neo 50q QC proved to be an impressive machine within its niche – and remains so just so long as it is not pressured to go outside of that niche.

The hardware underlying the modestly-priced mini-PC is a very good fit for a 1L chassis. With a peak power measurement of just 26 Watts, even that small chassis has no trouble cooling the system. And those minimal cooling needs, in turn, mean that the PC is whisper-quiet even under full load. It is not a fully passive system, but with a noise level only a double of decibels above our studio noise floor, it is among the quietest systems we have reviewed.

With that said, a mini-PC probably is not the best place for the power consumption advantages of the Snapdragon X platform to flex its muscles. In a laptop, power consumption is battery life – something most of us could always use more of. However, that is not the case for a desktop system plugged into a wall. A low-power system like this still saves on the electric bill at the end of the day, but that is not as much of an advantage for most users.

As for performance, the 50q QC uses Qualcomm’s lowest-tier Snapdragon X SoC, and it shows. The system can put up a very good fight against other low power systems, but anything with enough of a power budget to run a 35W Intel or AMD chip is going to run right past the 50q QC, thanks in large part to its low peak clockspeed of just 3.0GHz. All of which are things we would have expected just looking at the specifications and the pricing of the 50q QC before even reviewing it, and which is confirmed by our testing.

Still, within ServeTheHome the tiny Lenovo PC has certainly proven its utility. We use several of these boxes around our studio/labs for driving various testbeds and displays, and we will likely be using the 50q QC to swap out one of our older Core i3-N305 systems for something more powerful but similarly low-power. Which given the commercial focus of Lenovo’s ThinkCentre system lineup, is exactly the kind of use case the 50q QC was made for.

Where to Buy

You can find the unit at Lenovo’s web store: Affiliate Link