Lenovo ThinkStation P3 Tiny Gen 2 Internal Hardware Overview
Digging in to Lenovo’s tiny workstation, we have always been a fan of Lenovo’s single-thumbscrew design for opening up their 1L systems. And the P3 Tiny does not disappoint here, with only a single thumbscrew between us and the system internals, making it among the easiest-to-open mini-PCs we have had the pleasure of reviewing.
Starting from the top, the P3 Tiny is essentially split into two halves. The top half features the CPU, PCIe slot, and cooler, while the smaller rear half of the system is where the SO-DIMM slots and remaining M.2 slots reside.
The one downside of such a tiny system is that while almost every part is removable and replaceable, there is not really room to access these parts. As a result, it is necessary to do some further disassembly to get to the rest of the system.
Removing the main blower fan – a fairly powerful 14-Watt design – gives us access to the top-side M.2 slot, as well as the heatsink that is sitting over the CPU.
Removing the heatsink, in turn, finally gives us access to the Intel CPU. As noted earlier, this is a proper desktop CPU socket (LGA 1851), with Lenovo’s system able to accommodate most non-K Core Ultra 2 series CPUs. This includes the Core Ultra 9 285, the most powerful of Intel’s standard TDP (65W) chips.
Based on Intel’s Arrow Lake architecture, the 285 is plenty powerful chip, featuring 8 P cores and 16 E cores, with a top boost clockspeed of 5.4GHz. The integrated graphics are less impressive, however, with the unbranded Intel Graphics configuration based on the company’s Xe-LPG architecture sporting just 4 Xe GPU cores.
On the reverse side of the system are the SO-DIMM slots for the P3 Tiny. And unfortunately, this is the one place where an otherwise fine system takes a stumble. While Lenovo includes 32GB of DDR5 with this configuration – even using newer CSO-DIMMs in order to hit DDR5-6400 speeds – the company only includes a single 32GB CSO-DIMM by default. As a result, the P3 Tiny is only operating on a 64-bit memory bus, throwing away the other half of its bandwidth potential. In practice this is mostly just a problem for the integrated graphics, but it is an entirely unforced error on Lenovo’s part, albeit one they have been making off and on for the last 20 years.
Getting back to the CPU, the heatsink itself is also fairly beefy. Lenovo uses it to cool not only the CPU, but the VRMs immediate around it. Which in this configuration would not be getting any cooling otherwise, as they are well away from any blower fans.
Meanwhile at the other corner of the system we find one of the P3 Tiny’s three M.2 storage slots. The top slot is fully wired for PCIe Gen5 x4, allowing for some very fast sequential SSD speeds. And Lenovo populates these systems accordingly with PCIe Gen 5 drives – our system coming with a 1TB version of Samsung’s latest OEM drive, the PM9E11. The drive itself does not have any kind of heatsink attached, but as it is sitting directly under the system’s blower fan, it still receives some active cooling.
On the rear side of the system are two more M.2 slots for additional SSDs. Each is wired for PCIe Gen4 x4, which is a big part of the reason why Lenovo populates the front-side M.2 slot first.
Speaking of M.2 slots, there is also a smaller M.2 slot on the top side for the wireless radio. Optional on some of the P3 Tiny SKUs, our specific model comes with an Intel BE200 pre-installed, offering 2×2 stream Wi-Fi 7 as well as Bluetooth 5.4. As noted earlier, only one of the antennas in the P3 Tiny is internal, so an external antenna is needed to get the most out of the radio.
In the case of our system, that M.2 slot is also underneath the pre-installed NVIDIA RTX A1000 video card, marking one more component that needs to be removed to service a user-replaceable part.
And that brings us to the final internal hardware element, the PCIe bay and video card.
Using a riser, Lenovo offers a single PCIe x16 slot for a video card or other expansion card. The slot itself is a bit bandwidth constrained as it runs at PCIe Gen4 x8, though given the limited amount of power available to any installed cards, this is unlikely to present an issue. The bay itself is also quite small, and it is designed to accommodate a half-height, half-length (HHHL), single-wide card.
For installing a video card then, this limits Lenovo’s options. NVIDIA’s most powerful card in that form factor is the Ampere generation RTX A1000, a 50-Watt card with 18 SMs on the GPU and paired with 8GB of GDDR6 memory. Compared to the integrated Intel graphics, the A1000 still offers a solid step up in performance – not to mention more display outputs – but it is notable that it is not very competitive with SFF PCs based on laptop hardware that can integrate a GPU almost half a decade newer. Such is the cost of modular components, it would seem.
The A1000 is an actively cooled card with its own blower – and is why the top side of the system is vented, so that it has a place to draw in cold air.
So how does this all come together as a complete product? Let us take a look at performance.
Can I populate all nvme slots at the same time? Could I fit double sided nvme? With PLP?
@Florian
Yes, all of the M.2 slots can be populated at the same time. As for double-sided drives, I’m afraid I don’t have a well-informed answer for you. Lenovo provides no official guidance in their manuals; they don’t explicitly list DS drives as supposed, but they don’t list them as unsupported, either. Thermal pads are pretty squishy, though, so I would be surprised if you couldn’t make it work.