I started rolling these out as workstation replacements at work a few years ago and they've been great overall. Favorite feature is actually the integration with the "tiny-in-one" monitors that work as a dock and have maintained compatibility for a few generations so far. Makes replacements and upgrades very quick and gets rid of quite a few cables in the process.
Got the ThinkStation Tiny M75q with Ryzen 5 Pro 3400GE units for work earlier this year. Lovely little units with easy access to everything. Amusingly the supplied 65W power bricks aren't enough to run the APU at full CPU+GPU load, the CPU side drops to 1.1GHz. Decided to try my 90W ThinkPad brick after noticing the 135W brick in the video, now it only throttles down to 3.4GHz (3.6 max) under full CPU+GPU load! I suspect it wouldn't throttle at all if I could get myself a 135W brick, since the fan doesn't come anywhere close to full speed under those conditions, they might be using the same fan as the models with discrete GPUs and higher-TDP CPUs. Once the Renoir refresh comes along I really want to buy one for personal use, though I hope they eventually give PCIe options on the AMD models as I've grown used to having a 10GbE connection to my NAS, and in the absence of that or TB3 I'd be stuck with those 5GbE QNAP USB NICs which would be a bit more expensive and not quite as fast. Loving the series, I discovered 1L PCs this year and they excited me in a way that SFF and mITX computers never managed to!
these are really interesting as fast compute/storage nodes. pull the GPUs, put in 10G NICs and a couple of big NVMe disks and you have machines that will be great running Proxmox with Ceph across the NVMes.
Love the series! These small boxes bought used from ebay are greater performers and perfect for projects. I had a M73 tiny from lenovo setup with linux that was screaming fast. One comment, could you make the charts bigger onscreen? I'm watching on a laptop and can't make out the comparisons. Looking forward to watching the rest of the series!
I'd think the reason this P320 uses 20W+ in Idle state compared to 9W-12W for the other TinyMiniMicro's is because the PRESENCE of the GPU in this node prevents the CPU from going into a more power efficient C-state . Because it's in the system it doesn't allow the CPU to go in ultra power saving. Would love it if you put more emphasis on reducing power consumption in this TinyMiniMicro series, since the idea is buying them 2nd hand to build up stacks or for 24/7 home server PfSense / Home Assistant use, one of the reasons being often mentioned saving money up front and in use. You could review if the individual components (motherboard, NIC's, ports) have special Idle power states and how much power saving you can achieve by enabling specific settings in the Bios. From what I learned from 'Zuinige Server' topic on Tweakers.net modern (Skylake or higher) Intel Core/Pentium based self-build home servers can reach 3W-6W in Idle state with OS on SSD. Only achievable in modern 7th Gen and newer systems because from then on the motherboards have evolved to actually temporarily put components in ultra low power mode. The Intel 210 211 219 NIC's have EEE low power mode. (And switches need to support EEE likewise to allow this power saving option. 0,2W/0,3W per NIC vs some 1,5W/2W for components that do not support EEE) Samsung Evo 840 are supposedly using the least amount of power in Idle state. C6 / C8 are ultra low power modes for CPU's. The 10W+ difference in Idle power mode for a node in 24/7 low demand use counts up to paying €100/€150 in extra electricity consumed over a 10 year period at EU prices for each node.
Maybe a dumb question, but does the PCIe slot support bifurcation? e.g. could I stick a M.2 carrier in there? or hack the case for a PCIe extension for an external GPU?
We did not test the bifurcation side since this is low profile and small area so more than 2 SSDs there would be hard. On the external GPU side certainty interesting but it may be less expensive to just buy a larger system. Your line of thinking is 100% correct that these have a lot of potential.
*Starts to go through a pile of old ThinkStation Tiny computers to decommission.* "Hey I might as well put on a YT video while I do this" *This video pops up* Creepy!
If you take the GPU out, how does power consumption compare? Would it be similar to the other mini workstations? Do you get even more thermal headroom than the other minis?
It’s not really a fair comparison. The P320 is a workstation, not a desktop. For a fair comparison you should get a Lenovo thinkcentre Tiny m900 (or newer) I has 1 x nvme and 1 x Sata, Intel graphics, more or less the same as the hp and dells and at the same price level. I have several m900’s running my home lab. I love them! They’re quiet and has great Linux support.
Hi Jesper. We have the M900 as well as the M920q for later in this series. The idea was we wanted to show a higher-end option before we got too far in the Project TinyMiniMicro series. We are trying to get these out but we have a lot of other content to do.
The comparison is fair in terms of it being a smaller desktop that can be repurposed by homelabbers after they are dumped off-lease by large corporate environments. It’s certainly fair when compared to other STH forum favorites like the Wyse 5070 extended, HP t730/740 thin clients or the Lenovo m720qs. The real party piece here for the p320 is the PCIe 3.0 x16 slot (not found on its HP z2 mini equivalents), but the headache would be to figure out how to cool the damned thing.
Kevin Kwan I agree that it’s a nice machine. But it’s also more expensive. I would be surprised if Dell and HP didn’t have comparable models at a higher price point.
ServeTheHomeVideo I understand and it really is a nice machine. I’m looking forward to those m9xx videos. Dell and HP are less popular on the used market, here in Denmark (so cheaper). So it would be interesting to see how Lenovo compare against their Dell and HP counterparts? Keep up the good work! We need more channels like yours. With more insights and less fluff. 👍
This little monster is expensive af. ASRock Deskmini A300 is also viable option tho because powerful Ryzen. Qotom also interesting option with it's multiple nic
We run Ubuntu and Proxmox VE on all of these with KVM virtualization. VMware 6.7 is better for getting NIC drivers. On the STH main site we have the NICs used so you can look up drivers specifically.
@@ServeTheHomeVideo the PN50 is supposed to be launching in September, and who knows with the supposed chip shortage from AMD. In the P320, even a 10 Gbit NIC should be easy to do
Nice video! TWO questions: 1. Does the motherboard supports booting from m.2 drive and does it support raid0 / raid 1 whit m.2 drives? 2. as i understand the motherboard also supports integrated graphics and Quadro can be taken off, whitch reveals the 16x pcie port. Now: does the motherboard BIOS supports "bifurcation" of the 16x to two 8x lines??? Idea is to use PciE16x to 4 port MIniSAS adapter, that controls external 16bay harddrive bay. Buildind Cheap Compact 16drive NAS whit 2.5" HDDs
Hi, this is a great video series. In the meantime, I've also bought a Thinkcentre M920q. But here I noticed that only one stereo sound chip is installed. I also wanted to use the device as an HTPC, but now it doesn't work. Are there 1L size devices that can do 5.1 or more? Thanks, greetings Peter
@@ServeTheHomeVideo I tried it via HDMI. But it only comes in stereo. Even with an audio extractor (S/PDIF) between the HDMI connection only brings two channels. Either because the monitor connected via HDMI only has two speakers, or because of the built-in Realtek sound chip. I think it's the sound chip.
Patrick could I pull out the GPU and put in a 4 port low profile NIC card and it would work? This would make an ideal OPNsense router and i could see two of these in HA setup.
Depends on the NIC. Hotter NICs will need a thermal solution for sure. Also, you would at minimum need a custom bracket for the rear. That is probably the easier part if you are handy with. 3D printer
Right now through PDUs to get the port counts. You are right. Many bricks. Luckily the 65W ones are small. Still, if one PSU or unit fails it is a bit more isolated.
Currently I have one of these bad boys and I connected 3 usb ports, 1 mini dp port and mic and audio port, it got very hot! Is that normal? Is there a way to keep it cool? I live in Thailand right now so yeah, it’s hot in general but I would like to keep the mini pc cool as much as I can.
hola amigo me encanta tu canal ye pregunto a este Lenovo p320 tiny le puedo poner un cargador de 170w.20v y 8.5a ya que no se consigue el original de 135w 20v y 6.75a
On the subject of the USB-Port coloring. it does not matter. 90% of those things are bought for/from business. and these machines are usb 3 only. the person responsible for buying them knows, and probably does not look at an picture of that thing. - the Karens and Kevins of this world - who are using the machines - don't care or don't understand the difference. the persons using it in his homelab (or a tech person) does not really care either - the port is clearly labeled, no problem there - imo.
I thought the blue coloring was part of the spec for the connector. I agree it doesn't really matter (especially since all the ports are USB3) but I would still prefer to have the normal blue. IMHO it just makes things slightly easier to connect without thinking.
@@eDoc2020 yea.. also, the port is called USB 3.2 Gen1 (Prev USB 3.1 Gen1 [Prev USB 3.0 - aka USB SuperSpeed]) Type A - sooo... in my book, the USB-IF lost its right on a lot of things. - The Color is the last thing those Buttheads are allowed to talk about. (The same goes for the HDMI 1.x spec - 1.4 once had to be called High Speed HDMI - the currtent 2.0 Standard is called Ultra High Speed, but the 2.0 is allowed)
@@ServeTheHomeVideo lenovo does not do that on most of their machines, as they don't like to mix up ports. They typically also don't use 3rd party usb controllers, instead pay the full license to intel to use all possible usb channels (on their think products, nvm their consumer stuff). This is something hp likes to do.. And you'll end uo with an usb 3.2 port which barely is faster than an old 3.0 port. Speaking from my experience (msp). But back to normalbusers. It simply does not matter. As long as you don't have 1usb 1.1, they (users) will not see any difference. Even if they would use usb 3 sticks, it would not matter for two word files and an exel sheet. And if done right the port would be blocked by av/policy/endpoint/etc.
Yes, many comments are talking about that, and that was what he referenced in the video regarding 3d printing a bracket, since this bracket is not standard
hola nuevamente aun que no contestes mi mensaje me gusta tu canal tus videos y tengo una pegunta puedo cambiar mi tarjeta grafica nvidia p 600 por otra de mayor gb
I started rolling these out as workstation replacements at work a few years ago and they've been great overall. Favorite feature is actually the integration with the "tiny-in-one" monitors that work as a dock and have maintained compatibility for a few generations so far. Makes replacements and upgrades very quick and gets rid of quite a few cables in the process.
Keep the vids coming, loving this series!
Wow, great form factor /and/ a discrete gpu - going to keep an eye out for one.
Very flexible! In a 3 node stack you could have CUDA, a 4-port NIC for router, and an eSATA/SAS card for external drive arrays.
Got the ThinkStation Tiny M75q with Ryzen 5 Pro 3400GE units for work earlier this year. Lovely little units with easy access to everything. Amusingly the supplied 65W power bricks aren't enough to run the APU at full CPU+GPU load, the CPU side drops to 1.1GHz. Decided to try my 90W ThinkPad brick after noticing the 135W brick in the video, now it only throttles down to 3.4GHz (3.6 max) under full CPU+GPU load! I suspect it wouldn't throttle at all if I could get myself a 135W brick, since the fan doesn't come anywhere close to full speed under those conditions, they might be using the same fan as the models with discrete GPUs and higher-TDP CPUs.
Once the Renoir refresh comes along I really want to buy one for personal use, though I hope they eventually give PCIe options on the AMD models as I've grown used to having a 10GbE connection to my NAS, and in the absence of that or TB3 I'd be stuck with those 5GbE QNAP USB NICs which would be a bit more expensive and not quite as fast.
Loving the series, I discovered 1L PCs this year and they excited me in a way that SFF and mITX computers never managed to!
these are really interesting as fast compute/storage nodes. pull the GPUs, put in 10G NICs and a couple of big NVMe disks and you have machines that will be great running Proxmox with Ceph across the NVMes.
Been thinking of picking one of these up as an htpc for my projector
Love the series! These small boxes bought used from ebay are greater performers and perfect for projects. I had a M73 tiny from lenovo setup with linux that was screaming fast. One comment, could you make the charts bigger onscreen? I'm watching on a laptop and can't make out the comparisons. Looking forward to watching the rest of the series!
I'd think the reason this P320 uses 20W+ in Idle state compared to 9W-12W for the other TinyMiniMicro's is because the PRESENCE of the GPU in this node prevents the CPU from going into a more power efficient C-state . Because it's in the system it doesn't allow the CPU to go in ultra power saving.
Would love it if you put more emphasis on reducing power consumption in this TinyMiniMicro series, since the idea is buying them 2nd hand to build up stacks or for 24/7 home server PfSense / Home Assistant use, one of the reasons being often mentioned saving money up front and in use.
You could review if the individual components (motherboard, NIC's, ports) have special Idle power states and how much power saving you can achieve by enabling specific settings in the Bios.
From what I learned from 'Zuinige Server' topic on Tweakers.net modern (Skylake or higher) Intel Core/Pentium based self-build home servers can reach 3W-6W in Idle state with OS on SSD. Only achievable in modern 7th Gen and newer systems because from then on the motherboards have evolved to actually temporarily put components in ultra low power mode.
The Intel 210 211 219 NIC's have EEE low power mode. (And switches need to support EEE likewise to allow this power saving option. 0,2W/0,3W per NIC vs some 1,5W/2W for components that do not support EEE)
Samsung Evo 840 are supposedly using the least amount of power in Idle state.
C6 / C8 are ultra low power modes for CPU's. The 10W+ difference in Idle power mode for a node in 24/7 low demand use counts up to paying €100/€150 in extra electricity consumed over a 10 year period at EU prices for each node.
Patrick dude. Your awesome.
Ha! Many would disagree with you there :-)
@@ServeTheHomeVideo I want your life.
Can you replace that Quadro with an LSI HBA card with external ports? That would make this the weirdest NAS ever.
ok but honestly i love this idea just because
Maybe a dumb question, but does the PCIe slot support bifurcation? e.g. could I stick a M.2 carrier in there? or hack the case for a PCIe extension for an external GPU?
We did not test the bifurcation side since this is low profile and small area so more than 2 SSDs there would be hard. On the external GPU side certainty interesting but it may be less expensive to just buy a larger system. Your line of thinking is 100% correct that these have a lot of potential.
The PCI-E slot is so sweet.
*Starts to go through a pile of old ThinkStation Tiny computers to decommission.*
"Hey I might as well put on a YT video while I do this"
*This video pops up*
Creepy!
If you take the GPU out, how does power consumption compare? Would it be similar to the other mini workstations? Do you get even more thermal headroom than the other minis?
This tiny is interesting because you could probably put a low profile dual/quad port NIC
High end Intel 350 4 port nic is a Lenovo option for these
I'm waiting for a P35 tiny, with Amd Ryzen Pro 7, 8 cores, ECC Ram, and a GPU with qualified drivers for CAD
One of these with multiple (2 or more) NICs and it would be a great pfSense or OPNSense box.
It’s not really a fair comparison.
The P320 is a workstation, not a desktop.
For a fair comparison you should get a Lenovo thinkcentre Tiny m900 (or newer)
I has 1 x nvme and 1 x Sata, Intel graphics, more or less the same as the hp and dells and at the same price level.
I have several m900’s running my home lab. I love them! They’re quiet and has great Linux support.
Hi Jesper. We have the M900 as well as the M920q for later in this series. The idea was we wanted to show a higher-end option before we got too far in the Project TinyMiniMicro series. We are trying to get these out but we have a lot of other content to do.
The comparison is fair in terms of it being a smaller desktop that can be repurposed by homelabbers after they are dumped off-lease by large corporate environments. It’s certainly fair when compared to other STH forum favorites like the Wyse 5070 extended, HP t730/740 thin clients or the Lenovo m720qs.
The real party piece here for the p320 is the PCIe 3.0 x16 slot (not found on its HP z2 mini equivalents), but the headache would be to figure out how to cool the damned thing.
Kevin Kwan I agree that it’s a nice machine. But it’s also more expensive. I would be surprised if Dell and HP didn’t have comparable models at a higher price point.
ServeTheHomeVideo I understand and it really is a nice machine. I’m looking forward to those m9xx videos. Dell and HP are less popular on the used market, here in Denmark (so cheaper). So it would be interesting to see how Lenovo compare against their Dell and HP counterparts?
Keep up the good work! We need more channels like yours. With more insights and less fluff. 👍
This little monster is expensive af. ASRock Deskmini A300 is also viable option tho because powerful Ryzen. Qotom also interesting option with it's multiple nic
Man, but we want see the device runing, all connected, I think that´s important. The doors behine are nice, but too much words, put some screen takes.
How likely is it that any tiny mini micro would run a hypervisor for virtualization like esxi for a lab set up
We run Ubuntu and Proxmox VE on all of these with KVM virtualization. VMware 6.7 is better for getting NIC drivers. On the STH main site we have the NICs used so you can look up drivers specifically.
will the asus PN60 or even PN50 also be in this series? The option for dual ethernet makes it more interesting than I expected
We may look at those later. Working through a backlog at the moment. For dual LAN adding a 2.5GbE USB NIC is fairly inexpensive/ easy as well.
@@ServeTheHomeVideo the PN50 is supposed to be launching in September, and who knows with the supposed chip shortage from AMD.
In the P320, even a 10 Gbit NIC should be easy to do
Nice video! TWO questions:
1. Does the motherboard supports booting from m.2 drive and does it support raid0 / raid 1 whit m.2 drives?
2. as i understand the motherboard also supports integrated graphics and Quadro can be taken off, whitch reveals the 16x pcie port. Now: does the motherboard BIOS supports "bifurcation" of the 16x to two 8x lines??? Idea is to use PciE16x to 4 port MIniSAS adapter, that controls external 16bay harddrive bay. Buildind Cheap Compact 16drive NAS whit 2.5" HDDs
Hi, this is a great video series. In the meantime, I've also bought a Thinkcentre M920q. But here I noticed that only one stereo sound chip is installed. I also wanted to use the device as an HTPC, but now it doesn't work. Are there 1L size devices that can do 5.1 or more? Thanks, greetings Peter
Generally no. These mostly were designed for headsets in an office. You would probably need to go USB audio for 5.1 (or output audio via HDMI?)
@@ServeTheHomeVideo I tried it via HDMI. But it only comes in stereo. Even with an audio extractor (S/PDIF) between the HDMI connection only brings two channels. Either because the monitor connected via HDMI only has two speakers, or because of the built-in Realtek sound chip. I think it's the sound chip.
What kind M2 SSDs fit taking cooling in consideration? does it make sense adding Sabrent Qs in?
I would use it with SmartOS and a ZFS mirrored setup.
Patrick could I pull out the GPU and put in a 4 port low profile NIC card and it would work? This would make an ideal OPNsense router and i could see two of these in HA setup.
Depends on the NIC. Hotter NICs will need a thermal solution for sure. Also, you would at minimum need a custom bracket for the rear. That is probably the easier part if you are handy with. 3D printer
why didn't you show how to take the cover off.
how do you manage powering all those nodes? I mean you will have a brickwall along with all those units...
Right now through PDUs to get the port counts. You are right. Many bricks. Luckily the 65W ones are small. Still, if one PSU or unit fails it is a bit more isolated.
@@ServeTheHomeVideo would love to see that
Currently I have one of these bad boys and I connected 3 usb ports, 1 mini dp port and mic and audio port, it got very hot! Is that normal? Is there a way to keep it cool? I live in Thailand right now so yeah, it’s hot in general but I would like to keep the mini pc cool as much as I can.
hola amigo me encanta tu canal ye pregunto a este Lenovo p320 tiny le puedo poner un cargador de 170w.20v y 8.5a ya que no se consigue el original de 135w 20v y 6.75a
can p620 and p1000 work in this machine ?
Remove the gpu and put an 4 Port intel nic in it...Instanz pFSense machine
Would need a custom bracket, it doesn't have the standard LP pci slot cover
You could do a hell of a lot of routing with that.
Those front USB ports are filthy.
Asus PN50 with extra LAN port?
On the subject of the USB-Port coloring. it does not matter. 90% of those things are bought for/from business. and these machines are usb 3 only.
the person responsible for buying them knows, and probably does not look at an picture of that thing. - the Karens and Kevins of this world - who are using the machines - don't care or don't understand the difference.
the persons using it in his homelab (or a tech person) does not really care either - the port is clearly labeled, no problem there - imo.
I thought the blue coloring was part of the spec for the connector. I agree it doesn't really matter (especially since all the ports are USB3) but I would still prefer to have the normal blue. IMHO it just makes things slightly easier to connect without thinking.
@@eDoc2020 yea.. also, the port is called USB 3.2 Gen1 (Prev USB 3.1 Gen1 [Prev USB 3.0 - aka USB SuperSpeed]) Type A - sooo... in my book, the USB-IF lost its right on a lot of things. - The Color is the last thing those Buttheads are allowed to talk about. (The same goes for the HDMI 1.x spec - 1.4 once had to be called High Speed HDMI - the currtent 2.0 Standard is called Ultra High Speed, but the 2.0 is allowed)
That is likely true, however, the OptiPlex 3070 we did has both blue (USB) and black (USB 2.0) and uses a 2 generation newer CPU (9th gen.)
@@ServeTheHomeVideo lenovo does not do that on most of their machines, as they don't like to mix up ports. They typically also don't use 3rd party usb controllers, instead pay the full license to intel to use all possible usb channels (on their think products, nvm their consumer stuff). This is something hp likes to do.. And you'll end uo with an usb 3.2 port which barely is faster than an old 3.0 port.
Speaking from my experience (msp).
But back to normalbusers. It simply does not matter. As long as you don't have 1usb 1.1, they (users) will not see any difference. Even if they would use usb 3 sticks, it would not matter for two word files and an exel sheet. And if done right the port would be blocked by av/policy/endpoint/etc.
This unit with that GPU would be perfect for a video-wall in a NOC, here's me hunting on eBay haha
If you got like 20 of em could you make a cfd computation farm?
At that point it is probably worth just getting an EPYC Rome system
Can you remove that GPU and install 10gbe card?
Yes, many comments are talking about that, and that was what he referenced in the video regarding 3d printing a bracket, since this bracket is not standard
hola nuevamente aun que no contestes mi mensaje me gusta tu canal tus videos y tengo una pegunta puedo cambiar mi tarjeta grafica nvidia p 600 por otra de mayor gb
How the f**k does this channel have less than 100k channel?
😮😮🎉
everyone really does incompatible shit - midi-ATX FOREVER!!!
I’m so early that bill Nye the science guy is still setting up the chairs.
These tiny lenovo systems are awesome! I am still using my m93p tiny. Here is a video i did on mine: ua-cam.com/video/uAhOvXh05ls/v-deo.html
first
pls dislike this comment it really means a lot to me.
Unique features: it has a non retaining screw 😐
so you're saying it's a completely screwless design in practice, just a slidey cover that requires no tools whatsoever!