Lenovo ThinkCentre M900 Tiny Our Project TinyMiniMicro Guide
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 26 ก.ย. 2020
- See the STH main site article with more detail here: www.servethehome.com/lenovo-t...
In our Lenovo ThinkCentre M900 Tiny Project TinyMiniMicro guide, we go into the features of the lowest cost system we purchased for the project at only $160. Even though the system was listed without an OS or vPro, we showed how we found that the system indeed included a Windows 10 Pro license and Intel AMT/ vPro. We also discuss some of the design elements that have been upgraded in newer systems.
Other STH articles mentioned in this video:
- Plex on Project TinyMiniMicro Guide www.servethehome.com/sth-proj...
- pfSense Firewall on Project TinyMiniMicro Guide www.servethehome.com/guide-ti... - วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
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7:03
Hey! That's me! I'm that Joe, haha! Was searching for videos on the unit and the thumbnail looked like the way I label units, then the screws were rolled up, and then finally seeing my name on the label haha. My coworkers got a huge kick out of this, they were saying we should screencap the still frame and hang it on the wall 😂😂 Cool video BTW! Keep it up!
Ha! Hi Joe. That is awesome!
What a great review. No mucking around, straight to all the facts and specs. Very thorough review too. Thanks a bunch!
The energy is great. It feels like you are going 1.5x speed at the start.
I actually checked my playback speed. LMAO
Is it capable of running warzone?
(Awkward moment when I'm already watching this at 2x👀)
I have 5 Kubernetes nodes at home running on:
Custom Whitebox - Ryzen 7 1800X - 32GB RAM - 1TB NVME
Dell Optiplex 3040 - i5-6500 - 16GB RAM - 512GB SATA SSD
Dell Optiplex 3040 micro - i5-6500 - 8GB RAM - 512GB SATA SSD
2 x Intel NUC NUC8I3CYSM - i3-8121U - 8GB RAM - 256GB NVME - 512GB SATA SSD
Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, deployed Kubernetes with Ansible. Using metallb for ingress, Longhorn for persistent volumes and helm for deployments.
I got one of these for $150 back in 2017 at a pawn shop, it's got an i5-6500T, 16GB RAM, a 256GB SSD, Windows 10 Pro, vPro, and 802.11ac WiFi. It had a 5 year warranty and the fan failed back in 2018, Lenovo was able to get me a new one the next day. Other than that it's been working great as an ESXi node. Highly recommend these things.
thanks man, i found one of these at a yard sale and was tryna figure out what to do with it. you help me out alot!
I use a M700 that has the same processor, 16 gigs of ram, and 256 SSD hard drive for a Minecraft server. It's been great!
For anyone who is concerned about power draw: Try to undervolt both CPU and GPU.
These are really great for it, got mine from 30W down to only 12W at same performance with a -230mv Offset.
Its so low power now, that the cpu stays at under 60°C and the fan never goes any higher than at idle. Even at full load like cinebench and furmark.
Great video Patrick and team, very informative, I’m on the hunt for one now as an HTPC to connect to my unraid plex server :)
Regards,
Shane from Trinidad
Extremely helpful video. I just bought one for my small home business.
Thank you for your reviews in this project. I just bought myself this tiny system with the Core i7 with 16Gb and 240 Gb SSD. Looking forward to use this in a cluster with my old System76 laptop, that is currently running ProxMox. The Lenovo also comes with Windows 10 Pro. I’m not a Windows user but will probably create a Windows VM for those just in case situations.
Just got one of these in today from eBay. I paid $200 for mine and it came looking almost new, still had the protective film on the buttons and badges, with a 256gb SSD installed, can't wait to plug it in and try it out. Your review really helped me. Thanks. 👍
excellent review, this is a nice mini computer especially with the upgrades done to it.
Just bought a M900 Tiny, i5 6500T, 128GB SSD, 8GB RAM, W10P for AU$79 (US$49) on eBay.
Last week I bought a M700 Tiny for my girlfriend and I've had a M92p in my bedroom for streaming for years as well.
Love these little things.
If you have one of these and the fan sounds like it has sand in the bearings, try upgrading the embedded controller firmware first. On my unit, the PWM fan controller was running on a frequency that made it vibrating like crazy; upgrading it made it far quieter and much less aggravating.
Great tip.
How would one go about doing this?
@@Scratch2C if you are running windows simply go to the Lenovo site - Support - auto detect drivers - update the drivers and firmware you see there
Thanks for the video. I was looking to buy one of those for my living room and this convinced me to go ahead!
For anyone looking to buy, check for the M910q which are only a couple dollars more expansive and have the 7500T with the 630 graphics.
Please do a review on the Lenovo ThinkCentre Tiny M75q-1/2. It would also be nice if you talked about build quality and internal components.
I am 1000th like. great video!
Legend!
I got one refurbished with i7 6700t and 16gb ddr4
Perfect home server c:
Even by this day the M900 is great tiny PC, I upgrade mine to 16 GB and changed the I5 6500t to an I7 6700t cpu 500GB NVME plus 500 SSD both by crucial. last week bought another one of eBay win bid for 137 USD include shipping, the first one I have paid 230 USD.
@ServeTheHome: It would be great if you could check the *effective* maximum specs for each model. There are 64GB DIMM kits for the M900 series, for instance. (Older) DIMMs tend to become more expensive than newer DIMMs, unfortunately--OTOH, along with the features offered by older generations of TinyMiniMicros, this might just make a perfect fit. In this specific case, knowing the effective maximum specs will make it easier to decide whether to go for an 8, 16, or 32 GB DDR4 offer in the first place.
Our 2x 32GB kit arrived after we did this one.
Eh, RAM capacity is typically determined by the memory controllers built into various CPU generations, and not by individual models. As long as it has dual DDR4 SODIMM slots and Skylake (or later) or Ryzen based, it'll generally accept 32GB SODIMMs per socket.
@@Waaaaaaaaaaaang You're right, but the official Lenovo Product Specifications Reference (PSREF) for the ThinkCentre M900 Tiny Platform only lists "32GB max" (Intel does the same w/ older generation NUCs). And since most vendors/resellers only point you to the former, a quick test might remind/convince viewers of this video series that this is indeed possible.
would this be a good candidate for diy pfsense router (after adding a network switch and WAP to the network switch? The confusing pricing on ebay that makes used m93p tiny similar price to used m700/720 makes me wonder what makes the older ones worth as much as the newer ones?
Love the videos man, keep it up
I agree, the velrco is nasty. I usually cut off the velcro and use my own, then I know it's brand new.
If you do some clever searching on eBay for these, there's versions with the best low-power processor (J3170), 8gb of ram, and a 500gb hard drive for only $31.50 + shipping. If you buy several at a time to save on the shipping, you can get them for less than $40 each, shipping included! The only catch seemed to be that there was no OS included, but to my delight I tried a recovery USB and each one of them has a legit version of windows 10 Pro Edition registered to them! Amazing little PCs that are very power efficient. I'm using them for home servers to run all the regular NAS programs everyone loves.
I just bought one of these myself. It was used by a local tax office as one of their office PCs. Mine came with an i7 6700T, 16GB of RAM, and a 256GB SSD that contained a fresh install of windows 10 pro. For $140 it's not bad. It's going to become my new Minecraft server. Since it has vPro, I'm setting up a pair of containers with 2 cores each. One for bedrock, and one for Java.
It's by no means my fastest system, that title goes to my 2995X Threadripper system, but that thing is currently dedicated to hosting GPU instance of Stable Diffusion for a couple friends to use and does the CPU based rendering for my channel and my job.
Would It be enough for my kid to play Roblox?
@@stillblastin96 Not really since the integrated graphics on these older inel CPUs is very weak. It's only really suited to being an office / media center PC. If you want something small like this that can handle basic games, I'd look into a Ryzen APU based model.
@@DigitalJedi thanks for the reply this helps out a lot and save me money lol
Will it support a lga 1151 e3-1245 Xeon cpu? The lga is correct, just not certain the bios will support a xeon.
great video.
Would one of these be ok to install TrueNAS an make a server? I was also thinking on using cloudflare to assign it a domain so I can access it through SSH from outside the local network
Did you sell it until now? Thank you very much!
Hey! I have a question. Is there a possible way to add an external GPU to this? An answer would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Probably hard to do in these.
What is the maximum height for the 2.5 drive bay? 7mm, 9mm, 15mm?
good video... I don't like windows 10+ and don't need vpro, but would like to know if these systems support windows 7.
for example, HP 800 g3 does not.
We did not try Windows 7 on these. Crazy to think that this week on STH we are going to have a CPU with enough cache to meet the Win 7 minimum RAM requirements, and next week one with Windows 11 requirements.
Heh, it’s like the Proliant EC200A but with built-in graphics and minus the overheating issue...
How is the performance compared to the EC 200?
Overall whihc of the tiny system was toye fav. My fav for vsan usage was the one with two M2 nvme slots. And 2.5inh SSD
Hey, does the fan make much noise or not? I'd like to buy it, but I hate when they make a lot of noise when the fan gets on
I 4.5quadcore what’s the max we can can upgrade everything I want to kno before I buy and I have 2 m73s I bought the hdmi port for the but unlike the m93 the 20 pin connection is not there do you kno what the connector on the mb is called so I can order 2 and solder them on
Just bought a system exactly like this off eBay for $200. Just needed a cheap Windows PC that I may later turn into a server. idk.
Acer veriton n4640g are nearly the same But Acer has a full size pcie x16 slot available i use the acer for gaming off grid it runs from a 12vdc to 19vdc inverter made by motion tek USA the inverter was for a motion joy tablet i paid $10 aud for inverter and $60 aud for the veriton i3 6100t and 4gb ram 500gb hdd. it now has 16gb of crucial ballistix 2x 8gb. m.2 dogfish SSD it can boot with a GT430 but I use a GT545 with external psu.
Thanks! I pulled that same wifi cord when replacing the ssd and thought I had broken something.... and definitely check the inside if you pick these up on ebay! They can get real nasty.
Where is anyone able to source these units at that price? I wasn't having luck quickly finding that model near that price point on ebay. Or is this video going to affect the market price for these? Awesome video.
There almost double the price in germany. I guess it comes down to where you live.
Just eBay. There were a few in the $180 range with best offer last night. It may impact prices for a few days, but there are huger numbers of units out there
I have seen a few on ebay for about $200 with an ssd.
in Toronto, Canada my local small shop has dozens of these for about CA$200... Has HDD not SDD so had to budget some extra to get SSD, but they're pretty good.
Ebay prices tend to fluctuate as piles come off corporate leases and the sellers don't want to sit on 50+ of the things. You more or less have to catch one of those piles coming off lease and getting dumped below market to make sure they move. Got one of those hexacore i5-8500Ts he was mentioning (a HP G4 600 Mini) for $322, that config is usually $400+.
What’s the max power cpu processor I can upgrade to I was told 6700t I want at least 6700 3.8
To 4.5 quarcorw
During the beginning of this video, or someplace in this video, I wished you would have said something about whether this unit could be upgraded to Windows11 or not. I do not see spending any money on computer stuff now days, unless it can upgrade to Windows 11. Perhaps in your series of looking at smaller computers like this, you can say if the processor and related hardware can upgrade to Windows 11. If you have already posted a video like this, perhaps you can post a link here so we can check it out. As an aside, I do like the workmanship of Lenovo laptops. Especially the ones the US government buys. They are quite well made. I really like the build quality. Thank you for this video.
To my knowledge these are not Windows 11 compatible. I have three of these units.
Intel W11 official compatibility begins with the 8th gen Core series. This is 6th gen.
Linux all the way with something like this.
Hi, I`ve an M700 Tiny with an i7 processor and 32 gb of RAM, it performs pretty well for general purposes, not for graphics unfortunately. Do you know how to connect an external GPU to this machine? thanks...
It would be extremely difficult. Something akin to having to figure out how to get PCIe Gen3 x4 from the M.2 slot, then getting that to an external box with power and the GPU. You would also be running a configuration few if anyone have tried and the Lenovo BIOS may not like it since it is something they have not tested.
I read that it supports 2x 32gb SO-dimm RAM adding up 64gb - even official specs state 32gb - can you confirm?
protip, because this just happened to me:
those nylon m.2 standoffs are one-and-done. if you put something in there, you better be sure you want to keep it there, because i snapped the pin off the upper half of mine. if that happens, you have to take the whole thing entirely apart and cut or snip the back of the standoff flush to get it out and replace it.
Im new to pc's t was thinking to get a mini pc because i need one for school and just playing games but my question is can it run gta 5?
You need to let people know that those little blower fans can get noisy under full load. I had a Dell 7050 and running Plex server it got louder than my HP Micro Server Gen 8. I even contacted Dell and replaced with new fan and was the same. Ended up selling and sticking with the HP.
I'm looking at one of these models (since they are still priced like this) as a living room emulation box for retro gaming. From my research it SHOULD be able to handle all the way up to PS2 without much trouble even with the Intel iGPU...
I paid 150€ without PSU and WLAN, but i got a i7. Perfect as a media center and it also runs Battlefield 3 with 720p.
Can't find the tiny mini micro PLEX video - is it out?
Hi there. We did this on the STH main site so no video. There is a lot of follow along instruction that is easier to follow in a web format. Link to that is in the description
Lenovo should get into NAS as well.
for Plex server I use Pepper Jobs glk-uc2x mini pc. Works great. Sub 250$ price. Any thoughts?
Cool system. The TMM systems tend to be higher power and performance. Costs are similar for TMM used. They can also have remote management. Again, all of this comes at the expense of higher power consumption as these are ~10-65W devices
@@ServeTheHomeVideo So true. This is just a dedicated Plex server using my NAS over the network and some light work... browsing etc..... But like others I am not finding the great prices that you did. Was it because you did a bidding process on ebay ? I don't use ebay much. Nooby. sorry
And thank you for your time to reply. I am sure that is not easy. Thanks again.
@@markwilliams3623 Sometimes it takes waiting for a decommission to happen. Buying these over weeks/ months has let us shop for better prices. Also using features like Best Offer helps as well.
can this fit a 15mm drive?
I just bought the M900 Tiny for $105 bucks
Would appreciate a power consumption section in these type of system reviews, idle and max draw, great review otherwise!!
We have that in new ones we are doing where we actually demonstrate power and noise.
@@ServeTheHomeVideo That explains it! I've been binging your old ones before I got to your new ones, super, cheers Patrick!
wondering if i can max the memory out with ddr4 @ 64 gb of ram to have a beefy proxmox setup? wonder if anybody has tried that?
We did not test this one with 2x 32GB, but most of the newer models work with 64GB. Given the memory cost, I would probably use a newer model to put 64GB into. They do make great Proxmox servers though.
"Hey guys this is Joe from STH.."
Whooooo
@ServeTheHome: were you able to unlock vpro? ive got a m720q with a vpro supported i5-8600T but lenovo has it locked in bios :(
vPro worked on this one
The M720q has a B360 chipset which doesn't support vPro
@ServeTheHome : Can you add a usb port type -c to m900 machine like the one in the video?
I would love to use my type-c docking station with it but unfortunatelly it didn't come with such a port.
I have Lenovo M73 with "desktop CPU" i3-4130 (3,4GHz) probably M900 working with "desktop CPU" with TDP 50W eq i3-6100 (500MHz higher)
So where can we get it for $150?
Just found browsing ebay
Has anyone gotten windows xp to work on one of these?
I bought a bare bones one from eBay and it has the Windows Pro sticker. Where is the licence embedded?
Did you figure it out? I've never heard that before this video.
@@wackzingo embedded in BIOS.
When you install Windows on a motherboard previously activated with Windows 10 or 11 it will activate 10 or 11 (the keys are interchangeable) of the same version.
So, if you install 10 pro on a new SSD and boot, the system will (should) activate with a digital license.
It's written into the UEFI/Firmware of the device.
(This device only officially supports W10.)
Strictly speaking , an "embedded" license for Windows is only for IoT "embedded devices". He meant digital license.
7:30
Most TV and pc monitor are 4k, any pc I would buy now would have to be capable of 4k graphics
6:15 bro, I cringed so bad I actually yelled at my screen
Good at half speed...perfect drunk
yaw botta walk around with your 3.5 foot (1 meter) PC.
This is a very informative video, but I just cannot get past how fast this guy talks. It actually is giving me a headache.
he understands people's time is valuable.