Why Are People STILL Buying This Old Mini PC?

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Music (in order):
"If You Want To" - Me
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Timestamps:
0:00 How old is TOO old?
0:51 Private Internet Access (Sponsor)
2:00 Lenovo m72p Tiny - Specs
3:50 First Boot BIOS
4:27 Cleaning it up a bit + thermal issues
5:55 Cinebench and power draw
7:01 Desktop usage
8:45 Booting Proxmox from NVMe
10:18 HAOS, Jellyfin, Crafty
11:25 AMT Remote Management
12:03 Is it TOO old?

[subrezon]

I hunted down dozens of these & other similar systems for my dad's business.
1) They run various old machines through the serial port, using software only available for Windows XP (which these systems support perfectly).
2) They run older digital signage, thanks to onboard VGA.
3) They are perfectly capable as POS systems.

[BobboNaught-YT]

One thing to watch out for, when you buy one, boot into BIOS and make sure you don’t see a Computrace Activated message.

[Aruneh]

My main homeserver is a HP Prodesk 600 G4 Mini, which is newer than this with an 8500T, but it's a great little system. And I specifically chose it because it supports 2 x nvme and 1x 2.5" at once, which is really useful.

[MarcoGPUtuber]

10:04 While yeah, a PCI Express 1.0 x1 socket would be approximately the same max throughput as a spinning rust hard drive, a lot of people forget that the SSD's main advantage is random IO and that it wouldn't be hampered by the port because it's still 50x faster than an HDD.

[WPGinfo]

Nice video; Imo it perfectly illustrates that choosing a PC / IT-solution is about 'what are you going to use this for? ' Most things we do, don't need much to get going.

[_Turbocat]

OMG leaving that in without first showing the re-shoot is pure comedy. it still would have been funny as an end credits blooper reel thing but it was waaay funnier this way, def kept the continuity. (p.s. end credits rap about it was also great)

[Bronburg]

You are missing one thing. Windows XP support. While some 4th gen intel OEM systems support it, 3rd gen was the last strong support. While not as good as dedicated GPU the internal graphics still work well for this also.

[brandishwar]

Ivy Bridge didn't support booting from NVMe at all. The first Intel platform to support NVMe boot is Z87, which was Haswell. X99 also supported it. NVMe is a PCI-E device, and is recognized on older platforms for storage, even if you can't boot from it. I used an NVMe gumstick with a PCI-E adapter board on a dual-Opteron server.

[Erin_Aran]

For anyone wanting to use these as a thin client or plex/jellyfin server, hardware-accelerated HEVC encode/decode support begins at the 7000 series CPUs. The visual quality isn't as good as with newer intel CPUs, but you can't beat this for the price and power consumption. I bought a barebones optiplex micro for $60 and an i3-8100t for $25, then slapped in 8gb of some cheap commodity RAM. The total cost was around 150 CAD after shipping and taxes.

But just in general, these used mini PCs are a godsend. They make computing affordable and accessible for dirt cheap. You can do some light 1080p gaming/esports titles for less than half the cost of a modern console, and also just have a PC alongside it. And if you aren't a gamer, the earlier models (along with a mid-range SSD) are sufficiently performant enough for anything you'd need.

[ravagingwolverine]

I love these tiny office PCs too. I am pretty sure I found this channel through the video on working on three seemingly broken Lenovo units. I have four of these tiny office machines, two Lenovo and two HP. It just never worked out when I was looking for a Dell. I've had to stop myself from buying more quite a few times, though I did also get a Lenovo SFF at one point which is useful for the extra drive bays. My two Lenovos are an M73 and an M93p, which are almost identical, both with the i5-4570T. From the looks of it, they changed the thermal solution a bit for those fourth-gen Intel chips, so perhaps the numbers would reflect that. My HP units are later models, one with a 6500T like yours(but in the gen two case. black), with the other having a Ryzen 2400GE like your other Lenovo. Those have SATA and M.2 drive ports which makes them more flexible and useful with less effort. But even the old Ivy Bridge and Haswell ones can be good for a lot of things, especially with the 9-13W idle power, which seems typical of most of these systems regardless of generation. For example, in my case, I don't do live transcoding with my media server, so the extra power draw on the server when I watch a video is tiny(or mini, or micro).

You mentioned the possibility of going older, though I'm not sure you can go much older than that in this form factor. I believe the M72 is one of the first, if not the first, of these tiny Lenovos. That might explain the thermal management. I believe HP's went through a similar evolution. I know Dell had a slightly bigger USFF line before their micros. The USFF machines are cool too and a good size, but are just not that common.

[MarcoGPUtuber]

13:46 Hardware Haven is finally entering into his Linus phase. That's how you know he's made it.

[stevencoad]

I have an 8th gen elitedesk with a 8600T 6-core, 32gb ram, and 2x256gb pm981 ssds running proxmox like an absolute champ (storage is on its own). I don’t think I’d go lower than 8th gen intel because this is my plex machine and the igpu supports h265.

I have a lot of nostalgia for ivy bridge, it was my first build getting back into gaming after a half decade of being laptop-only, but it just doesn’t have a lot of legs these days if the price is SO close.

[NathicOnline]

I have three of the M93p units, all of which I got around 2020. At the time, I found them to be a good option for cheap single purpose hackintosh builds. I also wouldn't be surprised if a lot of folks today are buying these because old homelab/retro gaming channels made videos several years ago (rightfully, at the time) praising these models. They are great little PCs but if I was looking today I would be searching for newer 1L Thinkcentre models.

[JasonThomasHorn]

The open com port would reduce airflow from the front.

[hans_kruse]

Great video. We have an Elitedesk 800 65 Watt, an EliteDesk 600 G4 and a Prodesk 400 G4. These also start getting trouble with Playback of 4K video. Adding fresh thermal paste is a good thing to do.
Unfortunately you have no control over the fan. One thing I did not try is the logging options hidden in the bios of some models. you can provide an URL to a log server.
One system is running Manjaro and One is still on Windows. I will soon turn these into a nice experimental Kubernetes cluster.

[nikolaimiscisco-peta]

Any Ivy Bridge CPU you will need to delid it and change out the TIM on the die. For Ivy Bridge Intel decided to use a thermal paste instead of soldering the heatspreader directly to the die like the the previous gen Sandy Bridge. The thermal paste that they use on Ivy Bridge basically turns into concrete and acts like a thermal insulator. This is a known issue with Ivy Bridge CPUs and there's many write-ups over many different forums and links that show this.

[LED-cxwj]

I have one of these and also an M93p with an i5-4570T that i got 5 years ago (In 2020) as a Server, but the M92p was a bit loud and made strange noises so i ended up using the M93p for that and only used the M92p occasionally for testing some things. They are both pretty similar the cooling system was completely redesigned on the M93p and there it has a heatpipe and the fan is actually blowing directly through the fins so it probably works better. Of course the configuration can be very different, my M92p already had 8GB RAM when i got it and the newer M93 only had 4GB instead, even with that it really worked surprisingly well with Windows 10 for some time until i decided to upgrade it to 16GB. Also it's interesting that the M92p has the mini PCIe Slot, while the M93p (or at least mine) doesn't have it soldered on the mainboard, so perhaps they really only placed it there on the models where WiFi was already included but i don't know.
So i didn't really use the M92p much but i tried to use it for some web browsing and watching Videos on it, but it didn't really work well as i remember and even with 1080p h264 Video it started stuttering quite often.
On the other side, the M93p is running at all times as my Server and works with no problems for most things i want it to do. The only thing where it really shows it's age is when i try to watch something over the Plex Server that's running on it and it has to be transcoded, then it has a really hard job to transcode it in realtime, even with hardware transcoding. But otherwise it's working fine.

The big problem now for these older systems is of course now the end of Windows 10 Support, because Windows 11 can't be installed on them of course.

Also i was actually quite surprised when you showed these on ebay and said that they are quite expensive at 40$, i just looked on ebay and here in Germany these are currently being sold at about 80-100€ with some being even more expensive, which is a similar amout in $, and they also haven't really gotten cheaper over the years, i remember i got mine for about 120€ in 2020.

[iknowdawae]

my homeserver is an optiplex 7040 micro. i got it for free from my workplace since we are replacing them. specced it out as much as its supported (i3 6100t to i7 6700t, 2x16GB RAM, an NVMe boot drive and a 1TB SATA SSD for bulk storage). its been running a modded minecraft server, a satisfactory server and a simple file share all at once with no issues. the fan does get kinda loud under heavier loads even with an aftermarket copper cooler installed but other than its been trouble-free

[BlokeOnAMotorbike]

solution to the storage expansion: I did this to my thinkcentre mini. 4 port mini pcie to sata 3 adapter, shucked 4x1tb kingston a400 drives (the boards themselves are tiny) and a 5 way sata power splitter. The whole mod cost about £40 not including the drives. So I have a 5TB file server stuck to the back of a monitor where it doubles as an almost completely silent bedroom entertainment system that runs on a 30 watt wall wart.

[JeffDeWitt]

I work IT in a factory that makes aircraft parts. I LOVE the micro PCs, They are so much easier to find a good place for... important in a cramped production environment, and at lest with the Dell OptiPlexes we use there are plenty of expansion options, I can add a second Ethernet port, HDMI or DP, or even a serial port.