Serious desktop PC, shrunk
Ratings in depth
There's so much happening in the world of mobile computing, that it's easy to forget that the advances that underpin the latest releases also help out at the serious end of the market. Lenovo's ThinkCentre M92p Tiny is on hand to try to get you to rethink this stance.
Like many big players, Lenovo offers a full range of computers of varying sizes depending on what you're looking for. Its ThinkCentre series alone comes in several flavours - ranging from the enterprise-focused M Series towers, through to the business-class Edge Series all-in-ones.
Lenovo describes its M Series Tiny range of PCs as 'full-featured micro desktops', and sure enough straight out of the box, the tiny footprint of the Lenovo M92p Tiny system is impressive. It's a little bigger than some micro machines - it's notably thicker than the Lenovo IdeaCentre A190, for example - but it's still a mighty small machine.
It's a little larger than the straight base unit, since it has an optical drive piggy backed on top, with the whole thing held in a chassis. Even so, you're still looking at an incredibly svelte system - and as the optical drive draws power from the main PC, you don't have any unnecessary additional power cables either.
Lenovo supplied the £595 / US$629 / AU$1,209 ThinkCentre M92p Tiny with a range of accessories to show off the system's flexibility, although in truth we can't help wishing that it hadn't. The laptop-style keyboard feels cheap and nasty, while the USB screen (a marvel in its own right), is no replacement for a proper panel - and again comes across as a poor laptop knock off, rather than a brilliant addition to the flexibility of the tiny unit.
The fact that all of this came supplied in a fairly hefty piece of luggage may attempt to demonstrate how portable a tiny machine like this can be, but in practice it only makes you wonder why you'd look at this over any number of laptops. Raw performance maybe?
This decision also highlights a major point against the Lenovo M92p Tiny's existence - in these days where we're all being asked to be more mobile, do we even need desktops for business any more? A machine this small potentially has a place next to (or under) your television, but what does it offer serious users?
Specification
The Lenovo M92p Tiny is... well, tiny, and that does limit the choice of components that can go in it. You'd think then that a desktop processor would be non-starter, but that's exactly what Lenovo has installed in this unit. To be fair, this is a more power-efficient chip than is the norm, with a thermal design power of just 35W, but it's still good to know that you've got a decent chip to hang your performance off.
The Intel Core i5-3470T that you'll find inside that tiny chassis boasts a pair of physical cores, but also comes with hyper-threading, which equates to four cores altogether for handling your multi-threaded applications.
This chip has a default clock speed of 2.90GHz, but is capable of turbo charging up to 3.6GHz. This last-generation chip has 3MB of smart cache to call its own and can access up to 32GB of RAM.
This processor is responsible for graphics capabilities of the PC as well, although the Intel HD Graphics 2500 set isn't a particular highlight of what Intel is capable of - and indeed even for a last-generation processor, it's hardly pushing the envelope much.
There are some interesting decisions at play in the Lenovo M92p Tiny, with Lenovo electing to equip the machine with Windows 7 and not the newer Windows 8 (let alone Windows 8.1). To be fair though, there's little of interest for businesses in Windows 8, so it's not a decision that we're going to hang Lenovo out to dry on.
We're less enamoured by the decision to ship the machine with the 32-bit version of Windows 7 though, since this limits the amount of RAM that the operating system can access. And given the current low-low price on RAM, this seems a limitation that is arbitrary. Our test unit had 2GB of RAM installed, but since the integrated graphics need a piece of this for themselves, that's not an impressive amount.
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