UK Lenovo P360 Tiny I7-12700T £929.99 with code (Lenovo.com)

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Vorwrath

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Currently 39% off the I7-12700T P360 Tiny with code "FLASHSALE", bringing the price down from an extortionate £1549.00 to a slightly more tempting £929.99. Lenovo.com link - might not last long as items seem to go in and out of their flash sales periodically.

Comes with 16GB DDR5 RAM, a 1TB m.2 SSD and an Nvidia T400 4GB graphics card installed. The older versions of the Lenovo Tiny line make nice little servers (see this thread) and this is the latest iteration, so hopefully it'll be good. Weirdly this model is listed as coming without wireless LAN - probably not a big deal if you want it for server use, just seemed to me like an odd omission at this price.

I ordered one with the intention of replacing an older NUC with it as a home Proxmox server. Hopefully I'll be able to ditch the GPU and stick a network card in it instead to get some additional ports.

Not sure whether it's worth the money over picking up an older model (which are plentiful on eBay) for most people, but you're at least getting the latest platform and a 3 year warranty.

lenovo screenshot.png
 
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Occamsrazor

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That must be a beast of a machine. I wish they’d make models with dual-LAN or 10gbe. What kind of network card can you put in it?
 
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Vorwrath

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That must be a beast of a machine. I wish they’d make models with dual-LAN or 10gbe. What kind of network card can you put in it?
The most common one is an Intel i350-T4 to get an extra 4 gigabit ports. That can be specced as an option when buying them from Lenovo, so there are rear brackets etc. to install them neatly available as parts. People have got them working with 10Gb cards too, but that takes a bit more inventiveness.

There's a lot of good information in the thread I linked in the first post about which parts fit which models, but not a ton of details on the P360 yet since they're fairly new out.
 
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Vorwrath

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Damn, I waited too long the flash sale is over and it’s back up to £1320.
They do have a deal (22% off) on an M70q Gen3… but not as appealing… ThinkCentre M70q Gen 3 Tiny (Intel) | Compact, powerful 1L PC | Lenovo UK
Stuff on the Lenovo website all seems to keep going on and off different promotions and coupon codes every few days. It's worth checking it periodically, it might not be too long before a similar deal (or one on a very similar system) comes up.
 

Occamsrazor

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Thanks @Vorwrath - Yes I'll keep an eye. Really want a TinyMiniMicro machine but getting lost as to the huge variety of different models. The Lenovos are appealing because of the PCIe card option, but the Dell 7090 also has appeal with a 20gbps front USB-C port as oppposed to the usual 10gbps. Then I was just looking at the latest NUC 12 Pro models which have Thunderbolt 4 which would offer flexibility for 10gbps networking add-ons, as well as built-in 2.5gbps ethernet.
One could go round and round trying to choose :)
One question... if you are using something like Proxmox or ESXi and are running the machine headless without screen, does having a discrete graphics card like the P360 of this thread offer any benefit at all, or just increased power usage? I know some apps like Plex can use it for transcoding (not that I need this) but was wondering if it offers any benefit to the general virtualization environment.
 
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Vorwrath

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@Occamsrazor Yeah there are certainly plenty of good choices. I like the Intel NUCs as well, the NUC 8 I've got has served me well. Just fancied something a bit more powerful that I can add additional networking to. I'd like to try out virtualising a home router with OPNsense, so for me the PCIe slot is a good advantage, and adding a network card there will probably be more reliable than USB/Thunderbolt based stuff.

The discrete graphics card doesn't really have any advantage unless you're running an app that will specifically make use of it. For example if you wanted to drive a bunch of displays for digital signage it could be handy. By default your VMs probably won't even have access to it, generally you need to do some extra configuration to either pass the card through to a single VM, or certain cards support SR-IOV to split their resources up. Unless you have a specific need for it, the GPU will just be sitting idle and adding 10 or 15 watts to your idle power draw.

The CPUs in these machines have an integrated Intel GPU that supports media encoding/decoding anyway, so for something like Plex transcoding it's normally better to use that instead. The power draw will be lower and it leaves the PCIe slot free for something else.
 

Occamsrazor

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I hate to hijack this thread beyond the original intention, but seeing as the deal is over now anyway and you've been so helpful.... Been looking at high performance mini-pc options that have additional NICs and came across these models that have inbuilt 2 x 2.5gbe, after managing to conquer the NUC naming system that's akin to an Enigma code. They also have Thunderbolt so you could add 10gbe pretty easily.

Intel NUC 12 Pro Dual-LAN: (not available yet, 12 cores, 16 threads)

Intel NUC 11 Pro Dual-LAN: (4 cores, 12 threads)

Comparison between the two model generations

There's also the ASRock 4x4 1260P but the 1260P processor doesn't have vPro which seems pretty useful for a server box, for that you need the 1270P:

The 12700T of the Lenovo P360 in this thread is still the more powerful processor, but the size, lower power, and extra connectivity of the NUCs is appealing to me. If the 12 ever actually becomes available for sale....

Any thoughts, expense aside? How important is having an extra NIC when using something like Proxmox if you aren't planning to virtualize a router? Also how do these virtualization environments handle the different performance and efficiency cores? I see confusing info online.
 
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Vorwrath

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@Occamsrazor I wouldn't say vPro was essential in a home environment, but it's a nice extra to have. If you're running a hypervisor like Proxmox, you can troubleshoot any problems with the VMs through its web interface, so vPro is only really useful for the initial install or if you have some major problem with the hypervisor itself. It's something I'd probably have used a couple of times in the last few years, but didn't massively miss on my NUC8. It's not that hard to just pull it out of the cupboard and plug it into a monitor if I really need to.

Not sure the size is a huge differentiating factor unless you're trying to fit a very specific space. These are all very small systems. The NUC has a smaller footprint, but is a bit taller. All these sytems have got relatively large external power bricks to consider as well. I'm not too sure on the power consumption. Generally a less powerful CPU is going to use less power when it's maxed out (because it's getting less work done), but at idle or with a light load, there might not be very much difference at all. I received the P360 yesterday, so am going to take a few pictures and measure the idle power consumption (probably with and without the GPU) once I get around to that. I'll probably put that in the Lenovo thread I linked in the first post.

I wouldn't say an extra NIC was important at all unless you have some particular use in mind for it. The NUC8 I've been running for the last few years just has a single gigabit ethernet port, and it's never been a particular problem (just running various home server related VMs and some for testing websites etc. for work that I bring up and down as needed). Obviously 2.5GbE or 10GbE is nice to have if your network is set up for that.

The use of E-cores is mainly just going to come down to the operating system. The current Proxmox (7.2) is using Linux kernel 5.15, which I don't think is new enough to utilise the efficiency cores properly. I don't think that will cause any particular problems though, it's just that it won't quite be using the full power of Alder Lake CPUs. Once a new stable version comes out based on a newer Linux kernel, I'd anticipate full support (I think Intel's scheduling improvements are in 5.18).

I'd say Thunderbolt on the NUCs is nice to have, but then the P360 supports DDR5 RAM and will have more memory bandwidth. There are lots of factors to consider, but they're all good systems really.
 

Occamsrazor

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I wouldn't say vPro was essential in a home environment, but it's a nice extra to have. If you're running a hypervisor like Proxmox, you can troubleshoot any problems with the VMs through its web interface, so vPro is only really useful for the initial install or if you have some major problem with the hypervisor itself. It's something I'd probably have used a couple of times in the last few years, but didn't massively miss on my NUC8. It's not that hard to just pull it out of the cupboard and plug it into a monitor if I really need to.
This is very useful to know. I've never used Proxmox or ESXI before, only what I have read online. I see your point about only needing vPro to troubleshoot issues with the hypervisor itself and everything else can be managed through the hypervisor. The device would sit in a server rack at home without a monitor and I'd want everything to be accessible over the LAN. But I guess hypervisors are pretty reliable for booting etc so the chances you'd need to diagnose issues with that itself would be infrequent.

Not sure the size is a huge differentiating factor unless you're trying to fit a very specific space. These are all very small systems. The NUC has a smaller footprint, but is a bit taller. All these sytems have got relatively large external power bricks to consider as well. I'm not too sure on the power consumption. Generally a less powerful CPU is going to use less power when it's maxed out (because it's getting less work done), but at idle or with a light load, there might not be very much difference at all. I received the P360 yesterday, so am going to take a few pictures and measure the idle power consumption (probably with and without the GPU) once I get around to that. I'll probably put that in the Lenovo thread I linked in the first post.
Nice, I'll be happy to read your take on this model. For me size isn't critical, either 1L TMM or NUC size would be fine... it'll go on a shelf in a rack, but I do want to keep power usage down. So looking for something powerful but relatively low energy usage, but also that has connectivity options.

I wouldn't say an extra NIC was important at all unless you have some particular use in mind for it. The NUC8 I've been running for the last few years just has a single gigabit ethernet port, and it's never been a particular problem (just running various home server related VMs and some for testing websites etc. for work that I bring up and down as needed). Obviously 2.5GbE or 10GbE is nice to have if your network is set up for that.
I was really dead set on having a second NIC but you've now got me reconsidering. I have a separate low-power box running pfSense for a router and don't have any plans to virtualize it as it's the one thing I want to be trouble-free (including user-created problems) so seems better to keep that function separate. In which case maybe I don't really need a second NIC. The Thunderbolt on the Intels is pretty nice though, because you could add something like this QNAP adapter to get a second NIC with 10gbe speed: QNA-T310G1S | Connect to 10GbE SFP+ networks over Thunderbolt™ 3
I had a chat with a UK NUC dealer... seems those dual-LAN NUC models are very scarce in the 11th gen model, and no expectation of the 12th gen model being available anytime soon.

The use of E-cores is mainly just going to come down to the operating system. The current Proxmox (7.2) is using Linux kernel 5.15, which I don't think is new enough to utilise the efficiency cores properly. I don't think that will cause any particular problems though, it's just that it won't quite be using the full power of Alder Lake CPUs. Once a new stable version comes out based on a newer Linux kernel, I'd anticipate full support (I think Intel's scheduling improvements are in 5.18).
I've just been reading about the issues of P+E cores and ESXI and Proxmox. I guess they will fix compatibility issues eventually, though wonder if an 11th gen that doesn't have the hybrid cores would be easier to deal with. Is it the (guest) operating system that needs to support them, or just the hypervisor? Can I ask what you are running on your box?
 
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Vorwrath

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@Occamsrazor I did make a post in the other thread with some photos and some basic power consumption measurements.

I think only the hypervisor would need to support the E cores in order to make use of them, but not 100% on that. 12th gen is a fairly substantial improvement, so even if the E cores aren't used at all, they should handily outperform the equivalent 11th gen parts in both raw performance and performance per watt (most if not all of those were still on Intel's old 14nm process). A lot of the older parts are still more than good enough to run a decent virtualisation server though, even going further back to the 8th/9th/10th gen stuff. It just depends on how much power you need for the software you want to run really.

I'm going to run Proxmox on mine, but probably won't be rolling it out for a while. Need to sort out some additional parts out first, since I'm planning to put more RAM and an extra NIC in it.