Lenovo Thinkcentre/ThinkStation Tiny (Project TinyMiniMicro) Reference Thread

[Parallax]

Hi guys I'm new to the forum.
O was redirected from Reedit to this topic.
I want to built a mini PC with Proxmox and OPNSense as my main OS for firewall.
The Ideea is that I want to subscribe to a 10Gbps internet provider but the only authentification option is PPPoE.
And PPPoE is a performance hog .
Could you recommand me the config for the kinda PC?
The only thing that I use is TrueNAS for some back-ups time to time I mean once a week from Phones and sometime my mac.
Pihole as my DNS for blocking adds for my phones connected via VPN and one TV.

You can put a dual port 10GbE PCIe card into the top end Tiny models (see the first post for which ones) no problem. As long as you're just running a firewall and you don't want something like IPS then I would say something like an M90q or later should work fine, or you could probably use an M720q/M920q at a pinch but I guess you would want something faster than the i3 models.

There's not much point putting TrueNAS on it because there isn't room for many drives inside, a maximum of 3 realistically, and you'll need one of those as boot disk anyway. You can add external USB enclosures for more drives but I don't think that's an ideal configuration for TrueNAS. All the other stuff should run no problem.

 

[Parallax]

Care to explain why? ))

In China there are a lot of Tinys on sale. You can get almost anything you want. Many sellers offer ES and QS CPUs as an option.
View attachment 29261
M910x NAS

View attachment 29262

List of options. You can choose even mobile Xeon or 9980HK

The M910x NAS is hilarious, where did you find that?

 

[Raice]

But 10gbps usb solution is better

I don't think so

most are very small

I want to use 1.92T Toshiba HK4R, they are about 40 USD here in China

 

[Parallax]

I want to use 1.92T Toshiba HK4R, they are about 40 USD here in China

Yeah, that won't fit along with the PCIe card.

 

[Raice]

The M910x NAS is hilarious, where did you find that?

There is an app in China, 闲鱼, Idle fish, for trading second-hand goods, DIY, etc. You can find a lot of goot stuff there.

 

[Raice]

Yeah, that won't fit along with the PCIe card

Thought so. May be I will use external caddy like this

 

[Parallax]

There is an app in China, 闲鱼, Idle fish, for trading second-hand goods, DIY, etc. You can find a lot of goot stuff there.

Hmm. My wife is in China at the moment but it's a lot to ask of her to bring me back a bunch of cheap electronics.

 

[Parallax]

Thought so. May be I will use external caddy like this

I think that requires a SATA connection, so you'd need some way to connect it to the ZIF SATA port inside the box, plus run a ribbon cable outside the case. It might be easier to use USB3. I run a ZFS mirror over two external USB3 enclosures on an HP Microserver, that's had no issues so far.

 

[Raice]

you'd need some way to connect it to the ZIF SATA

Or just extend original Tiny SATA cable

 

[Parallax]

Or just extend original Tiny SATA cable

Yes. I still think USB is easier. I suggested extending the ZIF cable because then you can keep it as a ribbon and that's much easier to route around the PCIe card and to get it outside the chassis. But you can do whatever you like, and we'd like to see your results.

 

[Zune]

Guys! I'm looking for a NIC that It can be possible to change manually the speed transfer (100Base-T, 1000Base-T...) and I found some NICs, but I don't know if It's cards are able to do it:

• Supermicro AOC-STGN-I2S;
• Intel X520-DA2 10G;
• Solarflare SFN7501;
• HPE NC523SFP (I guess this NIC won't fit into the Thinkcentre);
• HPE 530FLR-SFP+

 

[Raice]

HPE 530FLR-SFP+

Forget about FLRs, they will need special riser and won't fit

 

[Raice]

I hope Chinese modders will create FLR riser for Tinys, because you can have dirt cheap 40/56G Ethernet/IB with it.

 

[Leonsio]

I don't think so



I want to use 1.92T Toshiba HK4R, they are about 40 USD here in China

You misunderstood me. I meant usb for the hard drive. 10 gbps usb3 vs. 6 gbps sata.

 

[Raice]

10 gbps usb3 vs. 6 gbps sata.

Still don't get it. Drive itself is SATA so it will be limited to 6Gbps no matter how you will connect it to host.

 

[Leonsio]

Still don't get it. Drive itself is SATA so it will be limited to 6Gbps no matter how you will connect it to host.

The question was whether you can use 2.5 inch ssd and 10 gbe at the same time.
The best solution is to use external usb drive. Tiny have 5 gbps and 10 gbps usb ports. With 10 gbps usb port you will have the save speed like internal sata connection.
Anyway forget it

 

[Benji99]

Yeah i tried to buy on Ali Express first put in an order payed with paypal then they closed the order for security and keep my money and i cant get anyone to fix it there or at paypal. So im done with their scammy site

I buy from Aliexpress regularly and never had the issue you described. Must have been really unlucky but again, there's crooks on every marketplace platform. I once both a FractalDesign on Amazon from a third party reseller that clearly had the wrong Non-Fractal Design power cables. Amazon and the seller provided no assistance. Fractal Design was amazing though, they shipped a whole new set free of charge.

 

[axotopia]

Just want to add... I buy from Aliexpress regularly and never had the issue you described. Must have been really unlucky but again, there's crooks on every marketplace platform. I once both a FractalDesign on Amazon from a third party reseller that clearly had the wrong Non-Fractal Design power cables. Amazon and the seller provided no assistance. Fractal Design was amazing though, they shipped a whole new set free of charge.

Been shopping at AliX and Ali for a long time and probably over 300 orders. Definately there are scams and mistakes, but AliX and Ali had always made it right and sided with the buyer 95% of the time from the 5% that went South.... my personal experience. Been scammed even on Amazon, that's life!
Just to be fair, Sellers sometimes make mistakes. So as buyers, we need to do our part reach an agreement on a fix.
I've been on both sides, so definately appreciate a buyer who communicates respectfully amd reasonably to settle any dissatisfaction.

 

[axotopia]

RE: Nvidia Tesla P4 Low Profile GPU upgrade

Hi, been reading this post and figure I should contribute to what I learned from this posting.

In the process of upgrading my M920q. Just added a NVidia Tesla P4 Low Profile with a 01AJ940 PCIe connector. Setup is with i5-8500T, 8Gb RAM, Win 11 Pro.

Drilled some holes in the cover and attached a USB fan (Eluteng USB 120mm 2sp) to the back USB port, which turns on when the system boots.
Works pretty good so far.

Did a rough GPU test with Topaz Photo AI on a 40Mb image, P4 vs stock UHD630 ... Image processed (DeNoise, Sharpen, Face, Enhance) took P4 2:05min vs UHD630 13:07min. This includes both CPU time and likely some disk swapping on 8Gb.
Temperature with the cover plate removed, P4 is about 90 Celsius without fan, 75 with fan on low, and 65 with on high.

The P4 fits but had to remove the rear plate. Also removed the front plate to facilitate fan cooling. I'll probably modify the back plate in the future to cover the back chasis a little better, also may put some resilient blocking to secure the P4 inside the case a little better.

Got the P4 on fleabay making an offer for $90. Hoping to receive a i9-9900es from AliX next week to see if I can run the CPU on stock 01MN633 fan-cooler with some extra cooling form my external 120mm USB fan.

EDIT
Currently using 528.89 data center Tesla drivers from Nvidia driver download. After install, to use WDDM mode, in Command Prompt window, go to "C:\Windows\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository\nvgridsw.inf_amd64_d73757dc15285182" or something similar, and type "nvidia-smi -dm 0"
You may need to reboot to see the P4 in Windows Task Manager

For those looking to upgrade the M920q iGPU with a P4. ... just wanted to update on performance after adding a 32Gb RAM Silicon Power 3200 module to eliminate disk swapping.. and adding a i9-9900ES (15-20% slower than standard i9-9900).

I am only using the M920q for extra large imaging processing from my 42" large format scanners, so no idea how it pairs up for other uses.

Using Topaz Photo AI as my real world benchmark compared to a desktop Geforce 1080Ti on i9-9900k, 24Gb RAM on Asus X79 Sabertooth Mobo ... Note that the test does not account for CPU only computations....

Topaz Photo AI ( (DeNoise, Sharpen, Face, Enhance) took P4 1:1:44min vs 1080Ti 2:00min
Topaz Photo AI (Enhance 2x - Gigapixel) took P4 0:59min vs 1080Ti 1:36min

Not sure how the P4 is beating the 1080Ti on Topaz, but results are quite surprising for image processing. Tempted to pick up a P40 just to see how that performs with a iGPU on a Desktop PC. One thing to note for those using GeForce and RTX drivers on PC, the Teslas drivers conflicts with the NVidia game drivers.

Also note that Admin Privilege and AutoBoost command doesn't seem to work in NVidia-SMI in the 528.89 Grid driver ..... although performance at default with WDDM still beats the 1080TI in image processing with Topaz

 

[sportal]

Any insights as to which Lenovo Tiny's can run ESXi 8.0 cleanly? @damex mentioned they had ESXi 8 running on a m920q.

(I know, run Proxmox. I already have a Topton 4 x 2.5G box running Proxmox, but want to migrate back to ESXi since I use it in enterprise environments.)

I'm currently looking at the M920q / M920x / P330, M90q / P340, or M90q Gen 2 / P350, because I'm looking for vPro for Remote Management, a PCIe slot for a 10GbE Adapter, and want to reuse 64GB of DDR4 3200 SO-DIMMs I have.

Regarding the 10GbE adapters, is it better to go with an SFP+ (X710-DA2 or X520-DA2) or a RJ45 (X540-T2 or X550-T2) to decrease heat load on the Lenovo Tiny? My switch has space for either uplinks SFP+ or RJ45, and I can use SFP+ DAC (Twinax) or SFP+ SR modules.

I'll probably also add the i210 M2 AKey Lan card to get one more GbE NIC. Looks like the i210 is on the ESXi 8.0 HCL.

Thanks for everyone's great input on this thread and @Parallax for creating the reference thread.