Lenovo Thinkcentre/ThinkStation Tiny (Project TinyMiniMicro) Reference Thread

[cromo]

I installed my AOC-SGP-i4 (i350) today in p340 and it causes NVMe drive to disappear from the system. Cannot find any information on that. Anyone with similar experience or any idea what could be causing this? The card is functional, pulled from my other system I am upgrading from.

EDIT: after a while it seems to boot despite not showing NVMe drive online, and the i350 NICs are also invisible. I’m baffled.

OK, so I removed the NVMe drive to see if the NIC would show up, and it doesn't. I run the Diagnostics to list all the devices found and aside from the built-in i219 NIC, no other NIC was reported, so this is a different sort of issue than I originally speculated.

May I ask how everyone has theirs i350 FLASH configured? DISABLED, PXE, EFI, PXE+EFI?

 

[drvcrash]

I just picked up a couple m90q's and was thinking of using the built in sata cable with this adapter and a satadom for boot

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that way i can use the two nvme's for my vsan and the pcie slot for a AOC-STGN-I2S card

there should be enough space to stuff it all in there

Yeah, currently I have the boot drive with a VMFS datastore, but that's not compatible with vSAN (it requires two dedicated drives)


I guess I'll have to look for a device to measure power draw first; I'm just afraid that 65W won't be enough.


I am going for a TrueNAS shared storage solution anyway, but I guess it comes down to "Do I want all of my VM boot disks on shared storage or not?"


I don't have a 3D printer either, but there's wonderful websites where you can upload STL files and have it printed by people near you for very low prices

 

[cromo]

OK, so I removed the NVMe drive to see if the NIC would show up, and it doesn't. I run the Diagnostics to list all the devices found and aside from the built-in i219 NIC, no other NIC was reported, so this is a different sort of issue than I originally speculated.

Anwering myself: now that I read through the initial post again, I see:

• Also please note that anecdotally you must use only the x4 PCIe riser (01AJ929) when adding specifically the Thunderbolt card, since the x8 and x16 risers stop this particular card working (other cards have no reported issues).

Was anyone able to actually use a i350T4 PCIe x4 card with a x16 riser (the one that the GPU comes with)? Or could it be that the Supermicro one I have is specifically having trouble with it?

EDIT: actually can see it was reported already before it does work with a x16 riser.

 

[Parallax]

EDIT: actually can see it was reported already before it does work with a x16 riser.

Yeah, my "x16" riser works fine here with an Intel i350 card. It's only specifically the Thunderbolt card that I've seen reports of being picky.

As a side note, I've never actually seen the Thunderbolt card for sale.

Just a random thought, did you check if your Intel card is genuine? There's a link in the original post to see the difference.

 

[cromo]

Just a random thought, did you check if your Intel card is genuine? There's a link in the original post to see the difference.

I use a Supermicro SGP-AOC-i4 card, which is Supermicro's own design, not an Intel reference one. It's a standard PCIe card, though, and it worked just fine with my previous HP t730 thin client for the last 4 years.

 

[Parallax]

I use a Supermicro SGP-AOC-i4 card, which is Supermicro's own design, not an Intel reference one. It's a standard PCIe card, though, and it worked just fine with my previous HP t730 thin client for the last 4 years.

Then I'm not sure what to suggest. As you said, there doesn't seem to be any similar reports from others having this problem, and the Intel reference cards are widely used without issue.

Are you running a current BIOS? Have you reset it to defaults? (I know this is all basic stuff, but it seems something is fundamentally broken here.)

 

[cromo]

Are you running a current BIOS? Have you reset it to defaults? (I know this is all basic stuff, but it seems something is fundamentally broken here.)

Yes, all done. I reported this to Lenovo and we’re back and forth, but unlikely they’d be able to test with that specific card.

 

[rafale77]

Something I have been playing with and I found to be poorly documented (maybe it's just me not knowing how to search?) and could be useful to some: I figured out how to change the BIOS logo:

The tool is embedded in the UEFI version of the BIOS update packages.
1. I created a USB boot drive for firmware updates of my P340.
2. Created a jpg logo file (i.e logo.jpg) which needs to be relatively small, <20kb in my case, and put it on the USB drive.
3. Upon booting the firmware update USB drive, I rejected the firmware upgrade to access the UEFI shell.
4. The following commands then need to be executed:
Compress.efi logo.jpg
ChgLogo.efi compress.bin
If the file is small enough post compression, the logo will be loaded into the BIOS.

 

[Kaloz]

@Parallax : I can confirm the PCIe riser in the P350 tiny is the same as the one for the P340. It seems on the M90q G3/P360 we'll get a new one as 5C50W00909 if you would want to update the first post

 

[Parallax]

@Parallax : I can confirm the PCIe riser in the P350 tiny is the same as the one for the P340. It seems on the M90q G3/P360 we'll get a new one as 5C50W00909 if you would want to update the first post

Thanks, will do.

 

[Parallax]

Something I have been playing with and I found to be poorly documented (maybe it's just me not knowing how to search?) and could be useful to some: I figured out how to change the BIOS logo:

The tool is embedded in the UEFI version of the BIOS update packages.
1. I created a USB boot drive for firmware updates of my P340.
2. Created a jpg logo file (i.e logo.jpg) which needs to be relatively small, <20kb in my case, and put it on the USB drive.
3. Upon booting the firmware update USB drive, I rejected the firmware upgrade to access the UEFI shell.
4. The following commands then need to be executed:
Compress.efi logo.jpg
ChgLogo.efi compress.bin
If the file is small enough post compression, the logo will be loaded into the BIOS.

Very cool! Thanks for this.

 

[rafale77]

@Parallax

I was reading your CPU Passmark ranking and found some surprising things so I took it and added a couple of columns to show the GB5 single thread/multithread and iGPU computing benchmarks. I think it could be useful to help people select a CPU based on their workload as opposed to relying on a single benchmark. I am missing some data at the very bottom 3 CPUs.

 

[Kaloz]

Thanks, will do.

Np. It seems they've just added the PN for the x16 riser as well - 5C50W00933.

 

[tjk]

Any list for any of these TMM's that support SGX in the Bios? Looks like the P340 does but the M90q does not.

 

[rafale77]

Also wondering if anyone here has attempted putting a ”K” unlocked CPU in these tinys. Given the fact that power limits are customized and regulated by the BIOS, I was just wondering whether they would even be recognized.

 

[adman_c]

Still waiting on the riser (it's cleared customs in the US!), but here's the 3d printed baffle with the Supermicro AOC-STGN-I2S installed. Looks fantastic!

FINALLY got the riser and got it installed. The AOC-STGN-I2S was immediately recognized by proxmox, OPNSense, and pfSense. Idles around 12-14w with the firewall doing nothing (I still need to get it configured).

 

[Parallax]

Also wondering if anyone here has attempted putting a ”K” unlocked CPU in these tinys. Given the fact that power limits are customized and regulated by the BIOS, I was just wondering whether they would even be recognized.

Yeah, I'm interested in that general question from a different angle - what can you do in the BIOS to limit power consumption? There's a great deal on for P350s at the moment, but they come with a 65W TDP CPU and I'd like to limit it to 35W.

 

[Parallax]

I've done a lot of updates to the CPU table and added the BIOS picture change method (thanks to @rafale77 for both!), plus added some info from @Kaloz (thank you too), did some general tidying up.

 

[rafale77]

Yeah, I'm interested in that general question from a different angle - what can you do in the BIOS to limit power consumption? There's a great deal on for P350s at the moment, but they come with a 65W TDP CPU and I'd like to limit it to 35W.

Not seeing how that can be done in the BIOS. I only know of changing the power limits by changing the power brick. Not sure if there are tools in OS to do that. The TDP are the PL1 of the CPUs. PL2 on my machine is set at 135W for a 65W CPU.
I was wondering if a 125W TDP would run on my machine, assuming its PL2 would likely be at 135W too.

 

[Parallax]

Not seeing how that can be done in the BIOS.

Do you mean, not sure how to do this via the BIOS generally, or in the Lenovo one specifically?

It's a pretty common setting in performance BIOSes, but I agree I don't see a setting for it in the Lenovo Tiny ones (unsurprisingly).