1L BEAST! A 35W 64GB AMD Ryzen Powered Proxmox TMM Node

hey guys this is patrick from sth and today we're going to talk about this system right here which is the lenovo think center m75q gen 2 tiny or tiny gen 2. no if you're sitting there thinking to yourself wait a sec patrick haven't you guys done a project tiny mini micro feature on this system before the answer is well kind of yes so we're gonna do something that's a little bit different for project tiny mini micro in this installment specifically if you don't know project tiny micro we've been taking a look at all these one liter pcs from lenovo hp and dell and we've already taken a look at this kind of family from lenovo a couple times now we've done of course the intel xeon versions but this is an amd ryzen version so this is not the intel this is ryzen i know a lot of people want ryzen in here because of the amd gpu this does have that now specifically the reason that we're looking at this again is because the first time we did it we did with the ryzen pro 4000 series but you know frankly the ryzen pro 5000 series was definitely a huge upgrade in these systems and so you know it's kind of one of those things that i really wanted to do i previously ordered one of these units but the order got canceled so i wasn't able to actually show you that so we had to do the ryzen 4000 series at the time but the 5000 series actually is a huge upgrade and so i really wanted to go over that and specifically we finally got this unit but since we've already gone over a lot of this instead of just looking at this like oh here's what we got what we're gonna do instead is we're gonna actually take this unit and do something a little different now it's pretty easy to go and have a windows-based machine i mean these things all have windows licenses or a lot of them have windows licenses so it's really easy to have like a windows just desktop pc but what's something i know a lot of folks are doing is actually turning these into servers and so what we're going to do is we're going to take this machine and i'm going to show you what a server upgrade would look like and we're actually going to upgrade a whole bunch of different things in it so we're going to do that in a little bit but first let's get to the system and we're just going to do a very quick overview just so you can see what's going on here [Music] okay on the front of the system we have a combo audio jack we also have a usb type c and a type a port one thing that i wish lenovo did was actually just to put like a 10 because the type a port is a usb 3.2 gen 2 port which means it's 10 gigabit per second port while the usb c port is only a 5 gigabit per second port i just kind of wish that you know lenovo did that because it would be way easier to see oh and you also have the power button now looking at the back of the system what we get is something that's kind of fairly standard for these one liter pcs specifically let's get to usb again here we have four type a ports now two of those are usb 3.2 gen1 so 5 gigabit per second type a ports and two of them are usb 2 ports and so that is what it is now in terms of display outputs we get both a display port as well as an hdmi port now you're going to see our system also has a another display port and then specifically in an optional slot now there are two little optional slots here and you can get things here like you get vga ports serial ports you get nothing there's all kinds of different options you can get another hdmi port i mean there's all kinds of different options and so if you're configuring the system on lenovo's website certainly go look at what you can get if you're buying these things secondhand i would also say double check what you're going to get in that slot because you know sometimes just a nice little bonus to get something that you want now in terms of networking we get a one gigabit ethernet port and we also get wi-fi we're gonna talk a little bit about the wi-fi and we're actually going to upgrade it when we get inside the system so something i do want to note is that on the back of the system you're not going to see things like that quad port nick option stuff because inside we do not have that pcie slot that we see in some of lenovo's higher end systems example that you know so this on the bottom this is actually the m75 tiny gen 2. above that is the lenovo think center m90q tiny gen 2. we've done a piece on that as well we'll link that in the description and you know specifically this one actually is the intel one and this actually does have things like the pci slot they can get a riser for and then you know get uh you know expansion cards or something like that and put them in there so this does not have that because it's a lower end unit than the intel unit in you know lenovo stack but at the same time that doesn't necessarily mean that all of the systems in the market are low end systems just because they're based on amd amd definitely has a very competitive part in terms of cpu performance which we're going to see in a little bit but you're going to see that this top one is actually the hp elite desk 805 g6 mini and that one we're going to be doing a review of it a little bit later but this is definitely more of a high end unit or a higher end unit kind of more analogous to like how lenovo has their high end like the m90q tiny gentoos like kind of that high end uh unit in this one leader space so so hp actually does have the high end lenovo is kind of still in that kind of mid-range it's kind of more maybe like an m80q or something like that competitor and so that's kind of where this m75q tiny gen 2 fits in [Music] okay that's enough of that so let's get inside the system if we go look inside the system you just basically you have a screw in the back you pop off the top and boom you're inside now basics here we did not get a two and a half inch drive but if you did give it two and a half inch drive you basically have a sata spot but you can put something like a hard drive or maybe a sata ssd you can put that right here no problem you also see that we have the cpu assembly up here we're gonna show you some photos uh and you know maybe some just kind of looks at what the cpu looks like the cpu in the system as i mentioned earlier is an amd ryzen pro and it's a ryzen 5 pro 5650 ge processor which is a 35 watt tdp processor lenovo has a bunch of different options but the big thing here is that we get the new amd course and so this actually does perform a lot better than the previous generation the 4000 series this is the six core version there is an eight core version i just couldn't get it to review sorry guys doing the best i can but we're going to talk about performance when we get to it in a little bit one thing that i really do like is that this two and a half inch thing is so easy to just take off and you just pop it out like this i don't have to look at it and i can do it there are no tools to go put a two and a half inch drive in here so it's super easy and frankly i really like this design now what you're gonna see underneath is that there is a little mezzanine card for the extra display port and so that's kind of where that would go in the chassis of course those are changeable and they are orderable and configurable and all that kind of stuff so you could see different things over there on the other side what we actually got was wi-fi and what we actually got then in terms of wi-fi when we originally got this is this little guy right here which is an intel 9260 ngw i think uh wi-fi module and basically when i looked at i was like wait a sec wait this doesn't have wi-fi six like what the heck is going on and so that is something that we replaced we're gonna talk about that pretty soon okay now again to get in the back of the system you basically just pop off this back cover and now you have access to your memory and your storage now taking a look at the stock version of this you can see that we only have one so dim so this is a dual channel memory cpu but we only have one channel memory now something i would definitely say for anybody that runs these systems you always want to have two dimms here because not only do you get a little bit more memory which is always kind of good but the other thing is that you get dual channel memory operation and you really are starving the cpu for bandwidth if you only have a single dim you always want to have two so dims here so that way you get dual channel memory and you get that full memory bandwidth and this is especially the case if you do things like you want to use that integrated graphics now the other thing that you're going to see at the bottom is that we have the samsung i think this is a pm uh 981a nvme ssd and basically this is at the bottom and you're gonna see that we have an m.2 slot and then this uses lenovo's kind of tool-less little blue thing now of course depending on which ssd you get it may look a little different than this but there is something that is very important down here and then specifically you can see that there's a set of pads that are not populated for a second m.2 slot when we look at something like the m90q gen 2 tiny you're going to see that we actually get two m.2 ssds in this area but in this system we only get one now before we get into the customization and looking at proxmox and all that kind of stuff what i really want to do just really quickly is just note real fast that the amd ryzen 5000 series doesn't have a chipset in this thing you don't see a chipset that's on the board like you would see in an intel version and so all of the features that you would have from a platform perspective are actually on the chip itself and that has a big implication because lenovo is enabling amd psb or platform secure boot on the system which means that the cpu this amd ryzen pro you know 556 50 ge processor is actually vendor locked to lenovo systems so the bios and the firmware are signed with lenovo's keys those blow fuses in the amd psb so the security processor complex will have these field programmable fuses and those actually are blown which means that the cpu is locked to lenovo's system so you can't take this out and put in the hp system and have a boot for example we have a entire video on that we just did so go check it out you can check out the link in the description for that one that was originally part of this video but then it was too long so he pulled it out and did his own video but let's instead get to kind of upgrading this thing [Music] the first thing you mentioned was that little wi-fi module and one of the really easy things to go do is just get a new wi-fi module and put the new wi-fi module into the system and that basically gets you some upgraded wi-fi now here just for fun we're actually using the intel ax 210 so the wi-fi 6e version now personally when i go do these typically i'm looking for at least the you know intel ax 200 series of chips to go put in here i just kind of think that those ones tend to be pretty good wi-fi parts for these types of systems and typically if you do see wi-fi six in these systems those are the chips or the m2 cards that come in there so we're actually replacing the previous wi-fi ac version with that just to go get a little better wi-fi because if you do want to use wi-fi it's just nice to have and sometimes it's not too expensive to go do but let's get to the back of the system because really even though this is a six core cpu you're gonna see that the performance is really good and so what i wanted to do was really upgrade this to number one dual channel memory and then i figured well why not just go upgrade it and have a lot of memory and so what we're actually using is these g-skill rip jaws and they're really not that expensive they're about 200 i think we're paying like 200 6 207 for a pair of 32 gig modules which gives us a total of 64 gigabytes of memory in this system we'll put a link in the description it'll probably end up being an affiliate link or something like that so we make it compensated as a disclosure but you can go kind of see the ones that we get off amazon and we think we've gotten like eight sets of them and we're using them in a lot of these tiny mini micro systems these days so we'll just link those in description in case you want them and in terms of the ssd the sd that we got with the system was only 256 gigs so we thought you know hey if we only have a single slot here now of course we have the two and a half inch that we can use as well but if we only have one nvme slide we might as well get a bigger ssd and so we got the sabrin rocket q one terabyte ssd now this is definitely not the highest end drive that you can get on the market so i mean the highest end drive that sabrin has but at the end of the day this is a decent drive for this class of system and i think it's just perfectly fine for what we use we tend not to use like super right heavy drives or anything like that in these systems so i think this is just fine [Music] and what we're going to do with this system which is really interesting is we're actually going to go and install proxmox ve now if you don't know what proxmox is it's basically a debian based hypervisor solution that is not only really just a hypervisor but also does things like you know you can run vms on it but you can run containers you can run things like ceph as your kind of like scale out storage it has zfs already integrated i mean there's a whole bunch of functionality in proxmox it's become very popular and we've been using it for i don't know like pretty close to a decade or something like that so we've been using it for a long time it's an absolutely awesome thing and so we can actually install that on these project tiny mini micro nodes and then have these really low cost kind of small easy to put anywhere even in a small apartment or something like that you can go and have a virtualization host that's relatively quiet so let's get to that install okay now actually installing an os on this is pretty easy what we actually did for this one specifically is we are using just a tiny pilot which is a little raspberry pi ikbm solution we have a review of that you also see that in the description but we're just using that to go and install an os on here and specifically what we're going to do is put proxmox ve and the normal process is actually pretty easy to go through the one thing you do usually have to do is turn off secure boot because if you have windows that secure boot will be on and it'll start throwing errors so usually what you'll do is have to go into bios you have to turn that secure boot off also while you're in there i'll just double check and make sure that all virtualization options are on on our as they are so we're going to definitely you know need that for virtualization solution and then you just kind of keep installing proxmox as normal now as you go through the installation process one of the things that you're going to see is that you're going to install and in our specific case we're going to install on that one terabyte nvme ssd but one other thing that you could do is if you could find like an inexpensive like you know sata drive or something like that that could be something that you put in the two and a half inch bay and maybe use that for your installation i don't know it's just there so maybe you'd want to go do it but here we're just using the nvme drive because it's one terabyte and that's fine for a system like this we have network storage anyway a couple things to just note you do definitely want to use the wired nic kind as your primary nic as you're doing the setup you can actually turn on the wireless nik later and you might actually want to go do that and we will talk about that in a later video but that you do actually have two nicks in the system technically one of them is wireless so uh you know we really want to put a lot of like clustering stuff on there but you know the wired nick is definitely a good solution and once we've gone through the proxmox installation uh basically we're all set now we have guides on the sdh main site in terms of you know what to do when you get to into proxmox we're using proxmox v7 here and you can totally go set this up and now you have an entire virtualization environment with six core 16 threads you have 64 gigabytes of memory and a one terabyte ssd as your local storage you can of course hook up external storage or your network storage to that as well and so you have a lot of different options in terms of what you can do with proxmox in a little system like this [Music] okay now the big thing about the ryzen 5000 series and why we're doing this one again is really just the fact that the ryzen 5000 series is when we got zen three so we got the new micro architecture but we also got the you know unified level three caches and so that is a big deal for a system like this i mean that is absolutely a huge deal let's face it so in terms of performance what we see is that we're actually very competitive with the ryzen 7 and that will be the ge that we looked at last time in this exact same system right we're looking at the same system and yet you get performances pretty close now sometimes one wins over the other and that's pretty true in a lot of benchmarks and just you see things that like you know if you have like an nginx benchmark or something like that you actually see that you know sometimes you just need more cores and then those kind of things where you need more cores a core is better but in some things where you can get higher clock speeds and actually take advantage of those the six core and then three actually puts you ahead so of course you're probably thinking patrick don't you want the eight core model and the answer to that is absolutely i do we just don't have it yet and i have one on order and hopefully we're gonna get that from hp if they actually build the system and ship it now in terms of power consumption these are 35 watt apus and so you do see that we actually have a much smaller power supply than you would expect i think on a system with this level of performance and specifically we still have only a 65 watt psu i think really part of the fact that you have such a small psu in the system and this is like really what we would see from like an intel like back like an intel system like a core i5 like 6500 uh 7 500 t something like that this is definitely feels like it's an older generation psu and just having a smaller psu in a system like this because intel cpus even though they're 35 watt tdp have definitely climbed up so we typically see like 90 plus watt uh power supplies with those intel based units but with this amd unit you know frankly 65 watt was actually usable we didn't quite get up to 65 watts we uh you know got into like the mid 50s but at the same time you can definitely get pretty close you do have options this is using the kind of standard lenovo rectangle just the same thing they use in their laptops and stuff like that so it's that rectangle power adapter and so you can get bigger ones if you want pretty easily but 65 watts actually that's pretty low power for how much performance we're getting [Music] okay now in all these project tiny mini micro videos we always have key lessons learned and that's what i want to get to next now let's just kind of talk through a couple of those q lessons learned i think the first one if you have not seen our amd psb and vendor locking ryzen cpus using amd psb with lenovo if you haven't seen that video go check it out in the description you definitely need to if you're going to buy a system like this in fact i think it's important that the entire market sees that so you should probably go share that with some of your colleagues and friends just to make sure that everybody's aware of what's going on with these ryzen cpus the second thing that i noticed with the system is that the ryzen 5000 series is absolutely awesome i mean even you know people talk about it in terms of you know the desktop parts but when you get down to even these like 35 watt parts i actually think that zen 3 is a huge upgrade we've seen it on the server side i mean everybody knows that zen 3 at this point is a big upgrade and definitely is in the space these things have been extraordinarily hard to find i mean i've been trying to get one for months and i finally was able to get one just a couple weeks ago and so i'm very excited by it but at the same time you know if you can get them i do think that the ryzen 5000 series is super cool and i can't wait to go try that 5008 core chip when we look at it from a competitive standpoint i actually think that hp has a somewhat better platform i mean there are kind of two ways to look at i think from a serviceability standpoint lenovo definitely has the best in this generation they're about they're definitely beyond dell and they probably are beyond hp as well and just kind of working on the ryzen apu system so the elite desk 805 g6 mini and then this m75 cube tiny gen 2 and kind of working on them side by side you definitely think like okay lenovo is way easier to work on but at the same time hp has i think a platform that is much better in terms of just these ryzen systems that's not even talking about psp or anything like that i think it's just the actual platform and what you can put in the system is a lot better because hp actually i think positions the ryzen ap units as kind of like higher end units than lenovo does price-wise they're actually pretty similar and so what we actually have coming and i'm really excited about this is we already have the 805 g6 mini and we've already been kind of working on that but we have the g8 mini uh we have two different configurations because i'm hoping like maybe hp decides to build one of them i don't know um but we're gonna definitely show you some things and especially with this virtualization host side i think you're actually gonna say like oh my gosh hp has a killer solution and especially with the g8 ones i think that people are going to be like whoa that's awesome and i can't wait to show you guys those but we have to kind of hope that hp will actually go build them for me and ship them um don't know but we're trying here so i do kind of wish that lenovo brought its amd units up to parity with its intel solutions and had things like the dual m.2 slots because you know that is present on the hp solution and hp also has things like they can have pcie slot as well and so i just kind of think that hp has a higher end unit and i'd like to see lenovo up level their amd units and not kind of make them second class citizens because the performance is absolutely awesome now if you like this video why don't you give it a like click subscribe turn on the notifications so you can see whenever we come out with great new videos as always thanks for watching and have an awesome day

Channel: ServeTheHome

Views: 144,920

Keywords: Lenovo, Lenovo ThinkCentre, AMD Lenovo, Lenovo AMD Tiny, M75q, m75q-2, m75q gen2, m75q tiny gen 2, zen 2, amd, amd ryzen, zen 1 vs zen 2, thinkcentre, amd ryzen 5 pro 5650ge, ryzen 5650ge, 5650ge, 35W ryzen, amd ryzen 5000 series, amd ryzen 5000 series desktop, minipc, min pc, sff pc, amd sff, tinyminimicro, servethehome, project tinyminimicro, lenovo vs dell vs hp, proxmox, lenovo upgrade, proxmox ve, lenovo proxmox, cpu, vendor lock, tech, lenovo, amd ryzen pro

Id: M1EL8yYe_0s

Length: 19min 28sec (1168 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 26 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/foldedaway]

Is this one of the products where lenovo locks Ryzen CPUs to the board and prevent salvage down the line?