No way! Lenovo IdeaCentre Mini 5i

hey guys this is patrick from sth and today we're going to take a look at this thing right here which is the lenovo idea center mini 5 or mini 5i depending on which piece of lenovo marketing material you look at it's very confusing but this thing made me absolutely laugh for a number of reasons and i can't wait to get into this now the first one is just clearly the name let's get kind of get that out of the way first this is the idea center mini right but the mini is typically what you would see hp use as their like one liter pcs you have like the elite desk mini pro desk mini all that kind of stuff and lenovo usually calls theirs tiny and that's our project tiny mini micro uh because dell is micro right and but this is actually called a mini even though it's a lenovo box so that's totally crazy but this one is actually really important right now because lenovo has been heavily discounting these as part of their black friday and cyber week and all those kind of promotions for the holiday season these things actually are on sale and that actually makes me pretty good value and i'm going to show you exactly what i mean later in this video but of course this is sth so not only are we going to talk about you know the pricing and performance and all that kind of stuff power consumption but i'm also going to tear this thing apart and show you why this thing made me absolutely laugh like crazy once i figured out what was going on and if you don't know project tiny movie micro we're taking a look at all these one liter pcs from hp dell and lenovo and we're just kind of looking at them and you know doing the compare and contrast now most of these one liter pcs that we've done and we have an entire playlist you can go check that out but the vast majority of these systems that we've actually done these are really kind of focused at like corporate buyers i actually think that this is kind of more of a consumer style system but you're gonna see some similarities that are just i think gonna make anybody that's seen that series just laugh and yeah why even hide it let's just kind of get into it so this is the idea center and this is the lenovo think center m90q tiny which we've already done a review on this one we actually have the gen two one so you're gonna see that pretty soon and that one actually uh there's there were some deals on that one that one was actually awesome as well but you know basically very similar uh so i just want to kind of show the two of them side by side and you might say okay well the this one over here has a little bit of plastic and you know maybe some some fabric on top this one's all metal it's black it's a little bit smaller and this is actually a little bit larger and you might look at these fronts and think to yourself wait a sec these are completely different systems aren't they i mean on the idea center the power button and everything that's on the right hand side well on the think center it's on the left hand side so of course these are completely different systems right let me blow your mind now that i've done this you can actually see that the power button and the usb ports and all those kind of things actually line up so the kind of crazy way that these guys actually did this is they basically took the motherboard and they flipped it in the idea center and so like let's just start with the materials they literally said hey uh well why should we go and have a nice little metal chassis when instead we could have a plastic chassis with the fabric but as we're gonna see they didn't actually get rid of that metal chassis entirely they just kind of made the serviceability way worse all right so why don't we go over the ports of this system real quick so in the front of the system we have the power button but then we have two ports we have the usb type c port and that is the usb 3.2 gen 1 port then we also have a type a port that's also usb 3.2 gen1 i hate saying that like all the time it's just the worst the other thing that you'll see is that we have a combo audio jack so if you want to put a headset you can totally go do that all right now on the back of the system we have basically again this is the flipped version but we basically have the same kind of thing that we would see on a think center where we basically have we start out with the network port and kensington lot port but we also have this network port one gigabit networking that is what it is you'll see that we have a block of three usb ports another usb type-a port over here these are all usb 3.2 gen1 ports as well for video output we have the hdmi and that's a hdmi 1.4 port and then we also have a displayport 1.2 port something that is a little bit different between this and the think center tinies is that this section right here on a think center tiny would normally be reserved for adding additional optional ports whether that's additional display output puts you get like a usb port there's all kinds of things that you can put there and this has the plastic that's covering that so you cannot go and add something you know like extra ports to this like you would one of the think centers now getting inside one of these think center systems is super easy you basically have one screw in the back you pop off the top and boom you're inside ready to go and if you want to get to the back or the memory and all that kind of stuff in the system there's basically just this little panel on the back you pull that thing off boom you're inside and while lenovo definitely has a class leading solution in terms of serviceability for those tiny systems or the think center tiny systems this mini is uh nowhere near as good and let me just kind of show you because i think you guys are just going to have a laugh now that you've seen that let me kind of show you this one so the first step is that you have to pry off this wonderful fabric i don't know why it's fabric but there is a fabric uh cover and we have to now pry that off of the plastic chassis all right it's time let's do this ah okay boom it's open and guess what now that we have this chassis off we still can't get to any components while that was toolless we now have a whole bunch of screws if we want to do anything in the system now usually on a think center tiny when you open up the chassis you'll see things like the cpu socket and fan and you'll see you know usually the two and a half inch hard drive mounting and all that kind of stuff but here we just have we just have this metal plate but there are three screws and when you get rid of those three screws i'm gonna do that real quick okay now that i've gotten those three screws done now what we can do is we can actually open the system by pulling off this metal piece and now we're inside the system and what you can see is something that should look very familiar to anybody that has seen our tiny mini micro series and these lenovo units specifically we have two sodium slots and then we also have two ssd slots but on this system only one of the two ssd slots is actually populated and we have a very small western digital 256 gig ssd here this does use the lenovo plastic mounting which i think is absolutely awesome because you can actually do toolless mounting even though it took three screws to get in here and also prying off that cover but still it's not too too bad likewise with the memory since this is a 10th generation intel core system and this particular system has a core i5 10 400 t we'll get to that in a little bit but because of that this system actually uses ddr4 2666 memory so it's pretty inexpensive sod memory and if you want to you can go upgrade this particular system has i think 12 gigabytes total but if you wanted to go put more have at it just based on the other systems that we've seen from lenovo we only tried up to two 16 gig dimms for 32 gigs in this one still on a system that's about 545 i think that getting 12 gigs is actually great i probably wouldn't even touch this configuration it is a little bit weird though the fact that you have a 4 gig and an 8 gig dim in the two channels so this is kind of a little bit different okay now i mentioned how bad the serviceability is on the sync because not only to get to this section do we need to go and remove those three screws but then if we want to get to the main part with the cpu and the hard drive and all that kind of stuff there are actually four screws and these four screws are an absolute pain okay now i picked up this specifically to i guess highlight this challenge but this one actually you know is a screwdriver and you put different bits in there and that makes life really easy except for the fact that there are four screws and to get that when you go and you put your screwdriver in here the bits usually on all these screwdrivers that at least i have are too short to be able to fit in there and so you can't actually get to the screw that you need to because the screw that you're trying to get to is all the way at the edge of the system and the first three screwdrivers that i tried all had too short of bits to get there so you basically need a screwdriver that is not thick at the end because you do have to go pretty far down in there to be able to go and actually get to the cover but once you do that you get four of these screws you undo the screws and now you can get inside the chassis and you do that by simply popping the chassis off like this and now that we have this open you can definitely see that this is basically the lenovo tiny platform in a plastic case on the top up here we actually have our processor and we have the fan that you'd use and you know the shroud and all that kind of stuff to keep the processor cool in this system we got a core i5 10 400 t which is a lower power part but it also still has six cores 12 threads and we'll show in our benchmarks that's actually decently fast it's not definitely not crazy at all one thing that is nice in this generation is that the core i5 level you actually get the hyper threading so you go from you know where like say an 8th or 9th gen core you might get something like six course six threads in this kind of segment now you're getting six cores 12 threads and that actually adds a decent amount of performance so it's definitely a big uplift with this one now down here what you're going to notice is that we actually have a hard drive this system for our 545 again came with a one terabyte hard drive along with that 256 gig ssd and because we're now in the system everything is very easy to service the fan shroud you can just pop off you can also just go and there's a single little latch right here and you can just pop that little latch and then once you do that the hard drive just kind of pops out now most of the units that we have from lenovo did have this cable however there are some you know that we've purchased second hand that you know don't include this cable so this thing is proprietary so you're going to have to go look at it online if you're going to want to go find it but it should be the same one that works on the just kind of normal think center tiny so there should be a decent supply of them if you do need it but you still get a two and a half inch drive that you can put so you get your 256 gig ssd a one terabyte hard drive in here and that's not too bad even if you want to go and replace this with a ssd at some point it gives you a couple options now the other big feature is that we actually have the intel wireless so we actually have bluetooth but we also have wi-fi six in the system this is a little bit early to be able to have wi-fi 6e in an intel platform uh we typically only saw wi-fi 6 here so that is just something that's kind of nice but it also means that you get a giant upgrade wi-fi six is a huge upgrade over the previous gen ac wi-fi so i definitely am pretty excited about this and it's also kind of nice that this chassis doesn't have an external antenna it just keeps everything nice and clean which i do kind of like okay so i'm just going to draw your attention really quick here to the system and just show you kind of what's going on because i think it's going to just make you laugh like it made me laugh again the exterior of the system is all plastic but there is still actually an entire metal cage around the platform in here they think they have to do that like emi or something like that but they basically said like hey let's go have a plastic chassis and go put a cool little fabric color a cover on it and then they still ended up having a metal chassis inside they just kind of wrapped it in plastic and a little bit of fabric and since we are in the holiday season this kind of reminds me of that angry elf scene in elf you know where you have the one writer and miles finch is there and he's like okay what do you guys got and the first writer says you know what about a tomato that's had tough times on the farm and then miles finch says no no tomatoes they're too vulnerable kids are already vulnerable no farms everybody's pushing rural just be white noise and then the second writer pitches his idea and he's like what about a tribe of asparagus children but they're self-conscious about the smell of their pee and that was i just thought that scene is like really funny right and that's basically i think what lenovo went through when they did the system right they're like okay well we have this really great thing already but what if what if we put some plastic and and maybe some fabric on it and made it less serviceable now overall performance on this is pretty darn good and so i just kind of we're going to go throw up some charts here but just kind of giving you the high level this is a little bit slower than something like the intel core i5 10 500 t it's a couple hundred megahertz slower so it is slightly slower and you do definitely notice it but on the other hand if you're just kind of using it as a little server or you're just using it as a workstation i don't necessarily think you're going to really notice that much of a difference between the two because you still have that six core 12 thread configuration there are some features though that you don't get and one of them is because you have the h470 chipset and also the core i5 10 400 t not the 500 t you don't get intel v pro so if you want that for remote manageability and have things like ikvm and stuff like that using vpro you can't do that on a system like this one because the idea center just doesn't support it now the system comes with a 90 watt power supply this is just lenovo's standard rectangle power plug thing that you see in a lot of their notebooks so it's also pretty easy to go get bigger power supplies you get a smaller i don't think you want to but you could get a smaller or just a replacement power supply so it is definitely possible to go do that in terms of power consumption we saw basically in line with what we saw the think center do so it's not necessarily that much different in terms of either idle or at maximum and the other thing to just keep in mind here is that power supply that you have the big important thing there is just the fact that because you can do things like charge things on your usb ports you can use a lot of power that's not necessarily related to the system so it's not just a cpu using power it could also be like if you have your phone plugged in and you're trying to charge that or transfer files or something like that and you're charging while you're doing that that could be an example of where you'd actually start using a lot more power than if you just you know had the system set up and you didn't have a whole bunch of peripherals plugged in okay so with project tiny mini micro i always like to have at least one key takeaway and this one is actually kind of fun so i've already made fun a little bit of this whole plastic wrapping thing i'm not a huge fan of just you know changing it to get this extra gray plastic like maybe just paint the other chassis gray instead of black or i don't know it just it's a little bit bigger and i don't really like the fact that they increase the size to make something more plasticky and i guess it looks attractive ish but i don't know how much more attractive it really looks to me at least i think that the lenovo guys actually do a pretty good job on the think center so i think maybe this is just to kind of take the basically same platform and make it less expensive so that way they could say oh well this is our consumer one not our business one and on the other hand though if you are purchasing these things this was a phenomenal deal i mean this was basically a pretty similar price to the lenovo m80q that we purchased with the core i5 10 500 t so you lose a couple hundred megahertz but what we got in return was we got way more memory because we had 12 gigs in this we went from a 128 gig ssd up to 256 so we doubled the capacity and we got the one terabyte hard drive so that's overall a big win as well and i just kind of think that you know overall i think that this is a much better buy than that one that we purchased earlier this year now of course time has gone on but on the other hand at 545 dollars this has a lot of functionality i mean if you're looking at something that was like a core i5 6500t system you know there is a good chance that this is maybe about twice the performance and about less than twice the cost of one of those systems so that kind of gives you a consolidation at just the 545 price point which is definitely not too bad at all i don't think i would spend a thousand dollars for this machine but 545 bucks yeah why not now if you do go to the lenovo site they have been changing the deals on these for example the m90q gen 2 that we purchased that one actually i think is like 60 dollars more than when i bought it a week ago so i i don't know what to exactly tell you on that other than the prices do you tend to fluctuate a bit and the other thing just to keep in mind is that lenovo also how they do their couponing and stuff like that this time of year there's like discounts for their kind of uh you know kind of just their normal discounting on systems but then also there can be discounts that are like if you hit 500 you get x dollars off and there's all kinds of stuff there so you may have to go play around and it does vary a little bit based on geography so i got this for 545 i threw it up there for my order just so you could see it but it doesn't necessarily mean you're gonna be able to get the same price but you also might get something that's better as well so check that out the other thing i would give you a tip on is that lenovo also has a number of these units with lower end processors that are in that like maybe about 150 less range but they are significantly not as good i mean the core i3 definitely is a much lower end processor than this and some of the you know storage memory configurations are much lower as well and frankly for that extra you know say 150 i think that this is totally worth it so i would definitely go and make sure because they are marketing a number of these models pre-built i would definitely make sure that you're getting the right one i think this is probably my best value so go check that out i don't think we can do affiliate links but maybe we can do one and if we can we'll put it in the description you can use that you cannot use that i don't really care but what the heck again lenovo's not sponsoring this i just purchased it just for the heck of it oh hey and there's one other thing that i really need to mention here is the fact that this system actually came with windows 11 pro this is actually the first system that we've gotten with windows 11 instead of windows 10 pro and of course i always suggest if you can get pro over home so you can do things like have remote desktop and all that kind of stuff i do just think that you know especially when you're getting these oem systems a lot of times there's not a huge up charge and sometimes in pre-configured systems like this they just come with pro and so i would totally get pro it is fun though that this is the first system we've gotten with windows 11. hey guys i hope you like this look at the lenovo idea center mini 5. now we are definitely getting back to the project tiny mini micro series i just mentioned that we got the lenovo m90q tiny gen 2 and so we'll be doing that one pretty soon and as always if you like this video why don't you give it a like click subscribe turn on 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: 48,163

Keywords: lenovo, ideacentre, lenovo ideacentre, ideacentre mini, ideacenter mini 5, ideacenter mini 5i, core i5-10400t, intel core i5-10400t, core i5-10400t benchmark, 1l pc, tinyminimicro, thinkcentre, thinkcenter vs ideacentre, lenovo tiny, lenovo mini, windows 11 pro, windows 11 pc

Id: ztn7VjNzY7k

Length: 17min 36sec (1056 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 05 2021