The ULTRA Mini Workstation from Lenovo... the ThinkStation P360 Ultra

hey guys this is Patrick from sth and this is the Lenovo thinkstation p360 Ultra now this little system is one that we have gotten so many comments of folks saying why don't you review this and frankly the reason is that they're too expensive to go buy but Lenovo did send us this unit so we could actually go and do a review of it which I'm super excited about because when we open the system up and start playing with it it became obvious why so many people were excited about this platform this is a Lenovo professional workstation but it's it's small I mean this thing is I think like a little over three liters or something like that and just to kind of give you some idea in terms of how big it is this is a Lenovo one liter PC and uh you know you can kind of see actually put it this way so you can actually see a little better but you know it's definitely way bigger but on the other hand it's also way more powerful now at sth we have project tiny mini micro which we reviewed these things from Lenovo HP and Dell those are really the one liter PCS and these things are super popular because you can throw them behind monitors and you know you have a nice little system that's reasonably performant these days but this because it's a bigger chassis has way more functionality than we would have seen on something that's only one liter chassis for example not only do we get a Core I9 CPU but we also get a Nvidia RTX a5000 GPU with 16 gigabytes of memory on board another cool feature is that you have more memory expansion options and you have dual mix you can also put things like expansion cards in here so I think there are a lot of things that when folks say I am not overly interested in the 1 liter PC because I just need that little bit extra expandability or those little bit extra in terms of features I think that this is actually a really good platform for that so first we're going to look at the hardware I'm going to tear this thing down so you can see what makes this different then we're going to look at the performance power consumption noise and then finally our key Lessons Learned we're gonna have chapter markers so if you want to navigate you can feel free to do so with that let's get to the hardware okay so for the hardware we've already talked about the size of this chassis but let's talk about the front panel because what you're going to see here is something that I think is really cool right first you get a power button whatever you also get a headset Jack which I really like the fact that they're keeping the headset Jack we have seen a lot of systems without that and then you get a array of USB ports now the type a port that you'll see is a USB 3.2 Gen 2 Port which means it's a 10 gigabit per second Port I definitely like the fact that there's one I wish that there were two so that way I could plug in my keyboard and mouse in the front if I wanted to now you will see two more ports on this and those are way more exciting they look like USB type-c ports but they're actually Thunderbolt 4 ports we get a ton of folks that say why can't I get Thunderbolt on a project hiding mini micro node well guess what this one has it in fact it has two of them on the front now the rest of the front of the system is really just this venting it's like a mesh thing it's it's a normal Lenovo styling we've seen it on other workstations like the p620 that we reviewed and we're gets back real quick you'll notice that I have this thing set down horizontally but they're also rubber feet on this side of the chassis so if you want to you can actually pick up the system and then run it vertically okay look in the back of the system you're gonna see a ton of ports so let's start with the easy ones the USB ports now there are four USB type A ports these are USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports and so definitely good that we get some more expandability we don't just get stuck with the front ports you'll also notice that we have three to displayports now with these three full-size display ports are four is really the onboard igpu on the Intel processor that's in the system because there are folks that'll buy the system and not put a dgpu in the configuration and those folks of course will want to have you know some kind of video output and that's what those are really for now you can actually go and you know use multiple monitor outputs one of the challenges we had though was that if we do have the dgpu in sometimes the system was pretty darn finicky in being able to get video out of the igpu as well and since we will get the question I just want to point out that we did have some challenges with that okay next what you're going to notice is that there are two Lan ports I mean there are so many people that want two Lan ports on the 10mm micro series I love the fact that this has two you'll see that there's a two and a half gig ethernet port as well as a one gig ethernet port now in a lot of offices you're probably only going to have one ethernet port to your desk however I think that what Lenovo is actually doing is they have these two ports because there are some kind of like industrial applications and just kind of embedded type things that this you know is actually a pretty good fit for and I think having that extra Port gives you the ability to go and run those types of workloads on this or at least use a system in those environments okay so down here what you'll notice is that we have another four mini displayports I hate Mini DisplayPort let me just call it what it is but it's there because the Nvidia a5000 that's in here is a notebook GPU and there's only limited room to be able to go put ports so I guess that's the solution that they came up with to be able to actually put that many ports on here so you get another four display outputs from the Nvidia a5000 in the system of course if you don't have an Nvidia GPU in here then you know you're not going to have that card but we have a pretty pretty well configured unit and since we're not going to cover it too much in this review I do want to just point out the fact that we do have the little vpro sticker this is an Intel Core I9 processor even though it's a core I9 12 900 processor we do get the fact that we can have V Pro in this because uh you know you want manageability okay so opening up the system there is a little latch that's in here and you just basically pull this thing out it's super easy okay so now that we've opened this little chassis up uh what you'll see let me just kind of show you this side of the thing and we did add a couple things so I'm just going to show you what we added and I'll explain why in a sec but uh you know when you open up the the unit the first thing that you're going to see is that uh there's this little heatsinki thing here and so you pull up on this and underneath here you have the ssds so these are two m.2 slots and I think they're actually both PCA Gen4 or pcie gen 4x4 slots right so you have two ssds that you have and then Lenovo actually has this nice little cooler assembly so you can actually cool your PCA Gen4 uh and the two ssds which is really good because a lot of them run very hot the other thing I want to point out is that you have an ax 211 so an Intel Wi-Fi card and you also get Bluetooth 5.1 with that and before I flipped the system over I really wanted to show you the other features that you might not notice immediately and so we're kind of making them a little bit more obvious here so what you'll see is that on this side we have a pcie slot now it looks like a pcie you know by eight slot but it's really a pcie gen 3 by 4 slot so you only get four length and flip side you know you do get a four lane low profile slot so you can add an expansion card in here we have a lot of folks ask you know can you get a PCA slot in these small systems because you know they may have a card like a 10 gig SFP Plus card or something like that they want to add well in this system you actually have a pretty decent you know little slot although it's only by four slots so you're not going to run like 100 Gig networking or 50 gig networking really realistically and something like this you're probably going to be limited to something like like dual 10 gig or something now the other thing is something that we added so in this system when we opened it up there were I don't think there were any dimms on this side but you'll see that we have two of our g-skill rip jaw ddr5 modules in here we wanted to do two things first we wanted to see if we could actually get get more memory than was installed there's 32 gigs installed but I think you know I wanted to really test going up to 128 gigs which is why we put two additional modules in here the other thing I just wanted to test was if you could use third-party modules and it turns out that these g-skill rip Jaws you could I'll put the link in the description for those we also tried the Micron units that I'll put in the description as well I do want to point out though because a lot of folks don't know this that you cannot use ddr5 or dims in a udem or an Esso dim slot and so we have a video on that that we're gonna go Link in the description as well definitely go check that out if you want to learn about server ddr5 and the differences between server and you know the consumer desktop platforms like this okay so flipping the system over you're gonna see three main pieces of functionality and uh they're big definitely so the first thing we just talked about memory so what you'll see is that under this top heatsink there are another two slots for memory which means that in this platform you can have a total of four 32 gig ddr5 dims which means that you can today a go put 128 gigabytes of memory in that with the one liter systems you're limited to usually two so dim slots and so you get stuck at 64 gigs and it's been like that for Generations this is a way to get Beyond 64 gigs yet still have a relatively compact platform now under this top shroud and cooling fan assembly what you'll see is that we have the Intel Core I9 12900 which is a you know just kind of massive pretty much like a desktop processor even though it's in a very small form factor like this it is a 65 watt TDP processor although it of course uses way more than that because TDP does not equal power consumption we'll show that a little bit but you get a total of eight performance cores and eight efficient cores so that means your performance course you know you get hyper threading so you have eight cores 16 threads plus another eight of the smaller efficient course gives you a total of 24 threads and 16 cores in this processor and it has a max turbo frequency of over 5 gigahertz which is awesome in a little tiny platform like this now on the bottom here is the GPU in this particular configuration we have the Nvidia a5000 which is a professional GPU it's not really like a consumer GeForce cart because it has 16 gigabytes of memory on board now you might be saying well of course that's a desktop version right this is actually the mobile version so it's the mobile a5000. now we're not going to be able to test every application of course so instead if you have a professional application that you want to know the performance of the system or this GPU on what I would do is I'd say go look for an Nvidia a5000 mobile 16 gig GPU in that application and you should be able to find results at this point the other thing though is that there are other options like the A2000 which is much less expensive but we just don't have that here this is also an mxm card so it's not like you're going to just go and take a GPU like we have an Nvidia A40 up there you're not going to be able to take that GPU and just throw it in here so overall this Hardware platform is awesome let's go talk about the performance thank you so the performance of this that Intel Core I9 12900 is definitely a top bin SKU for this configuration and frankly it performs Super well eight performance cores eight efficient cores and you get a lot of performance in something like this now you can get 65 watt TDP CPUs in the one liter PC segment but in the one liter PC segment one of the challenges that you have is you just don't have that much room for cooling and so as a result you know you can get things that overheat you get very noisy fans in the larger form factor you have more just room for those giant heat sinks and stuff and what that does is gives you the ability to actually cool this thing and not be super loud and as you see from The Benchmark charts you're definitely getting great performance out of this compared to the a lot of the one liter PCS that we have now on the GPU side I mentioned that this is the a5000 16 gig mobile of course in professional applications sometimes you just frankly need more than that but that's really the top end that you get in here but of course because of how big this thing is you can't put a giant professional GPU like for example this is the brand new Nvidia RTX six thousand Ada Edition and this is like the hotness in terms of professional Graphics right now so what we're going to do is as we go do reviews of cards like this what we'll do is we'll put the Nvidia a5000 mobile 16 gig card into that data set where we can although it only has 16 gigabytes of memory still it should be pretty obvious why you can't put one of these in a chassis that's only this big right now one other thing that a lot of you've asked for is gaming testing now we don't normally do gaming testing but of course this thing because it has an Nvidia a5000 although a notebook version of that GPU in it it's actually pretty fast and what that means is that you could play games on it let me just kind of show you the experience because let me uh let's do League of Legends again and instead of even going down to 1080 let's just run it at 4K and look at the performance now I'm just playing Bots here but we are recording video on the unit itself and what you'll see is that we're getting like 220 to 240 FPS that is pretty darn good and is easily like way more than you need to be playable so I would say that you know if you did want to also game on this I guess you could although if you just won a gaming PC this is the of course wrong option for that so with that we looked at the performance why don't we go look at the power consumption and Noise foreign sitting right next to me at idle I have a sound meter right here this is how far the system is from the microphone it definitely does spin up but I just wanted to kind of show you what the idle power consumption and noise looks like so on the power consumption side you're seeing about 27 or so Watts sometimes you'll see spikes into you know 30 31 watt range even at idle and then you know of course power goes up from there the noise floor in the studio is about 35 DBA so it's not super loud but it's also not super quiet at the same time I can tell you sitting next to this thing it is super quiet right now but I figured let's run geekbench six just to see what the difference is in terms of power consumption and noise it's still pretty quiet but you're gonna see especially on the single thread side that we're gonna get into that 60 to maybe 75 watt range and at this point we're a little bit further in this Benchmark run you can see that we're kind of about in that middle of that single threaded workload side and the fans have started to spin up every once in a while so the room is now in that like 37 or so DBA range okay now we're in the multi-threaded workloads and what you're going to see is that the spikes are much higher 160 a little over 160 absolutely no problem at this point just doing a CPU benchmark now we're over 220 Watts again just doing a CPU Benchmark all right now let's switch and let's test the a 5500 so we're going to select that here and we're going to run our GPU compute Benchmark which is opencl of course on that we're not going to be running a Cuda workload so you could probably get something a little bit higher if you really tried to and here again you're going to see spikes in that 150 160 range no problem okay so I went in and I did the cpu-z just the stress test across the course and uh this thing is definitely getting a lot hotter so I'm sitting behind it and it's starting to get a little bit uncomfortable we're now over 200 Watts on the power meter and if we look at the decibel meter we've gone from about 34 DBA in this room to now we're at about 58. and the stress test is still running but we've kind of hit that point where we have now throttled down and uh without rolling about 120 watts and a much more manageable about 38 DBA so overall the thing that we learned with this whole power consumption section and noise section is that this system is quiet at idle it definitely can make a lot of noise if you're running it very hard for sustained periods of time but at the same time it is not that that bad it's nowhere near like a threadripper pro workstation or anything like that where you know you're going to be using six seven eight hundred Watts maybe kilowatt or more and I think that's how Lenovo was able to fit so much power in such a small space okay so what did we learn with this entire thing now I always like to have key Lessons Learned and I think that what I learned at this is I love the fact that you get a ton of expandability I really like the fact that this could run very quietly even with a pretty beefy GPU frankly and a pretty darn high-end CPU for especially a chassis that's so small like this now of course when you do fire everything up and you get it going it does definitely you know you can hear it it uses a lot of power and all that kind of stuff and so you know I would just tell everybody that you know when you're looking at a system like this it's not completely silent although at idle it is very very reasonable and even under light workloads is pretty darn reasonable you really have to get to those high-end workloads to make it kind of louder at the same time though I love the expandability but there are some things that I wish were a little bit better for example on the rear of the system we have a one gig and a two and a half gig ethernet port why can't I have two two and a half gate ports because that's what I really want and also we've had this thing set up in a number of different desks and stuff and you here on the set and something that I noticed was that I always wanted to plug another USB a thing in here and I don't really want to have a hub right so I love the fact that we have Thunderbolt ports love them right but on the other hand I wish that there was a second USB type a port just in case you wanted to go and actually plug into the front of the system I love that inside the system you get four so dim slots so you can actually get to higher levels of memory like finally I feel like we've been stuck reviewing systems that can go up to say 64 gigabytes of memory in this kind of like like kind of these smaller form factors like the one liter PCS and all kinds of stuff I feel like we've been stuck in that range for just so so long we've even looked at some other professional workstations they're in this kind of General size from other vendors that only have two sodium slots so I really like the fact that Lenovo is doing that here and as small as we say this thing is let's also remember that there's this giant honking 300 watt power supply which actually adds quite a bit to this overall chassis I frankly would rather that Lenovo figures out how to just go and take this put it in here add a little bit of extra room for cooling or something like that and then just give us a slightly larger PC now the other thing I want to point out is the price of these things so this system with the core I9 12900 also the a5000 GPU this thing will sell for well over four thousand dollars sometimes you know closer to like five thousand dollars depending on you know the exact configuration like if you're 32 or 64 gigs of memory one terabyte SSD and then you know I mean just just to me that feels like a lot of money for something like this I totally get it if you're an architect or you have some kind of design house or something like that where you need to have something that's compact that also has the Nvidia professional drivers that you can use that are certified with your apps on the other hand though I think that you know there are going to be folks that are looking at this saying hey I need more power because I need to go fit a giant GPU in there they might be saying also hey uh you know that's that's a lot of money for a compact system compact workstation like that um so I do think that there are definitely folks that are going to look at this and say like hey maybe I fall into other segments especially given the price hey guys I hope you like this look at the Lenovo think station p360 Ultra this is an awesome platform I really like the fact that we get a pretty high-end Intel CPU a pretty darn high-end Nvidia GPU and put them together in a relatively compact package and if you did like this video well why don't you give it a like click subscribe and turn on those notifications so you can see whenever we come out with great new videos as always thanks for watching have an awesome day

Channel: ServeTheHome

Views: 166,120

Keywords: servethehome, serve the home, intel, nvidia, nvidia rtx a5000, intel core i9, core i9 workstation, lenovo, lenovo thinkstation, lenovo p360 ultra, lenovo p360 ultra review, lenovo p360, lenovo thinkstation p360 ultra, mini workstation, mini workstation pc, sff gpu, thunderbolt, lenovo workstation, league of legends

Id: E_an5heI1BU

Length: 18min 47sec (1127 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 21 2023