1L with a GPU! Lenovo ThinkStation P340 Tiny
Today were gon na. Take a look at this thing right here, which is the lenovo think station p340, tiny Music, and the reason that this thing is super cool is because this is a project, tiny mini micro node. That is a 1 liter pc, and this thing also has a gpu in it: an nvidia gpu. Now, if youre not familiar with project tiny mini micro thats, basically, where weve been looking at these 1 liter, pcs from lenovo, hp and dell and over the last couple years, weve taken a look at several dozen of these machines. And so we have a pretty good idea of what all the machines in this class do, not just from lenovo but from other vendors weve taken a look not just at this p340, but weve also taken a look at the 30 tinies and weve definitely done a Lot of these systems, so we have a really good reference point in which we can use to compare this unit to other units. Now, just in terms of pricing lets talk about the high level configurations and pricing. I know everybody likes to just kind of know what that is. This is not the newest generation theres, a p350 tiny and i think, theres also a p360 tiny that lenovo hasnt announced, but you can actually find some documentation on it. So i dont know what the status of that is, but that will be the alderley generation. So this is a 10th generation intel core based system, but its also meant to be like a small workstation.
So, instead of just having a intel core processor, we also get a discrete nvidia, quadro gpu and if youre thinking, patrick nvidia doesnt use quadro, they actually do use quadro on their older parts and in these kind of lower power segments we do get usually older parts And so this is technically still a quadro gpu, although that name has been retired for newer parts. So, overall, with a pretty high end: core i7 processor, 16 gigabytes of memory, a half terabyte nvme ssd and a gpu, we managed to get this system for 840 or so on. Ebay and the reason i wanted this configuration is that it compares to this new mini pc series that we have and we actually just looked at a mini pc that had 16 gigabytes of memory. It also had a 512 gig ssd and the current price on amazon. For that one at the time that were recording this video and uh well, you know that pricing. Of course, all this pricing all changes, but that ones actually at 799 dollars with just an amd ryzen cpu, no discrete gpu. So what i wanted to do was just kind of talk about what the difference is and like can you actually get into a discrete gpu version for about the same price, and i think that this thing answers the well its not exactly the same 800. 800. Its like 40 more, but i do think that its close enough that you would say, like you know, an 800 and 840 dollar system are roughly comparable in terms of price, and so with that lets get to the hardware Music.
Now, looking at the front of the chassis youre going to see that we have basically three main ports, we first we have a headset which is a combo headset jack. The second thing that we have is two usb ports. The first port is a type, a port. Its a gen 2 port, and so it does 10 gigabits per second now there is a type c port on the front of this, but that type c port is only a gen 1 port, so its 5 gigabits per second. I kind of wish that both of these were 10 gigabits per second but thats. What we have on the front of this theres also the power button on the rear of the unit we get more usb ports. Specifically, we get two usb 3.2 gen 2 ports and three usb 3.2 gen one ports and we do not get usbc on the back of these units, but thats pretty common in the industry. The other thing that youll see is that we get our base display outputs, which is a display port and an hdmi port and thats pretty much standard on the lenovo tiny series. What is different, though, is that we get something thats exciting. Specifically, we get four more mini display port outputs because well thats whats on our nvidia gpu rounding out the configuration we get our intel i219lm nik, as well as our wi fi antenna on the back with that, though, lets go and before we get inside the chassis.
I just want to point out something that is a little different on the outside of the chassis and really thats, just how much area is dedicated to cooling. So you can see on the this p320 here theres no like there are no perforations on the top of this unit right. This is basically just a solid top, whereas we have giant perforation on the top of the newer p340 tiny unit and thats really just to give a lot more airflow, because this thing uses a lot of power. Youre gon na see why this may look small, but its actually not as small as you think, just in my hand here and ill explain why well get to the power section a little bit later. But i will say that even not just on the top, but also on the sides and on the rear like using the gpu faceplate theres. Definitely a lot more venting in this system, because well its having to cool a lot more and thats. Why? We see a lot more venting. The venting also means, though, that if you do try stacking these up on top of one another, you usually dont want to do that, because youre going to restrict the airflow to this top vent and that will cause heat problems or itll make your fans go faster, Which will create more noise, so you typically dont want to stack this type where you actually have the you know vent on the top with that, though, lets get inside the system and well.
The first thing is, of course, the screw: the screw ive already taken out, because lenovo doesnt use thumb screws, which is a total bummer. I wish they did but thats what it is now lets open up the system here and just pops right off like that. Finally, and we get inside and now that were inside the system, we can definitely start to see some of the differences between this and your kind of run of the mill one liter tiny mini micro, pc specifically. Well, we see that on the top we have our cpu, which is kind of standard, but this entire cooling assembly is dedicated to just cool that cpu and in our system we actually have a intel core i7 10 700 t, which is an 8 core 16 thread. Part its not quite the top end in this generation, because there was a core i9, which is it has a its a core. I9 10 900 t also a 35 watt tdp part, but with 10 cores in the next generation, the 11th gen. It actually went back down to 8 cores, so this is basically the same core count as the 11th gen, but the 11 10 has things like pc agent, 4, and there are definitely some features in the 11 10 that are cool, but at the same time this Particular system we dont have the core i9. We have done with them before with the quiet nine, but we have the core i7, which is still a pretty darn high end cpu, but the big difference is that we have a pcie slot, its a pretty standard.
Looking pcie slot on a little riser, these risers are actually pretty hard to find you can put them in some lenovo systems, but theyre not super easy to order after the fact, and then we actually have our nvidia quadro p620 gpu. Now this is not something that would be necessarily like im not going to tell you to go, play competitive games on it or anything like that. What, basically, is there its a two gigabyte gpu? The p means its pascal generation, which is definitely aging at this point, but the basic idea is that is a low power, discrete gpu and this low power, discrete gpu allows you to have four additional display outputs. You can actually go and have like six display outputs just on the system, if youre, using both the onboard as well as the quadro display outputs and although the brand has been retired, you can actually see that this one says quadro on it now, moving to the Back of the system, we can see the next feature, and this is one feature that i really like that lenovo does, and i wish that other vendors did as well, and what youre gon na basically see is that you pop off this back part of the chassis And then what you basically get is you get so dims and you get your storage, and so here we get two so dims. This particular system only had 16 gigabytes and we only have single channel memory.
I always suggest having dual channel memory, so i will put another 16 gigabytes in this as we deploy it and so well have 32 gigabytes. I also think – and we have tried by the way two 32 gigabyte dimms in here, and that gives you a total of 64 gigabytes and thats, actually pretty thats, actually a pretty darn good system right when you have like eight cores or 10 cores, you have 64 Gigabytes of memory, thats thats, pretty darn good, especially when you have a discrete gpu. The other thing that youre going to see is that we have nvme storage and we dont just have one nvme drive. We actually have two nvme drives now: lenovos configuration with the storage on the back of the motherboard is actually kind of nice here, because on some of the other systems like hp and dell, theyll have their nvme storage on the top of the motherboard, which means that, If you have a gpu, like you, know, youre, basically putting something on top of a hot component which is nvme ssd and so its just not ideal. I dont think for like cooling, but i think this is actually a better layout than what dell and hp use in terms of you know their tiny mini micro systems. The other thing is that this system actually has two m.2 slots, so you could go put two ssds in here. Some of the lower end. Lenovo systems have the same kind of cutout, but they only have one of the two m.
2 slots populated. So you can only put one nvme ssd in this, but here you actually get two, which i think is actually kind of an awesome feature now. What you do lose with this gpu is that you would normally have a like two and a half inch sata uh, like tray system here, which you dont get because well, the gpu is in the way and theres no room for it. The other thing is that if you do have to ever switch out the wi fi well, youd have to go all the way down here and its actually the wi fi card thats under the gpus. You have to like kind of take out this entire assembly. It doesnt really take that long, but its just something to keep in mind that it is a little bit harder to service the wi fi card here. But i just i dont think that a lot of people are going to do that so thats. What it is – and this was a generation where we were just at that point – where were starting to see the transition from like ac wi fi to wi fi six, and so this does have the i think, the ax 201 intel ax201, which is a wi fi. Six chip, so we actually get some pretty nice little wi fi on this lets just talk real, quick about performance, so this system has the intel core, i7 10 700 t, which is an 8 core 16 thread processor.
It can turbo, i think, up to like 4.5 gigahertz, but the base clock is only 2 gigahertz, its actually a little bit higher base clock than the 10 core model. Overall, this is pretty competitive with the ryzen 4000 series, if you want to compare amd to intel. So this is pretty comparable to that, but the ryzen 5000 series, of course, is actually considerably faster, and so i do think that if you want like maximum cpu performance, you probably want to get a ryzen based unit. Although i dont know, if lenovo actually has a think station, thats ryze and i actually dont think they have one so youd have to go, get something like the m75q, i guess or realistically im just gon na put it out here the hp. You guys have the elite desk 800, g6 and g8 minis. The g6 mini even had a nvidia geforce, 1660 ti and thats actually kind of cool, because thats a much higher end, much faster gpu than we get in this with the p620. Frankly, thats just thats something thats actually kind of – i guess more fun than this is. This is really just for display outputs, and this is also the lowest gpu option that you can get. This is the p620, but theres also the p1000 and theres. Also a t1000 option. Now all three of those have four mini displayport outputs, but you basically go from the two gigabytes of memory that we have, which basically is not a lot these days up to four gigabytes with the p1000.
And then you move to the newer generation architecture and eight gigabytes of memory on the t1000 card. So, frankly, if i wanted something for like a performance gpu, because i really wanted to accelerate things like that, i probably would really look more towards that t 1000 than the p620 and its just, you know, thats just a feature that is newer technology. But this really, the point of the gpu here is 100 just to go, provide extra display outputs. It is not really to go and like if youre saying, like oh id like to play game. This is not that if you want to go, do some basic acceleration. Um, there are definitely applications that take advantage of quadro drivers and there are things that take advantage of like the media, encoders and stuff like that that nvidia has and so that you do get. I guess with this, although they are older, because you know we are definitely a couple generations beyond pascal at this point, so just i would look up all that kind of information. If you are thinking about the p620 or p1000, and also just the t1000, i would just double check the specs in terms of what youre looking for and what this actually has. Okay lets talk about power, consumption, and i mentioned this earlier because there is something that is totally kind of different with this system than a lot of the other systems that weve seen. So this is a lenovo p340 tiny.
This is the power adapter for the little box if you have even the low end p620 gpu, just to give you some sense of scale here i mean these. Things are like this. This power supply is like almost is more than half the size. It feels like of the you know just unit itself, so its like you have two thirds actual system and, like one third of the total thing, is the power supply. This is absolutely huge and in fact i recently mentioned the fact that you could also get the hp elite desk. 800G 6 mini with, like the 1660 ti that one, for example, actually uses a, i guess, a smaller. I think it has 150 watt power, brick. If you get, the gpu option were actually gon na, have the g8 version of that with the gpu. That uh is being recorded right now, but we havent published it yet so youll see that soon, but this is just i mean this is a giant power brick. I mean its huge 230 watts now youre, probably wondering how that translates into actual power consumption, something that we saw, that was a little different was just in terms of power consumption. It is much higher in this system than we have been seeing from the project. Honeybee micro segment – specifically, we are not seeing power consumption in that you know maybe 9 to 13 14 watt range with this system. This one really kind of the lower end of the power consumption like we saw at idle was like somewhere in the 22 23 watt range.
But something that we did notice was that if we just let the system just sit there and go for a little while the overall power consumption would actually creep up over time. And so, if we let this thing just kind of sit idle for a little. While we actually saw that, i think maybe it was just a heat soak thing or something, but we actually saw that the overall idle power consumption would actually go up and if we left it for like a day or two at idle, we would actually start getting Into the 30 to maybe 33 watt range at idle, so its definitely much higher and thats, something that we wouldnt have seen if we just kind of plugged it in and did a quick idle test, its something that you had to like plug it in and just Kind of watch the thing go up over time and at the top end we actually got the thing to go and push over 150 watts in our testing when we had it fully loaded and stuff. So i mean frankly, can you get this thing up to a pretty high power output? I mean you definitely can so i can understand why lenovo actually went with the big honkin 230 watt power, brick because i mean this system actually uses quite a bit. The other thing is that, especially when you start getting over, you know maybe 60 to 80 watts of power consumption.
The fans in the system really start to spin up, and you definitely start to hear it so at idle. Its yeah theres a little bit of fan. Noise, but its not really too too bad, even in that you know, like 30 watt range once it starts getting a little heat soak. I think lenovo does a good job of fan management there. But when you start getting that thing loaded up, i mean you can definitely hear some of those that fan noise and thats just frankly the fact that you have so much power consumption in such a small package that well you know you got ta move airflow through The chassis to cool everything, so you dont want things overheat and when you do that it creates more noise, and so these are much noisier than some of the other systems that weve seen where you basically just have a cpu. You dont have a gpu and youre. Just not cooling as much, especially with the intel parts. They are a little bit warmer in these systems than we are seeing the amd parts, especially in the ryzen, 5 4000 and 5000 series. So i would definitely say the power consumption in this is even though its a small system, its, not necessarily small in terms of power consumption. One of the tiny features that youre gon na see that we have the core i7 with v pro, so this system actually does support v pro out of the box, just something to keep in mind that that is a feature, and this one supports it.
If you do want to go down the v pro route for manageability, however, while this has the v pro sticker, that is a feature that is not on the entire range, so definitely double check. If youre looking at you know, processors that the processor that you want to choose also supports vpro, if thats a system feature that you want and also even if it, the processor, does support vpro in theory, you can get these systems or some companies will get these Systems with v pro turned off because they do not want that remote manageability and if thats the case – and you were to buy that like second hand, you could have a system that, in theory, should support v pro, but it actually doesnt support v pro so with V pro always double check and make sure that the system that youre purchasing supports it if thats a feature that you want so for all of these project, tiny mini micro videos. I have key lessons learned and for this video i was kind of thinking about it. I was like man: what was it? What was my key lesson learned for the p340 tiny, and i think my key lesson learned is that this is something that i think is interesting, because it does have a discrete gpu and thats, something that we get asked about. All the time in these project, tiny, mini micro, node reviews people are asking like. Can i get a d gpu? Can i add one later? I think that if you do want dgpu, i would strongly suggest that you go and you get a unit that already supports it.
Lenovo actually uses a kind of more standard, just riser and pcie connector instead of a proprietary connector, which i actually really like. At the same time, though, i do kind of feel like the p620 is really showing its age. I mean its its thats thats many generations ago, and i just personally feel like i would have liked to see like that. You know like a touring at least as a kind of like minimum base level of a system in this generation. Now, of course, it is a little bit older, so time has moved on, but at the same time i do kind of feel like the p620 is just kind of that lower end really just for displayport outputs. But if you do want a better gpu and you know better performing system, i actually do think that the hp elite desk 805, g8 mini, is actually a kind of better option. I mean we have that with an eight core amd ryzen 5000 series processor, as well as we have a nvidia geforce gtx 1660 ti gpu, and i think that cpu plus the gpu combination frankly, is a lot better than what were getting here with lenovo. Now it definitely costs more so its something that you are paying more for, but on the other hand, that thing kind of feels more like what i think a lot of folks are asking like you know. Can we get one of these things that if i just want to do some casual gaming – and i want something thats, not like an integrated gpu, i want something thats, a discrete gpu for a little better performance.
Like you know, what should i get? I actually think that that is going to be a better option than something like this. I know we have had readers that have got gone out and gotten like the p620 and youre playing some kind of easy games, or just doing some little video media coding or youre using something like adobe, and you just need some kind of you know acceleration. Just by having a cuda based gpu then sure i guess the p620 is okay, but at the same time i think that there are better options out there and spending a little bit more money can get you a new system with warranty and some better features. So, just to me thats something that i would definitely keep in mind as a key lesson learned when we reviewed this system. As you can tell, we definitely have a lot more of these coming out soon and we also have separated out a new series which is not project tiny micro, but its just kind of looking at mini pcs. And so we have that series that we are starting up on the sth main site and on youtube as well so definitely check that out.
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