Lenovo Thinkcentre M600 Tiny

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crosscourt
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Lenovo Thinkcentre M600 Tiny

Post by crosscourt »

Picked up two of these for $30 each with the7th gen(Braswell) Pentium j3710 1.6ghz(turbo to 2.64ghz) quad core cpu,8gb of ram and a 2.5 256gb ssd. Passive cooling with the cpu as they have a single fan pulling air over the cpu and ram. External power supply and has a good number of USB 3.0/2,0 ports, two displayports(theres an optional add-in vga port if needed), ethernet and built in wifi. The unit is 7inches x 7 inches x 1.4 inches so it can fit just about anywhere. Ill be running Debian and Zorin initially on them as I become more familiar with them. Power usage is amazing as it runs between 7-14w which is definitely a low power system. It also has a M.2 sata connector but doesnt support nvme.
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Re: Lenovo Thinkcentre M600 Tiny

Post by wove »

I purchased ThinkCentre mini of a few years back. Perhaps a different model, and I am sure different specs. it was referred to as a ThinkCentre Tiny-in one. I got it refurbished from NewEgg. It was $80 and they threw in a very nice blue tooth speaker. The one I got was very nicely made, metal case, lots of screws easy to work on. But I found it to be a real dog of a computer and I gave up messing with it after a couple months.

I ended up gutting it out. The m.2 lives in a ThinkPad now. The RAM is no doubt in something. Lenovo's power supplies a very universal so it is also in use. The case I used to hold a Maximite 2 single board hobby computer. So all the parts went to pretty good use and the speaker has been in constant use. But as mentioned the computer itself was a very poor performing machine.

I hope yours are much better machines. Lenovo makes so many configurations of everything. That is an exceptionally nice form factor to work with and its low power consumption is a real bonus.
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Re: Lenovo Thinkcentre M600 Tiny

Post by crosscourt »

The M600 mini has one screw then you slide the cover off and everything is accessible. Two screws to remove the hard drive caddy, thats it. Performance isnt a barn burner but for everything other than gaming it will do just fine. Even though the cpu is an Intel 7th gen Pentium it performs about the same as a low end i5 4th gen cpu. The power usage is the big thing as Im averaging 12w in use. It certainly doesnt have the performance of the HP Elitedesk 800 G3 mini I have that uses a 6th gen i5 Skylake cpu and can utilize nvme drives, but this system also uses 65w. The HP in my opinion is the best mini-pc available presently in the used market.
Im moving away from using desktops except for my gaming system. Ill be using mini-pcs primarily for everyday tasks while saving some power over my gaming systems.
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Re: Lenovo Thinkcentre M600 Tiny

Post by wove »

It is an easy to open and work on device. Mine had the one screw to take the top off and everything is right there to work on. The one I had had only the m.2 installed. It could take a SATA drive, but I never put one in. For me a laptop is my knock around device, and I am not very fussy about performance. My desktop is the main working machine, when I set down at my work bench with the big monitors I want very good performance.

The X230 is my best laptop and it is a 3rd gen i5. It does have 16GB of RAM, which it probably doesn't need. My IdeaCentre however is a 10th gen i5 also with 16GB and an nvme drive. It is snappy and fast. I can toss a lot at it and it just keeps moving right along. It runs VMs well. and no matter the transitions in Gimp, or rendering a movie, it just moves right through the task, while leaving enough umph to get other stuff done.

I find myself thinking more and more about energy consumption when I pick stuff up. Overall the computer industry has been making solid advances in that area. The IdeaCentre maxes at 40w but looking at the power meter, it is mostly using between 20-25w. So it is actually using about the same power as the X230 while being able to do 4 times the work.

It sound like the the units you have are substantially nicer than the one I had. I trust you will be putting them to good use.
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Re: Lenovo Thinkcentre M600 Tiny

Post by crosscourt »

Both minis showed up tonite and initially I ran them on Win10 using ssds from my Dell Latitude 3460 and they activated with no issues, interesting.
Updated the bios as Lenovo had a recent bios update which amazed me. Both use 8gb of ram and only support Sata/Sata M.2 drives. Hard drive is easy to slide out quickly and the caddy can be removed if you want to use the M.2 slot. Very simple design, easy to replace items and they have addons for different connections, one of them has a add-in vga connector. Its no barn burner but the speed is good and would be fine for Office apps, browsing and online videos. Next up I want to run some Linux distros on it and see how they do. Power usage so far is 7-12w which amazes me and even though the cpu only uses a heatsink for cooling overall it does fine in average use. The bios has settings to increase the fan speed curve if needed.
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Re: Lenovo Thinkcentre M600 Tiny

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Cpu appears to be soldered in but outside of that the system is upgradable but why they limited ram to 8gb Im not sure. They could have moved the cpu back on the board and put in two memory slots just lie the HP 800 G3 mini . Temps while running are pretty constant around 43-46C which isnt bad for a passively cooled system.
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Re: Lenovo Thinkcentre M600 Tiny

Post by crosscourt »

Im a bit stunned to be honest as I did some Linux testing last night on the M600 using Q4OS, Zorin, and Peppermint and performance wasnt very good. In fact Win10 is much quicker overall in both tests and general use. I dont get it as Linux is always faster on all my older hardware versus Win10 but that wasnt the case. Peppermint in particular is a very light distro and flies on all my older hardware.
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Re: Lenovo Thinkcentre M600 Tiny

Post by wove »

It is a bummer to hear that your ThinkCentre minis have the same performance problems that I had with my unit. I just figured it was an inexpensive under powered device and I never tried to figure out what the bottleneck might be. In the end I just repurposed the parts into something more useful for me. It is interesting how a device can have a number of very nice useful features and still end up being something of a disappointment.
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Re: Lenovo Thinkcentre M600 Tiny

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The Pentium J3710 @1.6ghz turbo to 2.64 just doesnt have enough punch and needs more cache. Its quad core but doesnt perform as well as it should overall. That said its using 7-8w and performance is still good enough for everyday use but it doesnt have the higher end performance of the HP Elitedesk 800 G3 minis I also use. Still surprised Win10 performs the best versus some lightweight Linux distros. Ill play around with it more as my expectations werent that high. I also own a high end Ryzen 5 5600x desktop system, Alienware R10 so its always available for gaming and high end projects.
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Re: Lenovo Thinkcentre M600 Tiny

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One M600 is going to be used as a game emulator using Batocera Linux. The second Ill be running as a Linux tv box and the third is running Win10 for the moment but will probably also become a tv box.. Its going to b fun playing some much older games on the M600 as it will essentially become a game console with a controller.
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