Last week Keith told
me he got a box in the mail from Lenovo, and he wanted me to take a look at it.
Inside the box lies a tiny little computer.
This is the new ThinkCentre M715
Tiny Desktop from Lenovo, and I'm about to go into some nerdy details about it.
Normally I wouldn't
be too excited about a piece of hardware like this. For the products that we buy, the size of these small
form-factor machines have remained about the same for the last 5 years, and any updates are usually just spec bumps for the current platform. This
one is a little different.
As noted on the spec
sheet pictured above, this machine is based on a completely different platform. While the
spec sheet shows one possible configuration, our model has a Ryzen 5 Pro 2400
GE with Vega 11 graphics, 8gb of RAM, and a 256 GB SSD just to name a few things.
This is a part of AMD's new lineup of mobile APUs that
will be coming to laptops and other small form-factor devices. We'll be running
some extensive tests on this machine to see how it stacks up against other
processors, but here are the Cinebench results for anyone that cares.
Overall it seems to
handle various workloads surprisingly well! Keep in mind, this is judging from
the limited time that I've personally spent with it thus far. We're going to
run more tests in the coming days to get a better idea. While we don't know the
exact pricing or configuration that we'll be shooting for, this could
potentially be a great budget-focused option for small form-factor machines
here at ESU. Stay tuned for more in the future!
Tyler Gastineau
Digital Experience Coordinator
Information Technology
Emporia State University
Tyler Gastineau
Digital Experience Coordinator
Information Technology
Emporia State University
