Lenovo’s latest mini-desktop is a 7.6″ x 7.2″ x 1.6″ box with a textile cover on top and a 10th-gen Intel Core “Comet Lake” processor inside.
The Lenovo IdeaCentre Mini 5i supports up to a 65 watt Intel processor, up to 32GB of RAM, and has room for a hard drive and SSD.
Lenovo says the IdeaCentre Mini 5i will be available in Europe in September for €500 (about $600) including VAT.
The computer may be small by desktop PC standards, but it packs a reasonable amount of horsepower, with processor options including:
| Processor | Cores/Threads | Base/Boost freq | GPU base/max | TDP |
| Core i7-10700T | 8/16 | 2 GHz/4.5 GHz | 350 MHz/1.2 GHz | 35W |
| Core i5-10400T | 6/12 | 2 GHz/3.6 GHz | 350 MHz/1 GHz | 35W |
| Core i5-10400 | 6/12 | 2.9 GHz /4.3 GHz | 350 MHz/1.1 GHz | 65W |
| Core i3-10100T | 4/8 | 3 GHz/3.8 GHz | 350 MHz/1.1 GHz | 35W |
| Core i3-10100 | 4/8 | 3.6 GHz/4.3 GHz | 350 MHz/1.1 GHz | 65W |
Measuring 7.6″ as its longest spot and weighing about 3.3 pounds, the Lenovo IdeaCentre Mini 5i may not be as small as some other recent compact computers. But with support for up to a 65W processor, this thing should be able to run circles around smaller systems like the Chuwi LarkBox or Intel Frost Canyon NUC.
The IdeaCentre Mini 5i also has a decent range of ports including:
- 1 x USB 3.1 Type-C
- 5 x USB 3.1 Type-A
- 1 x HDMI
- 1 x Ethernet
- 1 x 3.5mm mic/audio combo
Lenovo also equips the system with a wireless card featuring 2×2 WiFi 6 and Bluetooth 5.0, and the company will offer DDR4 memory options ranging from 4GB to 32GB and storage options ranging from 128GB to 512GB of solid state storage and/or 1TB or 2TB of hard drive storage.
I’ve been looking for a computer just like this with internal drive bays! houray!
Looking at the images… am i seing a Mini ethernet port on the back? looks about the size of a USB-2 port! weird!
It’s not a photo, it is a render.
And someone has stuffed it up, they tried to make the bottom side of the Ethernet port in line with the bottom side of the other ports. Either it is actually lower, or it is positioned higher and the logo of the ethernet is positioned on the bottom and out of line with the other port’s logos.
@Grant
Yeah, I don’t get the ThunderBolt 3 shyness. Unfortunately AMD can (and should) add ThunderBolt 4 to the Ryzen 5000 and 6000 series, but they won’t. They’re known to cut corners, and that’s the first to go. Once AMD feels like they can’t make any meaningful improvements from one-gen to the next, then they’ll try adding features users have been requesting.
In the meantime, OEMs/ODMs they do have a solution. If they can’t implement USB 4.0 (which is slightly inferior to TB3 and TB4), they can design their device internals by having a mini-PCie port inside. Just for Laptops, Mini PCs, and All-in-Ones, a x4 port would suffice for most people’s needs. But yeah it would be a little limiting for external GPUs, but that’s the same case with TB3 ports anyways.
The lack of Thunderbolt is awfully disappointing. Thats really the only thing that would convince me to go Intel right now.
The Asrock DeskMini X300 looks like a better buy with support for the 65w AMD Ryzen 4000 CPUs, and two hard drive bays.
The Ryzen 7 Pro 4750G scores a Passmark score of 20,600 on average. The Core i7-10700T scores a Passmark score around 12,000. The two CPUs are priced identically.
The 65w non-T version of that i7 would be a more fair comparison with a 17,000 Passmark score, but since the Lenovo doesn’t support it, I’m inclined to say I’d go for the Asrock with better CPU support.