Hello again,
Yes, I'm (not very) sorry I keep raising the Lenovo Mx20q series boxes, but in a central London flat they're a Godsend for home lab requirements.
I saw that the i9 9900T is a standard configuration for the M920q Tiny according to Lenovo. 8 cores with 16 threads would be great for virtualisation servers, with a very low power consumption at idle and it takes up basically no space, and fully loaded the Passmark is over 17,000 so this is quite a powerful box - my previous best was a M75-1q running a Ryzen 5 3400GE which is roughly half that. I see that the Ryzen 4xxx series is coming in the M75-2q for a nice speed boost but it will be a while before those appear on the secondary market.
In the meantime then the i9 9900T looks interesting, but it is reassuringly expensive at retail if indeed you can find it, so I went looking for alternative sources.
Step one, I *cough* "needed" a new M920q Tiny to try this out. I'm not particularly keen to pay full price on these, so eBay it is and I waited around a month until one came up with a Pentium Gold CPU (the lowest model). The starting price was more than I wanted (£250), so I waited. It didn't sell (bear in mind that eg M720qs are a hot commodity on eBay UK at the moment, going up around 20% in the last 3 months), so I waited and it was relisted. Again, £200, still more than I wanted - so, reader, again I waited. After a while the seller made an offer of £160, I counter-offered £150 ($200), and it has duly arrived - with 8 GB RAM and a 500GB SSD, which is fine, I have 2x 16GB SODIMMs and a spare NVME drive to add to it to start. The Tinys will support 64GB of RAM maximum.
Step two, online research leads me to believe that although the CPU TDP is shown as 35W these can draw up to 50W if allowed to do so. This model came with a standard 65W supply so I've ordered a 135W version just in case (about £20 ($28)).
Step three, the CPU. Not readily available to buy in the UK, as far as I can tell. Whenever you can't buy something through the usual channels, China is the next port of call and sure enough there's a plethora of sellers with deals on i9 9900Ts, but they are ES (engineering samples, see this super handy Russian chart) models, QQC0 and QQZ6. Although attractively priced (£180/$240 shipped) I had three concerns :
Yes, I'm (not very) sorry I keep raising the Lenovo Mx20q series boxes, but in a central London flat they're a Godsend for home lab requirements.
I saw that the i9 9900T is a standard configuration for the M920q Tiny according to Lenovo. 8 cores with 16 threads would be great for virtualisation servers, with a very low power consumption at idle and it takes up basically no space, and fully loaded the Passmark is over 17,000 so this is quite a powerful box - my previous best was a M75-1q running a Ryzen 5 3400GE which is roughly half that. I see that the Ryzen 4xxx series is coming in the M75-2q for a nice speed boost but it will be a while before those appear on the secondary market.
In the meantime then the i9 9900T looks interesting, but it is reassuringly expensive at retail if indeed you can find it, so I went looking for alternative sources.
Step one, I *cough* "needed" a new M920q Tiny to try this out. I'm not particularly keen to pay full price on these, so eBay it is and I waited around a month until one came up with a Pentium Gold CPU (the lowest model). The starting price was more than I wanted (£250), so I waited. It didn't sell (bear in mind that eg M720qs are a hot commodity on eBay UK at the moment, going up around 20% in the last 3 months), so I waited and it was relisted. Again, £200, still more than I wanted - so, reader, again I waited. After a while the seller made an offer of £160, I counter-offered £150 ($200), and it has duly arrived - with 8 GB RAM and a 500GB SSD, which is fine, I have 2x 16GB SODIMMs and a spare NVME drive to add to it to start. The Tinys will support 64GB of RAM maximum.
Step two, online research leads me to believe that although the CPU TDP is shown as 35W these can draw up to 50W if allowed to do so. This model came with a standard 65W supply so I've ordered a 135W version just in case (about £20 ($28)).
Step three, the CPU. Not readily available to buy in the UK, as far as I can tell. Whenever you can't buy something through the usual channels, China is the next port of call and sure enough there's a plethora of sellers with deals on i9 9900Ts, but they are ES (engineering samples, see this super handy Russian chart) models, QQC0 and QQZ6. Although attractively priced (£180/$240 shipped) I had three concerns :
- One, I am not 100% certain the Lenovo BIOS will be happy with an ES processor and it will almost certainly not have microcode fixes,
- Two, these ESes are etched as such and "Intel Confidential" on the heat spreader and strictly speaking never supposed to be sold, so - thrill of owning something illicit aside - a future buyer of my system may well look askance at it and make it hard(er) to get a fair price. ES chips also show up as Genuine Intel CPU 0000 <speed> ES in CPU-Z so may not be ideal for hypervisors trying to pass CPU info to the VMs, although I've not researched this.
- Finally, these ES versions are clocked 15-20% lower (1.7/3.8GHz) than retail chips (2.1/4.4GHz) which seems to negate much of the benefit of this whole exercise. I could just buy say an i7 8700T (6C/12T) for much the same performance and cost, and it would be actually officially supported.
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