I’m susceptible to suggestion sometimes.
On the server building discord, the Lenovo m710q came up as it does sometimes in discussions for its usefulness as a Plex transcode box and while I don’t need myself a Plex transcode box, I love that it’s a tiny computer and that just.
Ugh.
It gets me sometimes.
As me about the GA-3955u or the closely related m720q “Tiny” that’s my HTPC right now.
Briefly, went trolling around eBay looking at the market for the m710q and pricing and configurations ran the gamut. Skylake and Kaby Lake CPUs (6th and 7th generation) were present at a generalized range of costs between approximately 100 dollars and, well, and up. One sweet spot was about 145 for one sporting an i5-7500u, but another sweet spot was a different story.
For 65 dollars, someone had a quantity of 5 (at 65 each of course) m710q with… no details. It seems they were coming from a small business of some kind, and the seller knew nothing about them. They had corporate looking inventory stickers. I only could tell which CPU was inside by comparing Lenovo’s configuration tables with the “Pentium Inside” sticker visible in a photo.
It looked a little rough.
The seller couldn’t even confirm any internals or if they even functioned.
Yet at 65 dollars for a barebones 7th generation ultra small form factor? My offer was submitted.
What would I do with it? You know by now that I don’t know.
And, nervous at my impulsiveness, my offer was accepted and it was quickly shipped out.
Would it be functioning?
Would it even be in one piece? I wondered.
I had access to a spare power adapter, so that was a cost saved. I also had spare RAM and storage, so in a sense the price tag would rest at about 68 dollars total, if you’re willing to look at it that way. (I am).
The m710q arrived early, in questionable packaging – little more than a plastic bubble wrap wrapper. That was concerning but other than a little dent and a deformation of one of the onboard serial ports, it was fine. And almost racing my way down to the bench, for some reason, I installed a pre-loaded nvme drive and additional stick of RAM for good measure (already well versed from multiple re-configurations of my m720q) and it was up in running in—
No it wasn’t.
It would not recognize any boot device. Apparently it was configured only to network boot, which meant it had been a client for a server, I believe. No problem though, I’ll just jump into bios and—
Bios locked. With a password.
Well damn. I already knew this seller would know nothing about this, I just knew. My only chance was to reset the bios and hope that it wasn’t anything more deeply coded than that.
Had to resort to some shaky cam YouTube video to find the correct jumper to reset the BIOS – really just about the most awful cellphone video one could possibly produce – and the settings were miraculously all cleared and I could access everything, particularly showing the correct amount of RAM, confirming the low end Pentium G4560T, and indeed allowing boot from the onboard nvme drive (and an option for the second slot too, even though it was not so much as physically soldered onto the mainboard but hey).
With a little bit of configuration hesitation, the m710q booted right into Windows 10 and set about updating itself.
My gamble on a cheap ultra small format machine paid off.
Don’t know what to do with it – maybe a Parsec client or something – but I just kinda like the fact that it worked out.
I went back to see if any more were available but the rest had sold too. Ah well.
As a note, I threw in a spare, cheap-almost-throwaway m.2 wifi/bluetooth card just because but I am well aware that there is no antenna included without a stock card and the chassis is, of course, metal, so range is atrocious. But it’s okay, because I just needed to grab drivers and knew it would be terrible. Confused though that I’m only getting wifi 5 Ghz and no 2.4 Ghz. I really would have expected it’d be the other way around.
This Lenovo m710q is an ultra small format desktop PC based on an Intel Pentium G4560T (2 core/4 thread, 35 watt TDP) and is indeed socketed so it could be replaced. It came with 4 GB DDR4-2400 MHz RAM to which I added an 8 GB stick just because I could. I threw in a spare 256 GB nvme (Samsung branded) that already had a relatively clean installation of Windows 10 on it. And for an ultra small, or really any basic modern system, that’s about it. I did install that oddball Wifi/BT card, model unknown, and it’s behaving strangely but no harm done. And there’s room for a 2.5 inch format storage device still available. As a bonus of sorts, displays are handled by twin DisplayPorts and six total USB 3.0 ports are onboard, with gigabit ethernet. The system is powered by an external brick (shakes fist at sky) with Lenovo’s traditional square connector (no particular feelings) which basically dictates a 65 watt maximum power draw (I assume give or take).