Lenovo ThinkStation P360 Ultra packs 16 CPU cores and a GPU into a tiny desktop

You’ll never find a high-end workstation or gaming PC the same size as the original Intel NUC line, but there are options if you want a tiny yet high-end desktop. One of them is Lenovo’s new ThinkStation P360 Ultra, a mini desktop that houses 12th Gen Intel Alder Lake desktop processors, Nvidia RTX A2000 and A5000 GPUs with up to 16GB of RAM and amazing expandability in a small package that only fits 3.9 liters.

The ThinkStation has plenty of ports for a system of this size, with a total of seven DisplayPort outputs on the back (three full-size ports connected to the integrated Intel GPU and four mini DisplayPorts connected to a dedicated GPU), one 2.5Gb/s Ethernet port. sec., another 1Gb/s Ethernet port, and four rear USB-A ports on the back. On the front, you’ll find a headphone jack, another USB-A port, and a pair of Thunderbolt 4 ports.

Internal extensibility is also good. Your ThinkStation supports two M.2 SSDs and one 2.5-inch HDD or SSD, as well as up to four DDR5 RAM modules. The 12GB RTX A2000 GPU variant should run somewhere between the RTX 3050 and RTX 3060, while the RTX A5000 mobile GPU should run like the laptop version of the RTX 3080 GPU. Lenovo offers Alder Lake processors from a quad-core Core i3 to a 16-core Core i9 (eight P-cores and eight E-cores – our processor reviews show the benefits of these smaller cores for workloads, which are well distributed across many processor cores).

The P360 is smaller than high-end mini PCs such as the Intel NUC 12 Extreme, which also uses 12th Gen Alder Lake processors with 16 cores – the NUC measures 14.1 x 7.4 x 4.7 inches and the ThinkStation is total 8.7×7.9×. 3.4 inches. But the NUC has the advantage of using a standard PCI Express slot with a GPU that can be upgraded after a couple of years, although its small size tends to limit you to physically smaller GPUs than you can use in a full-size desktop. or a larger mini-ITX PC. It looks like the ThinkStation uses removable GPU modules, but using a proprietary connector – the ability to upgrade in the future depends on

Be prepared to pay big bucks for the most powerful P360 Ultra configurations. The PC will retail for $1,299 later this month, but that configuration will likely include a quad-core Core i3 processor and integrated graphics. If that’s all you’re after, the P360 Ultra is actually a bit on the large side – the size of the system only gets impressive when you add dedicated graphics and a more powerful processor.

We also don’t know if (or how much) the P360 Ultra’s CPU or GPU will be limited by power or thermal limits – the maximum system power is 300W, which is less than a high-end desktop GPU like the RT 3080 or 3090 can consume. all by yourself. In other words, a larger system is still capable of allowing its components to run faster and longer.