I bought a P520 Brickstation in early 2023 and it came with a W-2135, 32GB of Ram, and a 900W power supply all for $180. I purchased a used GTX 1070 OC for about $100 and transferred my Sata drives over from my Z230 SFF, never had a Lenovo tower before but I always loved their Brickpads so I chose this machine over an HP Z platform. It was a little different to go from a regular desktop to a proper workstation, however, it's a literal huge upgrade from my old PC that had an E3-1225 V3 and a GT 1030. Mostly just web browse and casually play Fallout 4 and Witcher 3 on it, occasionally I render audio and video. I would be able to run Fallout 4 on 1080p ultra at about 60fps if I didn't have 600+ mods installed.
hi. can you please check if the fans pin are regular connectors? I want one too but I want to replace all OEM fans with Noctua fans. I sometimes do audio work so fan noise is a no for me. thank you!
Been running one of these for a few months now as Gaming rig with a RTX 2070, 64Gb Quad Channel Ram, 2666mhz, Huge upgrade from my HP z640. Im sure you will see a ton of these being used in the future best bang for your buck right now.
Yeah these are really good machines and there are some sweet deals for them! I am really happy with it and I will be keeping it a long time. I am about ready to do some upgrades on it and I’m really excited! I imagine in 5-6 years the new Lenovo thinkstations releasing today will hopefully be pretty affordable in the next half decade.
@@NatesZoneneed some advice. A 8 core xeon 3.7ghz Lenovo p520 caught my eye on eBay it's cheap 250$ refurbished though because the PSU has dual 6 plus 2 pin for higher end gpu. Do you know of other workstation psu that have that dual 6 plus 2 pin. I was looking at a hp z440 but it's only dual 6 pin and don't want to melt my house down trying to use adapters with a rtx 4070.
I would just stick with the P520. It's a really solid machine. I've had better luck with lenovo than HP machines. And $250 is not bad for an 8 core system. @@Spencerwalker21
This is cool. I'm going to be running a P520 with RTX 2070, and right now 32gb ram but will put another 32gb soonish for quad channel. I have the 8 core 2145 so I'm excited to test it out. Waiting for all the parts to come in.
Just got a P520 in with W-2155, Plat 900W psu, 64g (2 sticks) ddr4 2133 for $289 delivered (includes tax and ship). Super clean inside the machine, well built, all power routes thru the board so I'm using a 6600xt instead of a 5700xt I was going to use. Wonder if anyones modded a Lenovo p520 psu for direct wired 8pins vs using it off the board... Mine has two six plus two pin connectors right off the board. Will check the board with a thermal imager under stress test to see if there's any heat in gpu power supply traces.
Nvidia doesn't officially support virtualization on any GTX/RTX devices below the 10 series, so that's why the 770 doesn't work OOB. There are a variety of tricks you can use (specifically in ESXI adding the flag to the VM that makes it hid the fact that it IS a VM from the OS) to get it to work, but their effectiveness varies wildly across different cards/setups.
Just got one with 128gb ecc memory for $300! Waiting for a graphics card & nvme. I want to use it for TruNAS Scale, or even-maybe-perhaps to introduce myself to the world of virtual servers! Also going to get another hard drive cage as I only have one. *THANKS FOR THE VIDEO!*
How is the power draw? I was really excited when i saw this build online but i was tempted by the power draw of the cpu, up to 140w! Could you share me your experience on the power draw from the cpu, from daily task like watching youtube, email to gaming like triple AAA games. Really appreciated!!!
Well, I've done a lot of upgrades to this machine since I did this video. I covered the upgrades in newer videos. Here's the playlist I made for this computer: ruclips.net/p/PL2vRMpUqEqs06UirnEGZiYD4UVF2q_WJG&si=jNAP06_rijfGbAqj As for power draw it's pretty efficient. Considering I went overkill with the upgraded components it's not that bad. I currently use the computer as a hypervisor running many virtual machines under ESXI 8.0. Since I'm running many virtual machines the power draw will be higher. But the Idle power draw is 125 watts with a 10 Core / 20 Thread CPU, 256GB of ECC RAM, and a GTX 1070 GPU & an RTX 2060 6GB GPU all running 24/7. I don't play AAA Games but I was running 3 4K RUclips videos, Minecraft on high settings, discord, parsec, and a few other apps and the power usage was 180 watts system-wide. Not bad IMO for such a powerful machine. I have two gaming VMs running 24/7 each one has its own dedicated GPU. I'm also running multiple Linux VMs for tinkering and testing purposes. Hope this helps!! Thanks for watching! :-)
I paid $201 Usd for it with tax and shipping. Here’s where I bought mine from: www.ebay.com/itm/234898419579?mkcid=16&mkevt=1&mkrid=711-127632-2357-0&ssspo=OmBj6QZnQj2&sssrc=2349624&ssuid=zLErueh5T9e&var=&widget_ver=artemis&media=COPY
Just ordered one of these with a w-2145. I’m planning on putting the rx6900xt in there for some 4k gaming. What do you think about the stock Lenovo air coolers? You reckon they’ll be enough in that case?
Just got it. Ran into a snag. The 6900xt requires 3 x 8 pin power, but the pc only has 2. Think it would be safe to use SATa to 8 pin adapter for the last one 🫣? I’ve heard stories…
@@Folk661 Well I’m not certain that would be good. The maximum power that can go through a sata to 8 pin is 54 watts. You could buy a dual sata to 8 pin which would allow up to 108 watts of power.
Sound advice thanks! I ordered a dual cable, I’ll definitely be locking that clock in at default settings. It’s an MSI card that supports overclocking, and can draw an extra 50 watts, hence the extra 8 pin. Better safe than sorry.
Hi there, I am using P520 W-2135 :-) I found the TjM temperature is just 65C around.... it seems it can thermal throttle very easy... what is your temperature in CPU-Z stress test?? p.s. Seems P520 have two series, type 30BE and type 30BF, type 30BE is not able to upgrade to W-22xx series CPU.
Lenovo has another thing going for it. It has a decent PSREF database which tells you all you need to know about your machine, and they also keep really good maintenance manuals (google " hardware maintenance manual"). Great for these enterprise workstations making it into the wild.
@NatesZone i bought one of these and it has the w-2135 and 32gb of ram I also put a 1080ti in it. but when I try to game with it the games crash or get really low frames. Any suggestions? This is on a clean install of windows as well.
It could be a sign of a failing graphics card. The symptoms you described are exactly what two of my close friends went through this year with their graphics cards. Their games would run abnormally slow, and crash. It snowballed to the point where they couldn't run any graphically demanding applications. Also in the end stage, their drivers would refuse to install correctly. One of my friends had a 2-year-old AMD card die that way, and the other had a 7-year-old Nvidia card die very similarly to the AMD card.
No. The motherboard is a custom form factor and is not standard. It does not have a standard power plug design. You will either have to get power plug adapters or look for something else.
No thank you. I bought this machine because I wanted faster cpus than what the p500 offers. I do not care how many drive bays it has. This is strictly a virtualization server. Plus my unit has a 900 watt power supply whereas the p500 only has a 490 or 650 watt power supply.
Up to 6, and possibly 7. Four in the internal bays, there's an additional two bay kit you can install next to the existing two @ 4:30 you can see the opening for this at the front of the case. Then two with 5.25" trays in the front, you could increase it to 7 if you used an IcyBox-like thing to put 3 drives in the 2*5.25" bays in the front.
Anyone habe experience turning these workstations into gaming pcs. The Lenovo p520 caught my eye because the psu has dual 6 plus 2 pin so even a high end gpu like a 4070 rtx eill work great. Are there sny other workstations that have that dual 6 plus 2 pin psu. The z440 was a alternative i looked at but it and other dell t5810 ect all only havd dual 6 pin. Any help is greatly appreciated.
Just won an eBay auction yesterday. I'll be comparing it to my Ryzen 5 5600X system. Reply to me in a few weeks if i haven't posted another comment regarding my experience.
I bought a P520 Brickstation in early 2023 and casually play Fallout and Witcher 3 on it. It's going to be a little different from a desktop experience because this machine is a proper workstation, you'll have to get used to it at first. It takes about 45 seconds to boot and all of it is mostly proprietary, the basics are there but if you wanted to install a liquid cooler or something you might have more trouble than a standard custom build. However, it's fully capable of running games, I have a GTX 1070 and would be able to run Fallout and Witcher on 1080p ultra at about 60fps if I didn't have mods installed. If you get a P520 with the 900w PSU you should be able to use any 6+2 pin graphics card you like, these came with dual graphics and beastly cards like the RTX 8000.
Just to update, it was a little bit slower than my Ryzen 5 5600X, but good enough to swap to it. Going from 16gb to 64gb memory is nice. As the other person said it's quite slow to startup, and also the fans are quite noisy during startup, but once it's up and running it's nice and quiet. Also I think it looks quite good, and plenty of USB ports.
@@doml8307 Dude that's awesome! I'm so happy for you! I'm sure you will be very happy with your new P520! Just one thing I have to say is unfortunately you need a dedicated Graphics card to get video out of the computer. I didn't realise that until I recieved the computer becasue I didn't do much reasearch. But happy computing! And thank you so much!! 😃
I bought a P520 Brickstation in early 2023 and it came with a W-2135, 32GB of Ram, and a 900W power supply all for $180. I purchased a used GTX 1070 OC for about $100 and transferred my Sata drives over from my Z230 SFF, never had a Lenovo tower before but I always loved their Brickpads so I chose this machine over an HP Z platform. It was a little different to go from a regular desktop to a proper workstation, however, it's a literal huge upgrade from my old PC that had an E3-1225 V3 and a GT 1030. Mostly just web browse and casually play Fallout 4 and Witcher 3 on it, occasionally I render audio and video. I would be able to run Fallout 4 on 1080p ultra at about 60fps if I didn't have 600+ mods installed.
bought one off amazon for 139$, 32gb ram and 2135 . Added an 1tb m.2 drive and a rx580 and sent it off to the kids as a new gaming pc. So far so good.
hi. can you please check if the fans pin are regular connectors? I want one too but I want to replace all OEM fans with Noctua fans. I sometimes do audio work so fan noise is a no for me. thank you!
@@samb2166 They are. Should be good to go.
Been running one of these for a few months now as Gaming rig with a RTX 2070, 64Gb Quad Channel Ram, 2666mhz, Huge upgrade from my HP z640. Im sure you will see a ton of these being used in the future best bang for your buck right now.
Yeah these are really good machines and there are some sweet deals for them! I am really happy with it and I will be keeping it a long time. I am about ready to do some upgrades on it and I’m really excited! I imagine in 5-6 years the new Lenovo thinkstations releasing today will hopefully be pretty affordable in the next half decade.
@@NatesZoneneed some advice. A 8 core xeon 3.7ghz Lenovo p520 caught my eye on eBay it's cheap 250$ refurbished though because the PSU has dual 6 plus 2 pin for higher end gpu. Do you know of other workstation psu that have that dual 6 plus 2 pin. I was looking at a hp z440 but it's only dual 6 pin and don't want to melt my house down trying to use adapters with a rtx 4070.
I would just stick with the P520. It's a really solid machine. I've had better luck with lenovo than HP machines. And $250 is not bad for an 8 core system. @@Spencerwalker21
@@NatesZone thanks 👍 will do
This is cool. I'm going to be running a P520 with RTX 2070, and right now 32gb ram but will put another 32gb soonish for quad channel.
I have the 8 core 2145 so I'm excited to test it out. Waiting for all the parts to come in.
You can check if your ram is ECC by counting the number of chips on it. If it's divisible by 9 it's ECC.
That's the exact, except I have 64 gigs ram, coming tomorrow. I can't wait.
Awesome😃!
Just got a P520 in with W-2155, Plat 900W psu, 64g (2 sticks) ddr4 2133 for $289 delivered (includes tax and ship). Super clean inside the machine, well built, all power routes thru the board so I'm using a 6600xt instead of a 5700xt I was going to use. Wonder if anyones modded a Lenovo p520 psu for direct wired 8pins vs using it off the board... Mine has two six plus two pin connectors right off the board. Will check the board with a thermal imager under stress test to see if there's any heat in gpu power supply traces.
Hi. do you know if you can upgrade the fans with noctua fans? I want to get one but I'll need to upgrade all fans into quieter ones. thank you!
Nvidia doesn't officially support virtualization on any GTX/RTX devices below the 10 series, so that's why the 770 doesn't work OOB. There are a variety of tricks you can use (specifically in ESXI adding the flag to the VM that makes it hid the fact that it IS a VM from the OS) to get it to work, but their effectiveness varies wildly across different cards/setups.
Just got one with 128gb ecc memory for $300! Waiting for a graphics card & nvme. I want to use it for TruNAS Scale, or even-maybe-perhaps to introduce myself to the world of virtual servers! Also going to get another hard drive cage as I only have one.
*THANKS FOR THE VIDEO!*
From ebay ?
@@MousaabLITIM-qd2sf Yes
How is the power draw? I was really excited when i saw this build online but i was tempted by the power draw of the cpu, up to 140w! Could you share me your experience on the power draw from the cpu, from daily task like watching youtube, email to gaming like triple AAA games. Really appreciated!!!
Well, I've done a lot of upgrades to this machine since I did this video. I covered the upgrades in newer videos. Here's the playlist I made for this computer: ruclips.net/p/PL2vRMpUqEqs06UirnEGZiYD4UVF2q_WJG&si=jNAP06_rijfGbAqj As for power draw it's pretty efficient. Considering I went overkill with the upgraded components it's not that bad. I currently use the computer as a hypervisor running many virtual machines under ESXI 8.0. Since I'm running many virtual machines the power draw will be higher. But the Idle power draw is 125 watts with a 10 Core / 20 Thread CPU, 256GB of ECC RAM, and a GTX 1070 GPU & an RTX 2060 6GB GPU all running 24/7. I don't play AAA Games but I was running 3 4K RUclips videos, Minecraft on high settings, discord, parsec, and a few other apps and the power usage was 180 watts system-wide. Not bad IMO for such a powerful machine. I have two gaming VMs running 24/7 each one has its own dedicated GPU. I'm also running multiple Linux VMs for tinkering and testing purposes. Hope this helps!! Thanks for watching! :-)
@@NatesZone thanks for your response, I'm going to watch your videos further for the p520 system then :))
Great video. Does this machine support m.2 nvme drives on the motherboard?
Yes it does. There are 2 slots for nvme drives.
I have had the 500 and 510's The are really nice Workstation etc etc machines !! :)
Yeah it’s been a great machine so far! Plenty fast!
How much does it cost? I'm considering buying a used one for my new home server. Same cpu, with 64G ram, P1000 graphic card, about 400USD.
I paid $201 Usd for it with tax and shipping. Here’s where I bought mine from: www.ebay.com/itm/234898419579?mkcid=16&mkevt=1&mkrid=711-127632-2357-0&ssspo=OmBj6QZnQj2&sssrc=2349624&ssuid=zLErueh5T9e&var=&widget_ver=artemis&media=COPY
Just ordered one of these with a w-2145. I’m planning on putting the rx6900xt in there for some 4k gaming. What do you think about the stock Lenovo air coolers? You reckon they’ll be enough in that case?
Cool! I think the stock fans are good enough.
Just got it. Ran into a snag. The 6900xt requires 3 x 8 pin power, but the pc only has 2. Think it would be safe to use SATa to 8 pin adapter for the last one 🫣? I’ve heard stories…
@@Folk661 Well I’m not certain that would be good. The maximum power that can go through a sata to 8 pin is 54 watts. You could buy a dual sata to 8 pin which would allow up to 108 watts of power.
Sound advice thanks! I ordered a dual cable, I’ll definitely be locking that clock in at default settings. It’s an MSI card that supports overclocking, and can draw an extra 50 watts, hence the extra 8 pin. Better safe than sorry.
Hi there, I am using P520 W-2135 :-) I found the TjM temperature is just 65C around.... it seems it can thermal throttle very easy... what is your temperature in CPU-Z stress test?? p.s. Seems P520 have two series, type 30BE and type 30BF, type 30BE is not able to upgrade to W-22xx series CPU.
Get a nocturna cooler
Can you undervolt with throttlestop?
Lenovo has another thing going for it. It has a decent PSREF database which tells you all you need to know about your machine, and they also keep really good maintenance manuals (google " hardware maintenance manual"). Great for these enterprise workstations making it into the wild.
Awesome! Thanks for the info! I am really impressed with the quality of this machine and it has been super reliable. And its fast!
@NatesZone i bought one of these and it has the w-2135 and 32gb of ram I also put a 1080ti in it. but when I try to game with it the games crash or get really low frames. Any suggestions? This is on a clean install of windows as well.
It could be a sign of a failing graphics card. The symptoms you described are exactly what two of my close friends went through this year with their graphics cards. Their games would run abnormally slow, and crash. It snowballed to the point where they couldn't run any graphically demanding applications. Also in the end stage, their drivers would refuse to install correctly. One of my friends had a 2-year-old AMD card die that way, and the other had a 7-year-old Nvidia card die very similarly to the AMD card.
Hi! Do you know if this only works with ecc ram? I just got one online and it wont detect my 8gb unb ddr4 2666 cl19 ram?
Yeah, it only works with ecc ram.
Is the motherboard ATX and compatible with a standart ATX powersupply?
No. The motherboard is a custom form factor and is not standard. It does not have a standard power plug design. You will either have to get power plug adapters or look for something else.
Any luck on case swapping it?
Does the PSU seem extremely loud to you? I have one of these and it is audible from a different room. Any fix work for you guys?
No. My machine is really quiet. It’s only a little loud when it boots. Perhaps the fan is going bad?
you should have gotten the p500 instead, its got more drive bays, but requires a flex bay module to boot nvme
No thank you. I bought this machine because I wanted faster cpus than what the p500 offers. I do not care how many drive bays it has. This is strictly a virtualization server. Plus my unit has a 900 watt power supply whereas the p500 only has a 490 or 650 watt power supply.
Yeah more drive bays does not just the lower performance
Hello. Would you know what speeds your getting from the onboard nvme drives ?
It’s the gen 3 speed.
how noisy is it?
It's only a little noisy when it starts up. Otherwise it is pretty quiet all the time.
How many 3.5" drives does the case support?
Up to 6, and possibly 7. Four in the internal bays, there's an additional two bay kit you can install next to the existing two @ 4:30 you can see the opening for this at the front of the case. Then two with 5.25" trays in the front, you could increase it to 7 if you used an IcyBox-like thing to put 3 drives in the 2*5.25" bays in the front.
Thanks Bob!
@@bobcarpenter1551 ok thanks
@@MarloMitchell They are the same drive bays for the P620, I'm not sure why they are delisted on the site. The part number is 4XH0S69186
pretty sure you didnt install the nvme correctly, shouldnt make a difference, just pointing it out
He did it right. Idk what your talking about lol.
Anyone habe experience turning these workstations into gaming pcs. The Lenovo p520 caught my eye because the psu has dual 6 plus 2 pin so even a high end gpu like a 4070 rtx eill work great. Are there sny other workstations that have that dual 6 plus 2 pin psu. The z440 was a alternative i looked at but it and other dell t5810 ect all only havd dual 6 pin. Any help is greatly appreciated.
Just won an eBay auction yesterday. I'll be comparing it to my Ryzen 5 5600X system. Reply to me in a few weeks if i haven't posted another comment regarding my experience.
I bought a P520 Brickstation in early 2023 and casually play Fallout and Witcher 3 on it. It's going to be a little different from a desktop experience because this machine is a proper workstation, you'll have to get used to it at first. It takes about 45 seconds to boot and all of it is mostly proprietary, the basics are there but if you wanted to install a liquid cooler or something you might have more trouble than a standard custom build. However, it's fully capable of running games, I have a GTX 1070 and would be able to run Fallout and Witcher on 1080p ultra at about 60fps if I didn't have mods installed. If you get a P520 with the 900w PSU you should be able to use any 6+2 pin graphics card you like, these came with dual graphics and beastly cards like the RTX 8000.
Just to update, it was a little bit slower than my Ryzen 5 5600X, but good enough to swap to it. Going from 16gb to 64gb memory is nice.
As the other person said it's quite slow to startup, and also the fans are quite noisy during startup, but once it's up and running it's nice and quiet.
Also I think it looks quite good, and plenty of USB ports.
Poor poor side panel
Haha, I'm still mad at myself for dropping it. 😂 Live & learn!
@@NatesZone Haha, I plan on getting a P520 myself so I will try to keep the side panel safe, awesome video!
@@doml8307 Dude that's awesome! I'm so happy for you! I'm sure you will be very happy with your new P520! Just one thing I have to say is unfortunately you need a dedicated Graphics card to get video out of the computer. I didn't realise that until I recieved the computer becasue I didn't do much reasearch. But happy computing! And thank you so much!! 😃
@@NatesZone Yep, my plan is to throw a 2070 super into it and use it as a gaming/streaming machine! Love the content, keep it up!
@@NatesZone Yep, my plan is to throw a 2070 super into it and use it as a gaming/streaming machine! Love the content, keep it up!