Lenovo ThinkCentre M93p review

Mini PCs aren’t just well suited to the home; they’re also a great way to save space in the office. The ThinkCentre M93p is one of Lenovo’s latest business-focussed mini PCs, and this high-powered system comes with almost everything you need to get started in the box. All you need is a monitor, as the M93p comes with its own wired mouse and keyboard. Some models also come with an external DVD rewriter that doubles up as a VESA mount, but at the time of writing this is only available with the Core i5 model rather than the Core i3 or Core i7 specifications.

Our review sample came with a quad core 2GHz Intel Core i7-4765T processor and 4GB of RAM. It’s not the fastest quad-core processor we’ve seen in a mini PC, but its overall score of 74 in our multimedia benchmarks show this PC is certainly capable of handling demanding office and media software. It also coped particularly well with the multitasking section of our benchmarks, but the relatively small amount of memory means running a Windows-based virtual machine may be a problem. You’re stuck with this specification, as the PC is sealed shut.

The M93p’s integrated Intel HD Graphics 4600 is reasonably capable in 3D games. It was able to run the laptop version of our Dirt Showdown test, which we run at 1,280×720, High detail and 4x anti-aliasing, at an average frame rate of 19.4fps, so you’ll be able to get a playable 30fps in this demanding racing title if you’re prepared to cut detail down to Low. The chip coped well with less demanding titles, too. In the platform game Trine 2 we were able to get a beautifully smooth 40.4fps on High quality with the anti-aliasing turned off at 1,280×720, although this dropped down to 23.4fps when we turned anti-aliasing up to High to smooth off the jagged edges in the graphics.

The PC isn’t quite fast enough to handle games at 1,920×1,080, as it only just managed 18.8fps in Dirt Showdown at Low detail with 4x anti-aliasing, and 19.3fps in Trine 2 with Low detail and the anti-aliasing turned off. This was slower than we were expecting, as we saw better results from the very similar chip in the Chillblast Fusion Vacuum Mini 3, but we suspect the chip is suffering from the ThinkCentre M93p’s small case and relative lack of cooling.