this system might be one of the best options for a versatile Home Server that I've looked at on this channel this isn't because it's super powerful efficient or even affordable although with current eBay prices I do think it's a great value the real strength of this system lies in its extensive features and options which are often missing in other desktop systems plus it's a Gateway into a modern server platform that doesn't cost you an arm and a leg so let's go check it out [Music] if you're looking for a Home Server I really think a system like this could be a fantastic deal but speaking of deals make sure you don't miss out on the prime Day discounts on the nexo lineup of products from ug green the sponsor of today's video Prime day is a fantastic chance to snag some great udream products whether for yourself or as gifts for friends and family if you're like me and often struggle with birthday gift ideas a highquality charger or power bank is something anyone will enjoy I actually 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guess on Prime day this is the Lenovo thinkstation p520 A Workstation first announced back in 2017 these high-end systems would have originally sold for well over $11,000 but I was able to pick this one up for just $200 on eBay now I get why many of you would want to avoid buying something from Lenovo even secondhand but there are actually a lot of compelling reasons to pick up a system like this for an affordable Home Server before diving into all of that though I just wanted to make sure the system worked as expected for some reason I was expecting it to be much bigger but it was fairly compact it took my dumb brain a bit to figure out how to get the side panel off but I eventually got it open the system doesn't come with a graphics adapter so I added an Nvidia T1000 just to test things out and after a minute or two I got a post screen and then was in the Bios where I could confirm the specs of the system this think station p520 came with an Intel xon W 2135 a skylight server CPU with six scores 12 threads and base and turbo frequencies of 3.7 and 4.5 GHz respectively a six Corp Skylight chip might not seem all that impressive but because this chip was designed for the server or workstation verticals rather than the desktop it opens up a lot of features you won't get in lower-end systems for example while the system I bought came with 64 gigs of ddr4 registered ECC memory they can actually be upgraded to 512 GB and also supports quad Channel memory everything is powered by a 900 W 80 plus Platinum power supply it is a proprietary design that slots into the motherboard with headers not only for SATA power but also to PCI power connectors for things like graphics cards the external I/O is pretty limited with just a few USB ports as well as PS2 ports a single gigabit Nick and some audio jacks internally though it's a completely different story first there are two 3 and 1 half in Drive trays at the bottom but supposedly some units could optionally have two more in the empty space next to it there are also two Flex Bays or really just 5 and a/4 in Bay where once again you could have optionally purchased mounts for two more hard drives since there was the possibility of six hard drives there are seven SATA ports on the motherboard and thanks to the onboard Intel SATA controller these can be configured in Hardware raid there's also two gen 3 nvme sockets behind this fancy heat SN Gizmo and these could also be configured in raid using Intel v-rock but you have to purchase a hardware license module to do so and I definitely didn't I mentioned earlier that because this system is built around a server class CPU it comes with a multitude of useful features one of these is the 48 PCI Lanes Which is far more than you could expect with a desktop chip this provides you a lot more expandability you already have the two nvme sockets which each use four lanes then there are two by6 PCI slots which can each deliver 75 watts of power as well as a by8 slot which can deliver 25 watts there's also two more by4 slots that are each running off the PCH rather than the CPU you also get this other really weird slot which sort of looks like a PC slot but not really I'm not really I'm just kidding so many of you are already aggressively typing in the comments but yeah this does have a standard PCI slot which might seem a bit weird but in a workstation system it kind of makes sense I'm sure there are a plethora of Niche use cases where someone needs access to some old piece of Hardware to get a job done the p520 has a lot of pcie lanes but also allows for pcie bifurcation on the 2x6 slots this means you can sort of chop up those slots into 2x8 connections or 4x4 connections which can be incredibly helpful if you're I don't know wanting to add four nvme drives into a single pcie slot while just having a single gigabit Nick might seem a bit lame this Nick the i219 LM is a bit special it allows for this system to use Intel's AMT which is their Remote Management platform this makes it possible to access the system remotely so yeah there's a lot to like about a system with all of these features but I already know what many of you are thinking this is made by Lenovo and full of proprietary crap and yeah you're right it uses a non standard motherboard power supply and case making repair and upgrade options much more limited you'll also run into some weird things like for example not having standard USB two headers on the motherboard which I learned the hard way in my last video where I looked at a lovo thing station while these quirks can be annoying they can also be helpful like for example when swapping components or cleaning out this system other than the motherboard which was screwed in like you would expect every single other component was removed with some sort of toolless latch lever or button I had the system completely disassembled in just a couple of minutes I dusted off everything outside but it's currently July in Oklahoma so I didn't take the time to set up my camera the system wasn't too dirty but I still just wiped everything down a bit to try to make it look a little bit better the only issue I ran into when trying to clean things up was when I attempted to remove the CPU Cooler it was held on with some sort of oddly sized Phillips head screws that were screwed on way too tight and I struggled to find a driver that could get enough torque without slipping when trying a flathead bit I chipped off the tip of one of my LTT screwdriver bits I eventually switched to a nut driver and thought I was going to break my iFix screwdriver but managed to finally get it Loose I immediately regretted doing so though because it was apparent that someone had very recently swapped the thermal paste probably whoever it was that screwed on that heat sing so tight putting everything back together was a breeze and frankly sliding all the components back into place was rather satisfying now obviously I would have preferred that Lenovo just used standard components here to make these systems easier to maintain however even with all of the proprietary junk it's still a machine designed for businesses and professionals offering useful features and some opportunities for expansions and upgrades so maybe this is still a good deal the only way to tell though is to test it out now I think the best use case for this in 2024 is as a Home Server probably running a hypervisor like proxmox with multiple virtual machines and containers but I could also maybe see this as a useful budget workstation I mean to be fair it is a b station after all I also wanted to be able to run cine bench for some quick comparisons so I installed Windows 11 I already had the GPU installed from earlier but I also dropped in a 10 GB SFP Plus card from 10tech Once I installed the drivers from Intel's website I was able to get solid 10 GB speeds when transferring files to and from my Nas I also gave my Thunderbolt add-in card another shot I was hoping that unlike in my recent p330 video that it would work thanks to the pcie power however that didn't seem to work and I imagine if you really want Thunderbolt you'd have to just go ahead and buy lenovo's specific add-in card I do all of my video editing into Vinci resolve studio so I gave that a quick go when navigating a 4K project playback was pretty smooth but like in previous videos most of the limitations seemed to be with the Nvidia T1000 I probably need to get a better GPU for testing Sorry the T1000 also seemed to be the limitation with the 4K render which took a little over an hour and 20 minutes that was just a bit faster than the Lenovo P3 30 with an i78700 and the T1000 I imagine if you paired a beier GPU with the Zeon W 2135 and the 64 gigs of RAM this will make for a really solid video editing workstation as per usual I also ran cinebench R23 for some quick CPU performance comparisons here the Zeon W 2135 managed a score of 8413 in the multi-threaded test and 1161 in the single threaded test I always like to compare results from a few different systems just to get a ballpark understand of how the CPU Stacks up I already mentioned the Lenovo p330 with an i78700 which managed to slightly Edge out the Zeon and single threaded performance but fell behind in The multi-threaded Benchmark the closest competitor I could find from the data I have is actually this Intel Zeon e 2286 M that's in this Intel n compute unit I took a look at a while back that CPU when compared to the W 2135 managed to perform better in both benchmarks while drawing significantly less power that's fairly impressive for a mobile CPU released just 2 years later speaking of power the p520 Drew 170 Watts while running the cinebench R23 multi-threaded test and 43 Watts while sitting idle in Windows keep in mind though that the GPU is also adding to the power draw a bit and you could technically run this without a graphics card at all which I do test out here in a bit for the money the CPU performance and efficiency isn't terrible by any means but it definitely won't knock your socks off or anything there are many PCs these days that draw significantly less power that would completely smash this thing in terms of raw performance and you could probably find eighth or ninth gen Intel systems for less money that perform pretty similarly but the CPU performance wasn't why I found this machine so compelling if you're wanting to run a bunch of virtual machines and containers all on one system odds are CPU load isn't going to be the limiting factor in my experience RAM and pcie lanes are much more important for example on my proxmox server I rarely see the CPU load outside of single digit percentages but my RAM usage is typically much higher plus with potential for Remote Management features like PCI bation and the potential for more storage space this could be a great all-in-one Home Server or a serious addition to an existing home lab so that's why next I installed proxmox since I could easily access everything I needed over SSH or through the web browser I technically didn't need the GPU anymore so I tried out running the system without it to see how that improved power consumption after removing the GPU the system posted but not without complaining about it without the graphics card power dropped to around 32 watts at idle in proxmox I tried changing the CPU scaling Governor to power save but that basically made no difference still 32 watts isn't terrible and realistically if you're buying one of these with the intention of loading it up with SFP plus cards graphics cards or a bunch of hard drives or ssds 30 Watts might not really be that big of the deal I could have started spinning up containers or VMS using the boot drive but why not take advantage of all of those PCI slots to do that I picked up one of these cheap quad nvme adapters off of Amazon and grabbed four 1 TB nvme ssds after getting all four Drive screwed into the card I dropped it into one of the pcie slots specifically one of the by6 slots as those are the ones that support bifurcation in the UEFI setup menu I navigated to the settings for Slot 4 and then enabled the buy4 by a option in proxmox all four drives showed up so I set them up in a RAID 10 ZFS pool obviously with that we get the benefit here of some redundancy and 2 tabt of usable capacity but I was also hoping to get a bit more performance to compare the ZFS pool with the single nvme boot SSD I ran a very primitive test with two identical Debian lxc containers but with one running off of the boot drive and the other off of the ZFS pool then I ran a few quick fio benchmarks to get an idea of how each handled sequential and random reads and rights the first two tests looked at sequential reads and sequential rights respectively and here I grafted the bandwidth performance in meytes per second while read performance was pretty much the same right performance was shockingly worse for the ZFS pool for random reads and rights I grafted iops instead of bandwidth here when looking at random reads the ZFS pool was slightly better but when you look at random rights well the ZFS pool only managed about half as many operations per second when compared to the single NV BB SSD I also ran a mixed test of random reads and wres and interestingly here the ZFS pool finally performed better now I'll be honest I don't really know what this proves this wasn't a very sophisticated test and I was using pretty cheap ssds all around but it's still cool that you can add four NVM ssds on just a single PCI slot thanks to bation since I had proxmox running I did a few other things I typically would like set up a container for crafting controller to run a Minecraft server run a virtual machine for home assist and even set up a virtual machine with auntu desktop with that I tested out passing through the Nvidia T1000 using PCI pass through after enabling IU adding the vfio modules blacklisting the drivers and then finally passing through the graphics card to the virtual machine everything worked pretty much perfectly I even managed to pull off some pretty hardcore cloud gaming okay not really but I was able to run sunshine to access the desktop remotely and do stuff like watch 4K YouTube videos without any hiccups I also set up jelly Fin and took advantage of ening for the hardware accelerated trans coating now one thing I hadn't used at this point were any of the seven SATA ports sadly my system doesn't have any of the optional Drive Bays either in the bottom of the case or in the 5 and 1/4 in bays and that seems to pretty much be the case with all the other listings I've come across on eBay fortunately though I'm a 3D printing guy now I found a model someone made online for a 2bay cage that fits the 520 and printed it with my bamboo lab x1c now this isn't really the best design in my opinion and it definitely didn't print perfectly but I was still able to screw in a couple of drives and then mounted in place with some adapters I wired everything up and booted the system to find the drives showing up in proxmox I created a traz scale instance and then passed through the S controller so that traz could access the drives directly and as with just about everything so far when running proxmox on this system it just worked without any issues I had a virtual true as instance with 10 GB just working flawlessly now I only set up four drives but remember that this case also has those two 5 and 1/4 inch Bays those could easily be populated with something like this IC doc Drive cage to add two or three more drives if you don't want to go with the 3D printing route or I guess if you just want more than four drives as I mentioned earlier this does support Intel's AMT for Remote Management you do have to do a bit of configuration in the Bios and then run something like mesh Commander to actually connect to it sadly mesh Commander is no longer being supported but it still seems to mostly work in my experience I keep a Docker container for mesh Commander for whenever I need it so I hopped into that and connected to the p520 unlike with my previous experiences with AMT I wasn't able to get the KVM feature working but I was able to get a serial connection at least with the BIOS plus I was still able to power on or off the system remotely which is definitely helpful with all of these features it's hard for me not to think that this could be a really solid server with plenty of expansion and storage options as well as features you just can't get with consumer systems yeah the proprietary stuff is kind of a bummer but at the same time this system was made for professionals not consumers and because of that it does offer a lot more flexibility and features than you would get with non-server or non-w workstation systems from Lenovo and other oems also while the Skylake xon W lineup isn't new by any means it still seems to be in use with other platforms like ivybridge or all the way up to Broad zons you can get used CPUs for pennies on the dollar or honestly sometimes just pennies and you can pick up used super micro motherboards for these chips at decent prices however when looking for similar motherboards but for the Zeon w2100 series the cheapest one I could find would cost almost just as much as the entire Lenovo p520 and while the cost for these Skylight CPUs is coming down as the platform is getting retired more and more they still aren't cheap so while the Lenovo p520 is a very proprietary system it seems to me that this system or others like it is the cheapest way to buy into this platform and get all of the features it provides hopefully the cost of those CPUs will continue to drop more and more as more of them start flooding the market but if you're looking for a big performance boost now you can get up to an 18 core Zeon W 2195 for around $250 it seems with the p520 you can also upgrade to Cascade Lake w2200 series CPUs but it seems that these are still quite a bit more expensive if you're interested in the p520 or any other items I've used I'll try to have links for those down in the description some of which might be affiliate links that help support the channel there's also alternatives to the p520 from D HP that seem to be selling for pretty similar prices so maybe do some research on those as well I've really enjoyed my time with the Lenovo p520 and if it wasn't for the fact that I just built two tra servers it's possible that I would consider replacing one of those with this system and then just virtualizing trunow on it and then moving all my other proxmox stuff over because it seems like a very capable system even if it doesn't end up in my home lab I still had a lot of fun checking it out and I really hope you guys enjoyed this video as well if you did maybe like maybe subscribe maybe become a raid member that's about it for this one though so as always thank you guys so much for watching stay curious and I really can't wait to see you in the next one [Music]