Lenovo ThinkCentre 50q Gen 4 Black 2023

The Lenovo ThinkCentre 50q Gen 4 is a tiny, reliable office PC with a peppy Core i5 chip. Its biggest weakness is the stingy 8GB of RAM and small SSD. It's a solid buy for basic business tasks if you can snag it at a low price, but power users should look elsewhere.

That Core i5-13420H chip is the star here, landing in the 40th percentile for CPUs. It's solid for business multitasking and feels snappy in day-to-day use. But the rest of the specs are a real mixed bag. The 8GB of RAM is a major bottleneck, sitting in the 8th percentile, which means you'll feel the pinch with too many browser tabs open. The 256GB SSD is also on the small side, and the integrated Intel UHD graphics are strictly for display output, not gaming. It scored an 8.7 out of 100 for gaming, so don't even think about it.

Stacked against something like the Apple Mac mini M4, the ThinkCentre feels like a different species. The Mac mini is a performance beast in a small package, while the 50q is a pure productivity workhorse that runs Windows 11 Pro. It's not trying to compete with gaming rigs like the HP Omen 45L or ASUS ROG G700, and it would get absolutely smoked in that arena. Its real competition is other business mini PCs like the Dell OptiPlex Micro line, where it holds its own on CPU power but often falls behind on base RAM and storage.

Pricing for this thing is all over the map, with a wild spread from $705 to over $17,000 across vendors. That high end is clearly for some maxed-out config, but for the base model we're looking at, you shouldn't be paying anywhere near four figures. At around that $705 mark, it's a fair deal for a reliable, tiny office PC from a major brand. Just know that you'll probably want to factor in the cost of a RAM upgrade sooner rather than later.

The Lenovo ThinkCentre 50q Gen 4 is a tiny desktop that knows exactly what it is, and more importantly, what it isn't. It's a no-nonsense office machine built to disappear behind a monitor or sit quietly on a cramped desk. With a 13th Gen Intel Core i5 and a super compact chassis, it handles spreadsheets, web apps, and video calls without breaking a sweat. Just don't expect it to do much else.

If you need to do any gaming, video editing, or run memory-hungry applications, just walk away. The integrated graphics are one of the weakest we've seen for anything beyond desktop use, and 8GB of RAM will have you pulling your hair out. Look at a mini PC with a dedicated GPU or at least 16GB of RAM.

This is a purpose-built machine for a specific job: running a cash register, powering a digital sign, or serving as a no-fuss office terminal. If that's your world, the ThinkCentre 50q Gen 4 is a quiet, reliable, and space-saving champ. Just buy the RAM upgrade.