Lenovo ThinkCentre M75q Gen 2 Raven Black

A shockingly good tiny PC ruined by a stingy 8GB of RAM. Buy it cheap, upgrade it yourself, and you'll have a killer little office machine.

The 4650GE is the star here. It's a 6-core, 12-thread chip that sits in the 36th percentile for CPUs in our database, which sounds mediocre until you realize it's sipping power in a chassis the size of a paperback. For office multitasking, it's snappy and responsive. The real surprise is the integrated Radeon Graphics landing in the 55th percentile. It's not a gaming rig, but it'll drive multiple 4K displays for productivity without choking. The letdown is the storage, sitting in a disappointing 19th percentile. A 256GB drive fills up fast, and the 8GB of RAM is a real weak spot at the 8th percentile, which will bottleneck this system long before the CPU does.

Stacked against the Apple Mac mini M4 Pro, the ThinkCentre gets absolutely demolished in raw performance and efficiency, but it costs a fraction of the price and runs Windows natively for legacy business apps. The HP OmniDesk M02-0144 is a more direct competitor in the budget business space, often shipping with similar specs but in a larger, less elegant tower. If you need a tiny Windows box for a kiosk, digital signage, or a basic office terminal, the Lenovo's form factor is the main draw. For anything more demanding, the ASUS ROG G700 or MSI Aegis Z2 are in a completely different league, but they're also massive gaming towers that cost way more.

The price on this thing is all over the map, with a wild spread from $530 to over $20,000 across vendors. The $530 entry point from Newegg is the only one that makes any sense, and even then, you have to factor in the cost of a RAM and SSD upgrade immediately. At that price, it's a decent barebones kit. Anything over $700 and you're getting fleeced. Just buy the base model, toss the 8GB stick, and drop in a 32GB kit and a 1TB NVMe drive yourself.

The Lenovo ThinkCentre M75q Gen 2 is a tiny desktop that punches above its weight class for office work, but the base configuration is a trap. The AMD Ryzen 5 PRO 4650GE is a surprisingly capable 6-core chip for a box this small, and it'll chew through spreadsheets and browser tabs without breaking a sweat. But the 8GB of RAM and 256GB SSD in this config are a real buzzkill. You're getting a solid engine stuffed into a go-kart with a thimble-sized gas tank. It's a great little machine if you know what you're getting into, but you'll need to budget for upgrades right out of the gate.

If you're looking for a plug-and-play PC that's ready to go for heavy multitasking or content creation, this isn't it. The 8GB of RAM will have you pulling your hair out. Go grab an Apple Mac mini M4 Pro if you have the budget, or a refurbished HP EliteDesk 800 Mini with 16GB of RAM if you want a similar form factor that's actually usable out of the box.

The Lenovo ThinkCentre M75q Gen 2 is a fantastic little office PC trapped in a terrible base configuration. Buy it only if you find it for under $550 and are comfortable cracking it open to upgrade the RAM and storage yourself. Once you do, it's a quiet, capable, and nearly invisible workhorse. If you're not willing to tinker, look elsewhere, because the out-of-the-box experience with 8GB of RAM is going to be a frustrating, stuttery mess.