Lenovo ThinkCentre M90t Gen 5 Raven Black 2024

A business brute with a monster CPU and ports for days, but don't even think about gaming on it. Buy it for work, not play.

The i7-14700 is the star here, landing in the 82nd percentile for CPUs in our database. That's a lot of processing muscle for a business desktop, and it chews through multitasking, large Excel files, and even light content creation without breaking a sweat. The integrated UHD 770 graphics are the obvious weak spot, sitting at the 36th percentile, so don't expect to do any real gaming or GPU-heavy rendering. The 16GB of DDR5 RAM is solid but middle-of-the-pack, and the 512GB NVMe SSD is about average for this class. What surprised us most is the port selection: 8 USB-A ports plus USB-C and HDMI 2.1 puts this in the 89th percentile, which is genuinely impressive for a business box.

Against the HP OMEN GT22-3080 and Dell Aurora DACT1250-7551BLK-PUS, the ThinkCentre M90t Gen 5 is a completely different animal. Those are gaming desktops with dedicated GPUs, and they'll run circles around this machine in any graphics workload. But if you don't need a GPU, the ThinkCentre's i7-14700 actually outclasses many gaming rigs on pure CPU performance. The Apple Mac Studio M4 Max is in another league entirely for creative work, but it's also a different price bracket and ecosystem. For pure business productivity and IT manageability, the ThinkCentre holds its own against anything in its class.

Here's where it gets interesting. US pricing sits around $2,109 to $2,202, but Canadian buyers are seeing a wild spread from CAD 2,363 to CAD 3,747 across just two listings. That's a CAD 1,384 gap for the same machine, which is frankly absurd. If you're in Canada, shop around and grab the lower-priced listing, because paying nearly CAD 3,750 for this spec is a bad deal. At the lower end of that range, you're getting a lot of CPU horsepower and enterprise-grade reliability for the money. At the high end, you're getting fleeced.

The Lenovo ThinkCentre M90t Gen 5 is a no-nonsense office workhorse that prioritizes reliability and expandability over flash. The headline here is that 20-core i7-14700, which is frankly overkill for most business tasks but gives this machine serious longevity. It's a big, chunky mid-tower with a DVD drive in 2024, which tells you exactly who this is for: IT departments and home office users who want a stable, serviceable PC that won't blink at a decade of spreadsheets, video calls, and the occasional demanding workload.

If you're looking for a gaming rig or anything that needs real graphics horsepower, this isn't it. Go grab an HP OMEN GT22-3080 or Dell Aurora instead. And if desk space is tight, the 8.28kg mid-tower footprint will annoy you daily, look at a small form factor option.

The ThinkCentre M90t Gen 5 is a purpose-built business machine that nails exactly what it sets out to do. It's fast, reliable, expandable, and loaded with ports. The weak integrated graphics and modest storage are real limitations, but they're not dealbreakers for the target audience. If you're outfitting an office or need a dependable home workstation that will last for years, this is a solid buy, especially if you can find it at the lower end of that Canadian price range.