ThinkStation P340 Tiny – A First Look

Many of you know that I am a big fan of Lenovo products. I belong to a group sponsored by Lenovo called Lenovo Insiders that spreads the word about Lenovo. However, I never pull any punches and have never been reluctant to be brutally honest when necessary. But none of that really matters today as the product I want to talk about I purchased with my own money. I am upgrading my primary system from one ThinkStation to another.

For the last several years, I have been running a ThinkStation P320 Tiny. A unit that I also bought with my own money. That system is now out of warranty, and while it has plenty of life left, I decided to upgrade. I have another use for the P320 so I'm not throwing anything away. And frankly, my one grip about the P320 Tiny is that fan noise can be a bit much. That has sometimes been an issue when recording my Pluralsight courses. But, given the compact nature of the hardware that isn't too surprising. I was hoping that the next generation had a better solution for the fan so the P340 Tiny was ordered.

Hardware

I ordered a unit with the Intel i9 processor with vPro, 8GB of RAM, a 256GB NVMe drive, and an NVIDIA Quadro P1000 video card.

This gives me 4 mini display ports which are driving 2 27" ThinkVision monitors, which I've been using for awhile. I love that these units come with a full Ethernet port along with plenty of other ports.

But I did make one major goof in my ordering. My plan was to use the Ethernet port so I didn't pay attention to the WiFi upgrade that was offered. It turns out that if you want to use Bluetooth devices, which I did, you need to order the WiFi adapter. I didn't pay close enough attention to this detail. I ordered an adapter after the fact but it didn't include all of the necessary parts and I'm still fighting this issue. If you intend on using Bluetooth, order the 802.11ax WiFi card.

Since I'm footing the bill, I try to save some money where I can. I knew I wanted more memory and another drive but I decided to handle these upgrades myself. I ordered a 64GB memory upgrade and a 1TB NVMe drive from Crucial.com.

I put together a short video intro to the device which also shows you how to open up the unit to upgrade it.

Initial Setup

The P340 shipped with Windows 10 1909. I went through the usual Window 10 upgrade process to bring the unit up to speed. I also used the terrific Lenovo Vantage tools to update drivers and the BIOS. That was pretty easy. Although I was disappointed to not get the Windows 10 2004 upgrade. Instead I got the message about some incompatibility. This is an issue that many people have experienced with the 2004 update. Eventually, the upgrade magically became available. And since then I've also installed the 20H2 update with no issue.

I used Dropbox and OneDrive so restoring files was pretty easy. While I was waiting, I built a list of applications that I could install using the winget package manager from Microsoft.

Get-Content c:\scripts\apps.txt | foreach { winget install -e $_}

First Impressions

I've been using the ThinkStation P340 Tiny for a few weeks and the only regret is that I wish I hadn't overlooked with WiFi/Bluetooth adapter. I have been able to make do but it isn't what I was hoping for. I love having 64GB of RAM as now I can run my virtual machines with increased resources. The i9 is awesome to look at, although I probably don't really need the vPro features.

I had hoped that my video rendering in Camtasia might be a bit faster between the memory and CPU but so far I haven't noticed that much of an improvement.

However, my concern about fan noise has definitely been addressed. In the older P320 Tiny, the fan would kick in even under what I though were light loads. I know this is nothing more than an unfortunate side-effect of the tiny form factor. The new P340 Tiny is much quieter, and I'm not getting the pseudo-random fan noises. If I push the workstation, fan levels will increase, but so far this has been a very worthwhile upgrade.

Overall, I love this unit. I ran the UserBenchmark tool which generally gave the workstation good marks. The one exception is the NVIDIA Quadro P1000 card. This card doesn't benchmark and brings the overall score down. But from what I can tell the video benchmark looks gaming-centric. I have no issues with my 4K dual monitor setup or my typical work. I am not a gamer and obviously I didn't buy this as a gaming unit. I bought it as a professional workstation to produce content and run my business. By those metrics, I am quite happy.

If you have any questions about my setup or the ThinkStation P340, please feel free to leave a comment.