Last Updated on April 19, 2021
This is a weekly blog looking at the Lenovo M93 Ultra Small Desktop PC running Linux.
For this week’s blog, we’ve run a variety of benchmarking tests on the Lenovo M93 together with four other systems to put the results into context.
All the tests use the Phoronix Test Suite, unless otherwise stated. For ease of reference, each system’s specifications are listed on every page. Together with the Lenovo M93 Ultra Small PC, we’ve run benchmarks on two Mini PCs from AWOW, the AK41 and the NYI3. We’ve also included a laptop from ASUS (UX305FA), and a Mini PC from Gigabyte (BXBT-1900). They are all low-power machines.
All the machines are running identical versions of software, and configured to ensure consistency between results. The Manjaro rolling distro is used.
Let’s kick off the benchmarks with some system tests.
$ phoronix-test-suite benchmark build-linux-kernel
Here’s benchmark results showing how long it takes to build the Linux kernel in a default configuration. The test uses all cores/threads of a PC, but it’s not the type of test where CPU cores run at 100%. A lot of the time, the compiler is waiting on other things like RAM and disk.
This test is won by the Lenovo M93 by a considerable margin, completing the kernel build in less than half the time of the ASUS laptop and AWOW machines. An impressive result for the Lenovo.
$ phoronix-test-suite benchmark encode-flac
The chart above summarizes benchmark results of converting a WAV file to the FLAC format, with 5 samples taken to ensure consistent results.
This is a good test of a system’s single-threaded processor performance, memory, and overall system performance. Again the Lenovo stands head and shoulders above the other machines under test. And remember that the Asus UX305FA laptop and AWOW NYI3 mini PC are only dual core.
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / System
Page 2 – Processor
Page 3 – Memory
Page 4 – Graphics
Page 5 – Disk
Complete list of articles in this series:
| Lenovo M93 Ultra Small Desktop PC | |
|---|---|
| Week 6 | Recording video using OBS Studio |
| Week 5 | We put the M93 through some light gaming |
| Week 4 | Multiple operating systems running on the Lenovo M93 |
| Week 3 | Video and audio are tested on the Lenovo machine |
| Week 2 | Benchmarking the Lenovo M93 Ultra Small PC with other low power machines |
| Week 1 | Introduction to the series including wiping Windows and installing Manjaro |
This blog is written on the Lenovo M93 Ultra Small Desktop PC.
| Lenovo M93 | AWOW AK41 | |
|---|---|---|
| Type | Tiny Desktop PC | Mini PC |
| Processor | Intel i5-4590T 2.00 GHz (Turbo 3.00 GHz) 4 cores and 4 threads | Intel Celeron J4115 1.80GHz (Turbo 2.5 GHz) 4 cores and 4 threads |
| Chipset | Intel Haswell | Intel Gemini Lake |
| Memory | 16GB DDR3 (1600 MHz) | 8GB DDR4 (2133 MHz) |
| Graphics | Intel HD Graphics 4600 | Intel UHD Graphics 605 |
| Disk | 240GB Crucial SSD | 128GB Foresee NVMe M.2 SSD F900F128GBH |
| AWOW NYI3 | Gigabyte BXBT-1900 | Asus UX305FA | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Type | Mini PC | Mini PC | Laptop |
| Processor | Intel Core i3-5005U 2.00GHz 2 cores 4 threads | Intel Celeron J1900 2.00GHz (Turbo 2.416 GHz) 4 cores 4 threads | Intel Core M-5Y10c 0.8GHz (Turbo 2.00GHz) 2 cores 4 threads |
| Chipset | Intel Broadwell | Intel Atom Z36xxx/Z37xxx | Intel Broadwell-U-OPI |
| Memory | 8GB DDR4 (1600 MHz) | 4GB DDR3 (1600 MHz) | 8GB DDR3 (1866 MHz) |
| Graphics | Intel HD Graphics 5500 | Intel HD 2GB | Intel HD Graphics 5300 |
| Disk | 128GB Kingston NVMe | 250GB Samsung SSD 860 | 128GB SanDisk SSD |