Lenovo ThinkCentre M70Q GEN 5 Review

A tiny office powerhouse that makes towers look silly. Just don't ask it to game, and you'll love it.

The Lenovo ThinkCentre M70q Gen 5 is the business desktop that makes you question why anyone still buys a tower. This 1.25kg mini PC crams a 20-core Intel i7-14700T and 16GB of DDR5 RAM into a box the size of a thick paperback, and it absolutely flies through spreadsheets, video calls, and tab-heavy browsers. If your daily grind is Office, Slack, and 40 Chrome tabs, this thing is a dream. But if you think you'll fire up Call of Duty after hours, think again—the integrated Intel UHD 770 graphics are pure office duty.

For business workloads, the i7-14700T is a little beast. It's a 20-core chip with 8 performance cores and 12 efficiency cores, and while it's not chasing benchmark records, it opens Excel files with 100k rows like they're nothing. Multitasking is smooth, boot times from the 512GB SSD are instant, and the whole package stays quiet even under load. The integrated GPU, on the other hand, is a letdown—it's fine for streaming 4K video but can barely manage Minesweeper at respectable frame rates. If you need graphics muscle, you're out of luck.

The price here is a mess. Listings range from $999 to over $24,000, which is obviously not real—the high end is probably a rogue third-party seller taking a bath on eBay fees. At a realistic street price around $700–$900, this machine is a steal for office work. At $999, it's still fair. But if you see it anywhere near $24k, run the other way. Shop around; the lowest legitimate price we can find makes this a strong buy.

The most direct rival is Apple's Mac mini M4. That little silver slab has vastly better integrated graphics and an even tighter form factor, but you're stuck with macOS and a higher starting price. For Windows diehards, the ThinkCentre is the superior business rig. Those ASUS ROG and HP Omen gaming desktops are in a different universe—they're for GPU-heavy tasks and suck exponentially more power. Unless you're building a tiny server army, stick with the M70q if you just need a quiet office companion.

If you plan on gaming, editing 4K video, or doing any 3D rendering, skip this entirely. The integrated Intel UHD 770 is a potato. Go grab a Mac mini M4 if you need compact graphics punch, or look at an entry-level gaming desktop like the HP Omen GT22—it'll be bigger, louder, and way more capable when the work day ends.

If you want a dead-silent, ultra-compact Windows desktop that demolishes office work, buy this. The i7-14700T and 16GB of DDR5 in such a tiny package are genuinely impressive. Just understand what it isn't: a gaming PC, a video editing workstation, or a machine with any graphics upgrade path. For the right person—office worker, small business, home desk jockey—it's a near-perfect fit.