[degarr]

The downside is, I think the Lenovo BIOS has some wattage limits baked in that I can't alter. In most loads it runs at 47w, but it won't do it's 58w 'Short Turbo' speed, it's also running slightly below it's max turbos, I was able to hit 3.0ghz sustained with some undervolting, 2.8ghz without undervolting. It also seems to run SLOWER under some loads, where I can get 3.0ghz in Cinebench R15, it runs at 2.45 and a lower TDP while running R20. AVX2 power consumption thing maybe? So yes, in the restrictive Lenovo box, it's an amazing upgrade but it's not running as optimally as it would on a desktop board with user configurable settings.

I registered on this forum just to ask you about your system and experiences with it and different CPUs, TDP, throttling, etc. I have three of these Lenovo Tiny systems, one M93p and two M73's. If you're not familiar with the M73 version, it's almost identical to the M93p except it has an H81 chipset instead of the Q87 in the M93p, and some of the USB ports are only USB 2.0, otherwise they're identical. I currently have an i7 4770S in the M73 and while it boots up and runs fine, I've been concerned about it drawing too much power through the motherboard and eventually causing the board to fail. The 4770S is a 65W TDP CPU while the system was only designed for a 45W TDP CPU, and while TDP refers to maximum heat production/dissipation, in order to produce more heat you have to draw more power, which is my main concern.

Then I read this post where you mentioned above about there possibly being a power limit in the BIOS. I also happened to find your post on Reddit (it has the same keywords) where you said you had an i5 4590 (which has double the TDP!) in your M93 and the system engaged current throttling. How long did you have the 4590 in it and could you elaborate a bit about how and when you observed the current throttling with that CPU and your current one? Also, you mentioned that you managed to undervolt your current CPU. How did you do that? I didn't see any voltage settings in the BIOS on any of my Lenovo systems. 

I'm not concerned about heat because I'll be using that particular M73 for a Plex server and it should rarely run at 100% CPU usage, and never long enough to completely overwhelm the little CPU cooler. However, I'm concerned about potentially damaging the motherboard by drawing too much power through it, even if it's for only short periods of time. I have a 90 watt power adapter and my wall power meter says it never comes close to using all of that so I'm good on that front. In the Windows power settings I've set the "Maximum processor state" to 90% in hopes of limiting power draw there as well. If I remember correctly, in CPUID HWMonitor, under Powersackage it never goes above roughly 45W, but I don't know if that's an accurate metric for actual current draw.

My goal isn't to have an extremely fast Tiny system for my Plex server, but just to have something a bit stronger than a dual core CPU in it without spending a bunch of money, and I happened to have the i7 4770S available. If using the 4770S isn't viable or safe, I'll probably just go with a cheap dual core T series CPU. Any insight you have with this would be greatly appreciated.

DrVlikhell you wouldn't be making a HA Proxmox cluster out of 3 of them would you? as that is what I am doing