Lenovo ThinkCentre M920z All-in-One Desktop Review

The Lenovo ThinkCentre M920z has a 23.8-inch display and weighs 6 kg, which is why you should be able to put it even on smaller desks. The base of the stand has a diameter of 25 cm and takes up exactly this much space on the desk.

The Lenovo ThinkCentre M920z offers good connectivity options such as the USB 3.1 Gen2 port with support for Rapid Charge technology. The device also features a USB Type-C port, which relies on the USB 3.1 Gen1 standard. Because of this, it cannot be used to output a video signal. Here, users are limited to one DP port. Lenovo also offers an optional serial port.

While the DVD drive on the right side is easy to reach, the ports on the left side are somewhat harder to reach. You can easily feel the DVD drive with your fingers without even looking at it. You can also easily find the power button and the SD card reader by feeling around with your hands. However, in order to reach the ports, you will have to either turn the device around or twist yourself to find them. You should connect devices to the back that are going to stay connected for a while, because the ports on the back are also hard to reach.

Lenovo’s All-in-One PC comes with a 3-in-1 card reader. The inserted SD cards protrude 1.5 cm from the SD card slot. In our benchmark, the ThinkCentre M920z achieves a read speed of 30.7 MB/s and a write speed of 18.6 MB/s. These are subpar results.

The ThinkCentre M920z has a Gigabit Ethernet port on the back. Lenovo also offers three optional Wi-Fi modules that support the fast Wireless AC standard and feature either a 1x1 or 2x2 MIMO antenna. The third option comes with a 2x2 MIMO antenna and Intel’s vPro technology.

The Lenovo ThinkCentre M920z brings a number of security features to the table such as TPM 2.0, a Kensington lock, an intrusion switch, a camera cover, BIOS-based Smart USB Protection, the ability to disable individual USB ports and Computrace.

With the ThinkCentre M920z, Lenovo offers three years of onsite support. It can be extended for up to five years, and you can also buy additional services. For example, there is an option that allows you to call professional technicians whenever you need to replace or upgrade some components.

Keyboard

The ThinkCentre M920z comes with a simple wired keyboard, which has a long travel distance and poor tactile feedback. Long writing sessions become tedious because of the mushiness. Furthermore, the actuation point is not very clear.

Lenovo also offers a professional wireless keyboard with flatter keys. It does not have a clear actuation point, either. Moreover, the keys are too flat and this is why fingertips may slide off of them. The professional keyboard is very far from being as good as the keyboards of ThinkPads.

The screen of the ThinkCentre M920z consists of a 23.8-inch, matte IPS panel with a resolution of 1920x1080. According to the manufacturer, the brightness amounts to 250 cd/m², which is high enough for office environments. The contrast ratio is supposed to be 1000:1 and it is claimed that the display can cover 72% of the NTSC color space.  Lenovo also offers the ThinkCentre M920z with a 10-point multitouch screen, which has the same image quality and resolution.

The ThinkCentre M920z features a Core i5-8500 with Intel’s integrated UHD Graphics 630. This is why the system feels very responsive. In combination with 8 GB of RAM and a 256 GB SSD, the system is powerful enough for office work and simple image-editing. According to the spec sheet, the system supports up to 32 GB of RAM. Moreover, the Lenovo desktop is also supposed to be able to use Intel’s 8th-gen Core i7 processors. Users can order an Optane module instead of the M.2 SSD or they can just put in an SSD of their own. An additional 2.5-inch SATA storage device can also be installed.

The Intel Core i5-8500 is a Coffee Lake-based desktop processor that features six cores. It has a base clock of 3 GHz and a boost clock of 4.1 GHz, which is why it is suited for demanding applications. It is made using the 14-nm manufacturing process and has a TDP of 65 watts. The heat produced by the CPU is dissipated by the cooling system well enough that there should not be any performance drops associated with thermal throttling. 

In our Cinebench R15 stress test, the performance of the Core i5-8500 stays on the same level over an extended period of time. When compared to the predecessor CPU and the predecessor model of the ThinkCentre M920z, users can expect to see a small increase in single-core performance and a significant jump in multi-core performance. In the multi-core benchmark, the Core i5-8500 is almost 60% faster than the Core i5-7500.

In the PCMark benchmarks, the Lenovo ThinkCentre M920z does not meet our expectations. The results of the ThinkCentre M920z in PCMark 8 are on the same level as those of the predecessor model ThinkCentre M910z, which means that there is almost no difference in terms of system performance. In PCMark 10, the ThinkCentre M920z is only 6% faster than its predecessor model.

When performing everyday tasks, the Lenovo desktop reveals no weaknesses. The system boots up very fast, the data can be accessed without any delays and the programs launch relatively quickly.

The ThinkCentre M920z has a fast SSD from Samsung that is known as the PM981. It has very good read and write rates and therefore contributes in a major way to the good system performance. With a 28% increase in performance when compared to the SSD found in the predecessor model, the data is accessed much faster on Lenovo’s new All-in-One desktop. Moreover, there is also an empty SATA drive bay, in which a 2.5-inch storage device can be installed.

You can find out how well the Samsung PM981 in the Lenovo ThinkCentre M920z stacks up against other storage devices on our HDD/SSD benchmarks page.

Intel’s UHD Graphics 630 is responsible for image-rendering. This graphics unit is only suitable for simple applications that do not need a lot of GPU horsepower. However, it is still capable enough for simple image-editing and can run older video games on low settings.

There is a significant boost in performance when compared to the GPU (Intel HD Graphics 630) in the predecessor model. While the results in the 3DMark 11 benchmark are about 10% higher, the UHD Graphics 630 performs about 20% better in the Firestrike and Cloud Gate benchmarks.

You can learn how well other graphics cards perform on our GPU benchmarks page.

Intel’s UHD Graphics 630 is not suitable for graphically demanding games. Simple games from the Microsoft Store and very old titles are playable, but partially only on low settings. In our benchmark, the now six-year-old BioShock Infinite was playable on medium settings at 1366x768. Here, we achieved 27 FPS on average using the “High” preset.

Because Intel’s UHD Graphics 630 benefits significantly from a dual-channel configuration, users can get a few more FPS when gaming by installing a second RAM module. Our review device runs in single-channel mode.

You can learn which games can run smoothly with Intel’s UHD Graphics 630 on our gaming benchmarks page.

The fan of the Lenovo ThinkCentre M920z only starts to spin up when the system is taxed. It produces an audible, humming noise. However, it never gets really loud and the fan noise is often drowned out by the ambient noise. During simple office work, the fan usually stands still, which leads to silent operation. During our review, we also observed occasional coil whine, which usually occurs when data is being accessed.

The DVD drive is surprisingly quiet. When reading data off of DVDs, we could only hear the movements of the laser head.

In our review of the Lenovo ThinkCentre M920z, we did not encounter any issues related to overheating either on the surface or under the hood. Because we did not observe any drops in performance during our stress test, users should not worry about losing performance on account of thermal throttling. 

The Lenovo ThinkCentre M920z comes with two 3-watt speakers, which are located on the front of the device. They offer a sound quality that is good enough for occasional media consumption. If you are going to use the Lenovo ThinkCentre M920z to consume media content on a regular basis, then we recommend getting a pair of headphones or external speakers. We did not have any problems with connecting such devices to the Lenovo desktop via the 3.5mm combination microphone/headphone jack that is located on the left side.

The ThinkCentre M920z features a built-in 150-watt power supply. According to the manufacturer, it has an efficiency of 90%. It comes with an included power cable, which is the only cable you will truly need (depending on the configuration).