I recently bought the Lenovo ThinkCentre Neo Ultra Gen 2 because I was looking for a high performance, compact mini-pc to sit on my desk.
Originally I was looking at the mini PCs from Beelink or GMKtec, particularly the ones with the Ryzen 9 AI Max 395+ processors, but once you bump them up to 128GB RAM they blew past my budget.
I also felt that by the time you’ve dropped £1,500+ on a mini PC it should at least have a decent graphics card, and while the Radeon 8060s is nothing to be sniffed at, it is still no match for the latest generation of Nvidia graphics cards.
I also considered building my own but try as I might I couldn’t find the perfect configuration that came below £1,200.
So in the end I went for the latest version of the Lenovo Neo Ultra (and, annoyingly blew through my budget).
Here’s the spec of my machine:
- Intel Core Ultra 9 285
- GeForce RTX 5060 8GB GDDR7
- 64 GB DDR5-5600MT/s (SODIMM)
- 1 TB SSD M.2 2280 PCIe Gen4 TLC Opal
- Intel® Wi-Fi 7 BE200 2×2 BE vPro® & Bluetooth® 5.4 *
- 350 Watt PSU
* Pretty useless considering I’m using a Deco mesh on WiFi 5
The total price came out to £1,510.
However, I found a good coupon and went crazy with Lenovo’s rewards programme. I was able to knock £35 off the price with that.
I also used Honey to get 1% cashback and bought at a time when Lenovo was offering 2x reward points on every purchase, or about 5% of the value of your purchase.
So I’ll get about £15 cashback from Honey in a few months time and have nearly £75 in reward points from Lenovo.
All in all I was able to knock off about £125 by maximizing coupons and cashback. I’ll probably use the £75 rewards points to by an external Lenovo speaker or a set of headphones.
First thoughts
Shipping was frustratingly slow when you are used to Amazon’s next day delivery. It took 10 days to deliver. Most of that time it was sitting in the ‘processing’ status because it had a couple of optional upgrades.
However, once it was shipped it took about a day to travel from China to the UK.
I’ve been playing around with it for a few days and my overall impression is good. I’ve freed up a lot of space on my desk because before I was using a laptop with a dongle and there were wires everywhere.
The unit is a little bigger than I thought it might be, but it tucks away nicely in the corner of my desk. Footprint wise it takes up less room than a laptop and getting it out of the way makes me feel like I’ve got some room to breathe.
There’s a definite audible hum from the PSU fan that I’m quickly getting used to. I’m able to tune out background noise fairly easily but if you’re someone who needs absolute quiet then you probably want a less powerful machine with a lower power draw, or use some fancy cooling systems in a larger case.
Benchmarking the Intel Core Ultra 9 285
The first thing I did when I powered up the Neo Ultra was to run some benchmarks. I watched a benchmarking video on the Gen 1 version of the PC which was rocking an Intel i7 14700 which is no slouch.
Intel Core Ultra 9 285 Cinebench R23 benchmarks
This was the first test I did. The Core Ultra 9 285 scored 34,988 points on the multi-core test and 2,288 points on the single core test. By comparison the Intel i7 14700 scored 24,446 according to this test.
So I think we have a significant leap here in terms of performance between the gen 1 and gen 2 versions of the Lenovo Neo Ultra.
For some reason Cinebench R23 doesn’t show the 285’s performance against more recent processors, so here it is in comparison to older processers, in case you’re thinking of upgrading from one of these.
Intel Core Ultra 9 285 Cinebench 2024 benchmarks
The Intel 285 processor scored 1,913 points on the multi-core CPU test in Cinebench 2024. I don’t really know if that is good or not, but I guess at least it beat the 3 year old Apple M1 Ultra processor? I imagine I’d cry if I benchmarked it against the latest Apple M5 chip.
In the single core test the render took FOR-EVER. That’s why it only got a score of 139.
Intel Core Ultra 9 285 Geekbench benchmarks
The processor scored 20,301 points on Geekbench’s multi-core test and 3,148 points on the single core test. I can’t really tell if that is good or not because it doesn’t make the top 100 results in Geekbench’s top scores!
To be a top 100 score a processor needs at least 26,736 points on the multi-core test. The rankings are unsurprisingly dominated by Apple M4s and AMD Threadripper 9985WXs. Single core performances are dominated by ARM processors, Apple M5s and earlier Intel processors.
Is the Core Ultra 9 285 a top 10 processor?
I don’t think many PCs are using the regular 285 version of the processor because many benchmarking sites I checked don’t list it. Likely because they don’t have enough data to provide a confident average score.
According to Geekbench’s top processor list, if everyone else got a similar multi-core score to me, the Core Ultra 9 285 would rank about 11th overall. Just behind the Core i9 14900KF (which to be fair is a souped up, overclocked version of the processor) and just ahead of the Ryzen 9 9900X3D.
It’s crazy to see that the performance version of the 285, the 285k still doesn’t beat the Core i9 14900KS.
I was also a little bit pleased that the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 (who is in charge of their product naming!?) scored a lot less than the Intel 285. That made me feel a lot better about opting for the Lenovo over a Beelink or GMKtec PC.
Nvidia RTX 5060 Geekbench benchmarks
Although the RTX 5060 isn’t a bad graphics card, it’s still on the budget side of things so it only scored 130,877 points in the Geekbench GPU benchmark. By comparison, an RTX 5080 is likely to score around 270,000 points.
In terms of where the RTX 5060 fits in against all the other graphics cards, it’s quite far down the list. Behind the 2080 Ti, 3070s and above, and the 4070s and above.
Individual scores will vary but my score placed the RTX 5060 in the Lenovo Neo Ultra about the same as an RTX 3070.
Oh, and if I had gone for a mini PC with an AMD AI Max+ 395, the integrated graphics card, while immense, still doesn’t match a dedicated GPU.
I’m pretty happy with these GPU scores!
Intel Core Ultra 9 285 UserBenchmark benchmarks
Finally I did a UserBenchmark test. Again, the 285 processor seems to be so unpopular that there are only a handful of benchmarks using this processor. I received a bench of 132% which is very good for this processor, and puts it in the top 5 processors out of all the user benchmarks.
However, because only a handful of benchmarks have been done on the 285, we don’t know the true position. With the benchmarks that have been done, the performance ranks at 34th, or about the same as a Ryzen 9 9900X.
In comparison to the Intel Core i7 14700 in the gen 1 version of this PC, UserBenchmarking shows that the performance is about the same.
Final thoughts
Overall, the Lenovo Neo Ultra Gen 2 is a pretty good machine that is about half-way between a budget mini-PC and a money is no object gaming PC.
If you’re thinking about buying it, make sure you sign up for the Lenovo rewards programme first and use Honey to get some cashback.
You could pay twice the price on a better graphics card and get more performance, but at the cost of size, noise, and ongoing cost.
If you came here looking for some benchmarks around the Lenovo Neo Ultra Gen 2, hopefully it gives you some idea of what to expect.