Lenovo ThinkCentre M90a Gen 5 review

The Lenovo ThinkCentre M90a Gen 5 stands out in the all-in-one space. With a 13th-generation Intel Raptor Lake CPU, a wide range of ports, decent quality screen and speaker systems, and a design that aspires to be something more than downright ugly it will happily grace even the most stylish offices at work or home.

The price for the Gen 5 all-in-one starts at £870 inc VAT and runs to £1,660 if you want the most potent silicon and maxed-out memory and storage. The model we were sent to test will set you back £1,240 which is the price we’ll be basing our value judgments on.

Lenovo ThinkCentre M90a Gen 5: Design

Things made by Lenovo with the word Think in the title tend to be black and so it is with the M90a Gen 5, the only color highlight being the red channel along the front of the stand that can be used to store pens, pencils, and mobile phones.

The plastic cabinet that houses the display and electronics is less than 55mm at its deepest which makes the whole system no larger than a 24-inch monitor which is the point behind an all-in-one. At just over 8Kg it’s rather heavier than your average 24-inch monitor.

Perhaps a little unnecessary for an office-bound device the M90a Gen 5 meets the US Department of Defense’s MIL-STD 810H standards for resistance to temperature, pressure, humidity, vibration, and more. Lenovo says it has tested it from the “icy expanses of the Arctic tundra to dust-laden desert winds” no less.

The bezels above and to the side of the 24-inch (23.8-inch to be exact) screen are nicely slender at 8mm and while the chin below is much deeper at 48mm it houses the speaker system so it’s that size for a good reason. The webcam that sits atop the display looks a little like an afterthought but that’s presumably a side effect of it being an optional extra.

Lenovo offers various types of stands including the Full Function Monitor Stand we were supplied with. This offers 110mm of height adjustment, 90 degrees of clockwise pivot, 45 degrees of swivel to left and right as well as tilt from -5 degrees to +20 degrees. That’s a very healthy range and the equal of any PC monitor.

At 420 x 190mm, the stand has a large footprint but most of the space is taken up by a shallow tray that is very handy for keeping stuff in. Without an hour of setting the system up the tray on ours housed a sound level meter, colorimeter, car keys, debit card, two pens, and a ruler. We’re starting to wonder how we lived without it. The stand is attached to the cabinet by a conventional quick-release bracket that covers a 100 x 100m VESA mount.

Lenovo has gone to town with the ports, the M90a Gen 5 boasting no less than 6 USB-A ports – three 10Gbps ports on the right edge of the cabinet and three 5Gbps ports on the rear. Also on the right, you’ll find a 3-in-1 SD card slot and a 3.5mm audio jack while the rear also hosts a 10Gbps Type-C port (data only), Gigabit Ethernet, HDMI 2.0 in/out and DisplayPort 1.4 output. There is space on the left side of the cabinet for an optical disc drive and at the back for a serial port but my review machine had a blanking plate across both slots.

What physical controls the M90a has are all on the right-hand side of the cabinet. At the bottom is a large power button while at the top is a microphone mute-button and a display switch that turns the unit into a dumb monitor for whatever is plugged into the HDMI port.

Oddly the M90a Gen 5 lacks the little 4-way joystick that is a feature of the M90a Gen 4 models and which lets you quickly change screen settings such as the brightness levels. With the Gen 5 model, you are left at the mercy of the display and audio settings available on the connected device.

The wireless modem in our unit was the ever-reliable Intel AX201 which supports 2.4/5Ghz Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.3. The AX211 card which supports 6Ghz Wi-Fi 6E is a £20 optional extra. 

Lenovo ThinkCentre M90a Gen 5: Accessories

The webcam fitted to our review machine proved perfectly capable of handling the video and audio basics, shooting crisp and well-balanced 1080p, 30f/s video even in less-than-ideal light.

Our camera didn’t support Windows Hello IR facial recognition, which is a £10 optional extra, while the model with a radar scanner that runs the smart human presence detection system will set you back a further £30. All camera models have a privacy shutter switch but it’s rather stiff and not particularly easy to use.

Since the M90a Gen 5 isn’t driven by a Core Ultra processor you don’t get the Windows Studio Effects camera features but you can access the same set of features such as gaze tracking and background blur through the Lenovo Smart Meeting app.

The bundled keyboard and mouse are both cabled affairs and of a slightly higher quality than you usually get with AiOs. The keyboard especially is a bulky and solid unit with a full-sized numeric keypad and full-sized arrow keys. It lacks a backlight but it is otherwise ideal for anyone destined to spend serious time at their keyboard. The mouse is a basic affair but the Lenovo-red scroll wheel has a perfectly weighted ratchet effect and the click-action is impossible to fault.

Lenovo ThinkCentre M90a Gen 5: Performance

Intel’s Core i5-13400 CPU is a solid performer thanks to its 10-core (6 Performance, 4 Efficiency) design and maximum 4.60GHz clock speed. Faced with the CineBench R23 multi-core CPU test it scored 11,797 while managing 305 points in ITPro’s own 4K multi-media benchmark. 

The last all-in-one we tested, the considerably bigger and more expensive Intel Core i7-1360P-based Acer Aspire S32 scored 12,843 and 248 respectively giving the two machines broadly similar – and high – levels of performance in everyday tasks.

When it comes to graphics performance M90a Gen 5 is let down by its integrated graphics chip, the Intel UHD Graphics 730 iGPU, which boasts a paltry 24 execution units. 

This can’t hold a candle to the Iris Xe iGPU with its 96 execution units let alone the new Arc chips that appear on the new Core Ultra SoCs. Case in point, the SPECviewperf 3dsmax 3D modelling test will run at around 16fps on an Iris Xe iGPU but the UHD Graphics 730 only managed a pedestrian 10.6fps.

Running the GFXBench Car Chase test offscreen produced a score of just 53.8fps which is the lowest score we’ve seen from a PC for a good number of years. The same goes for the 3DMark Time Spy benchmark which scored just 750 points to the Acer S32’s 1,410. The takeaway here is that if you need good graphics performance, the M90a Gen 5 is not the place to look.

At least the M90a Gen 5 can consistently run both the CPU and GPU flat out without any thermal issues. We inadvertently left the stress test apps running overnight but come the morning both were still happily chugging along at 100% utilisation and the fan noise registered at 42.7dBA which is barely more than the ambient background noise level in the office. The transfer speeds of the 512GB Samsung-made SSD were good with sequential read and write speeds of 4,817MB/s and 3,724MB/s respectively. 

Lenovo ThinkCentre M90a Gen 5: Display 

While it’s possible to have your M90a Gen 5 with a touchscreen for an extra £100, our unit came with the standard 1,920 x 1,080 IPS panel. The peak brightness of 290cd/m2 proved more than adequate for indoor use while the color gamut coverage was good for an office AiO with 104.7% sRGB, 74.1% DCI-P3, and 71.2% Adobe RGB. 

With a contrast ratio of 1065:1, Delta E colour variance of 1.9 vs the sRGB profile, and a Gamma of exactly 2.2 the screen looked both colorful and natural to the naked eye. There’s no support for HDR content and the refresh rate is a standard 60Hz but we expected no more. Overall it’s a surprisingly good display for an all-in-one.

Buried inside the cabinet below the screen are two 3W forward-facing Dolby Atmos-accredited speakers. They are not the loudest around, producing 73dBA as measured against a pink noise source at a 1m distance, but the sound they make is rich, tuneful, and underpinned by a solid bass line. 

If you want an all-in-one that can double up as a smart TV without the need to add external speakers then the M90a Gen 5 is perfectly suited to the job.

Lenovo ThinkCentre M90a Gen 5: Is it Worth it?

Just as long as graphics capability is not an issue the new ThinkCentre M90a Gen 5 is an impressive package. Its media playback ability is excellent thanks to the good-quality display and tuneful speakers while the plethora of ports make it very versatile. We were also happy to see that Lenovo has included the option to use the M90a Gen 5 as a dumb monitor which is handy for anyone who wants to plug something like a games console into it.

We’d call the M90a Gen 5 a solid value proposition too, especially given the vast amount of choice the buyer is faced with, including nine different processors, one or two SSDs of varying capacities, and an OS-free choice for those who prefer a Linux distro to Windows 11 (Home or Pro).

The plethora of options brings into stark contrast the one thing you can’t change, the GPU. The m90a Gen 5 is screaming out for the option of even a relatively mild – and cheap – discrete GPU like the Intel Arc 530M. If you could make that choice the M90a Gen 5 would be a solid five-star system, but as it stands it’s just a four, bordering on four-point-five.

Lenovo ThinkCentre M90a Gen 5 – Specifications