Lenovo ThinkSystem ST45 V3, A Customizable EPYC Tower Server
If You Need A Small Standalone Server, Or If You Just Want Optical Drives
Lenovo’s ST45 V3 is an interesting hybrid of a tower server and workstation, great if you have a need for a local server for your home or small business. It has a total of nine USB 3 ports, one of which is USB Type-C and on the back is both an HDMI 2.1 port and two DisplayPort 1.4 ports. Additionally, there is a combo audio jack on the front and an audio line out jack, all of which are very uncommon on a tower server and unheard of on a rack mounted one. The networking might disappoint you, it’s a 1GbE Realtek RTL8111-based NIC, but you could add a PCIe card with a better NIC if you need. It also offers you the option of adding optical drives, which are uncommon everywhere now!
ServeTheHome tested a version with the AMD EPYC 4124P installed, and also had the opportunity to test with a EPYC 4464P, the highest end part available thanks to the 65W TDP limit on the ST45 V3’s design. Lenovo states that the server tops out two 32GB DDR5 ECC UDIMMs however STH had no issues with a pair of 48GB DDR5-5600 ECC UDIMMs. Inside there are only two SATA ports, but then again there are two M.2 slots which are what you truly want nowadays.
Let us be clear, the Lenovo ThinkSystem ST45 V3 is an entry tower server, not the mainstream data center 2U server or the many high-end GPU accelerated systems we have been reviewing. As a result, it is tailored more for that edge SMB tower server use case.
I could see niche use cases for a small Eypc system for the ECC but I have a hard time imagining what small niche uses cases would not be limited by 32GB of RAM (I doubt many people will want to stray beyond the official specs), my FX 8350 from 10+ years ago has that much RAM….