Lenovo ThinkStations Explained: P510, P520, P620, P920

Dates come from Lenovo press releases where one exists, otherwise from Lenovo's PSREF workstation changelog; specifications from each model's PSREF platform sheet, read September 14, 2026.

Lenovo PSREF platform specifications and press releases, read September 14, 2026. Tower variants only; the P300, P310 and P350 follow the same entry-tower pattern.

Four lines have a complete machine; the rest are chassis or nothing — PCSP catalog, September 17, 2026.

One row deserves a second look: the P920 has sixteen DIMM slots on twelve channels, eight slots per processor but six channels, so two channels carry two modules each. Lenovo's live catalogue, PSREF version 670 of September 9, 2026, now holds only the P2, P3, P4, P5, P7, P8, PGX and PX. The P620's successor is the P8: socket sTR5, DDR5, PCIe 5.0.

Neither Lenovo nor HP publishes an end-of-support date per model, so the last BIOS release is the practical proxy. Lenovo's driver metadata is a public feed with a release date on every download, machine-read on September 14, 2026.

Lenovo's own driver download feed, read September 14, 2026 — the newest packages published, not proof that nothing newer will follow.

The firmware clock splits the ladder in half. Lenovo’s driver feed, read September 14, 2026.

The P620's package carries Lenovo's note “(Fix) Enhancement to address security vulnerability CVE-2024-6364”. Each package also declares which operating systems it serves: the P520 and P520c package names Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, Ubuntu 18, Windows 10 and Windows 11; the P910's names Windows 10, 7 and 8 and no Windows 11 at all.

Against HP, this is the strongest fact Lenovo has. HP's last critical BIOS is January 23, 2024 for the Z440, Z640 and Z840 and August 2025 for the Z4 G4, sourced in our HP Z article. Both vendors state the same clock in words — Lenovo's “5 years past end of production”, HP's five years after end of manufacturing — and neither publishes the date that would make it a calendar. So: check the BIOS date before the specification.

Microsoft publishes two kinds of processor list — a general one carrying Xeon W-2100 and W-2200, and per-version ones that do not — and the difference is worked through in our workstation compatibility list, which we corrected in September 2026 after reading the wrong one. The general Intel list (October 30, 2025) has Xeon W-2100, W-2200, W-1200, W-1300, Xeon Scalable 1st to 3rd generation and Xeon E-2100 to E-2400, and no Xeon E5, E3 v5 or v6, and no 6th- or 7th-generation Core. Microsoft's AMD list names Threadripper PRO by model — every processor the P620 was sold with.

Lenovo publishes three device lists rather than one table with version columns. List A (HT512623) carries the P330, P330-R2, P340, P350, P520, P520c, P620, P720 and P920; the 24H2 list adds the P360, P5, P7 and PX; the 25H2 list (HT518057, August 17, 2026) does not carry the P520, P520c, P920, P330 or P330-R2.

Do not read that as Lenovo dropping the P520. Lenovo says so itself on that page: upgrading to 25H2 “will also be supported for older systems not listed here that are within Lenovo's support period of 5 years past end of production”, the list being “a representative list of the systems that have been validated”. One inconsistency is worth printing: the P720 is on the 25H2 list and the P920 is not, despite the same socket, chipset and launch date.

Microsoft's general Intel and AMD lists and Lenovo's three device documents, read September 14, 2026. Every machine from the P320 onward ships TPM 2.0; older ones are TPM 1.2.

There is no Lenovo 26H1 list, and nothing here to defuse. HP's table carries a 26H1 column reading “Hardware Not Supported” beside every Z workstation it has made, which our HP article explains at length; Lenovo never published one, and both are harmless because Microsoft's 26H1 release page says it “isn't offered through Windows Update … it can't be installed as an in-place update on existing devices.”

Two details for a used buyer. No ThinkStation here offers a TPM 1.2-to-2.0 firmware conversion the way HP's Z440 and Z840 do. And list A carries a regional carve-out: P520, P520c, P720 and P920 units “shipped to the People's Republic of China (PRC) do not have TPM 2.0”. For the top row of the table the answers are Linux or Windows 10 with paid Extended Security Updates, priced in our ESU Year 2 article.

Start with the disclosure, because everything after it argues for a machine we do not have. Our ThinkStation P620 category holds 50 visible listings and zero purchasable ones on a live catalog pull of September 17, 2026 — and it is the biggest ThinkStation phrase in our search data. Fifty pages a reader can browse and cannot order is a waiting list, not a shelf.

Announced July 14, 2020 as “the first and only professional workstation powered by AMD's brand-new Ryzen Threadripper PRO processor”: one sWRX8 socket on AMD's WRX80 chipset, nine parts from twelve to 64 cores across the 3000WX family and the 5000WX refresh announced March 8, 2022.

The headline is not the capacity, it is the channels. Lenovo's sheet reads “8 DDR4 DIMM slots, 8 channels capable” at DDR4-3200, to 1 TB — one module per channel, where the P520 is four channels across eight slots. Per socket, the P620 has twice the memory channels of the P520 and more than the P920’s six. It was also Lenovo’s first PCIe 4.0 workstation, and the only one here with 10 GbE on the motherboard as standard, a Marvell AQtion AQN-107, where every Intel ThinkStation here ships 1 GbE.

And it is a dead end. The successor P8 is sTR5 with DDR5 and PCIe 5.0, so there is no processor above the 5995WX, no faster memory and no board swap. Lenovo and AMD built a custom air-cooled heat sink for that 280 W part, and the acoustics section shows the price: 32.6 dB declared idle.

What it costs elsewhere, and what that number is not. The specialist dealer Superworkstations listed a configure-to-order ThinkStation P620 at $3,250 on September 14, 2026, with a two-year warranty and a one-to-two-week lead time, marked “Condition: New”. That is new-old-stock pricing, not a used-market price; we could not capture a single genuine used P620 asking price this week.

What to buy instead, from us. If the requirement is memory bandwidth, nothing on our shelf substitutes and we will say so plainly; if it is a Windows 11 workstation with room for memory and a real graphics card, the P520 is what we can ship. Note also: the NVIDIA Quadro P620 is a graphics card and the ThinkStation P620 is a workstation.

The P520 is one FCLGA2066 socket on Intel's C422 chipset taking a single Xeon W-2100 or W-2200, in a 33 litre tower with eight DIMM slots over four channels to 512 GB. Five PCIe 3.0 slots plus a legacy PCI slot, and Lenovo prints a watt figure on each: slots 2 and 4 are x16 at 75 W, everything else 25 W, so a real graphics card has exactly two homes. Discrete TPM 2.0, FIPS 140-2 certified.

Lenovo's processor table names the memory speed against every part, and that is the buying decision. The W-2102 and W-2104 run DDR4-2400; every other W-2100 runs DDR4-2666; from the W-2225 upward the W-2200 range runs DDR4-2933. Note what Lenovo does not say: it prints “Up to 512GB (8x 64GB RDIMM)” without tying that ceiling to the W-2200, so unlike HP with the Z4 G4 there is no vendor statement that 64 GB modules need the newer generation. On our shelf the difference is priced — same chassis, same 690 W supply, same “No RAM — No HDD — No GPU”, on September 17, 2026:

PCSP catalog, September 17, 2026; memory speeds from Lenovo's P520 processor table. Several P520 listings share one stock pool, so “units” is not a count of machines.

The six-core pair is the whole argument: $214.98 against $204.98 is exactly $10.00 for a newer processor generation, 100 MHz more clock and a memory controller that runs DDR4-2933 instead of 2666. At 8 GB per module the faster memory costs the same, $53.99 either way; only at 16 GB does a gap open, $139.99 against $107.99. And the catalog contradicts itself: a second W-2135 build sits at $219.97, $4.99 more than the newer W-2235.

The P520c is a different machine, and our catalog files it under the same name. Same processor family and chipset, but a 25 litre box at 14.5 kg: four DIMM slots, a 256 GB ceiling, a 500 W or 625 W supply, four expansion slots. It succeeds the P410, not the P510. Twelve of the 97 listings in our P520 category are P520c machines, every one a Xeon W-2133 with a Quadro P620 card, from $272.29 to $1,141.23, and none names an operating system.

One more P520 question people actually ask: where the USB-C comes from. The P520 and P720 have two flex bays, the P920 three, the P620 one, and a flex bay can take a flex module whose tray holds a card reader, two Thunderbolt 3 ports or a four-digit diagnostic display, with a front USB 3.1 Gen 1 Type-C or eSATA port beside it. It is a bay option, so a given used P520 may not have one.

On this axis Lenovo sits between its rivals and goes quiet in exactly the wrong place. It states a graphics ceiling only on the small towers, and only as card names, never as a watt budget. HP prints watts per supply for every Z tower; Dell prints neither. What Lenovo prints and neither rival does is a watt figure on every PCIe slot.

Lenovo's own figures, from each model's PSREF specification, read September 14, 2026. The P520c has 500 or 625 W and the same footnote as the P520.

The silence is on the machine where the choice is real. The P520 is the only DDR4-era ThinkStation with three supplies to pick between, and the one model for which Lenovo publishes no graphics guidance; our own configurator prices the fork at $159.98 for the 690 W build-your-own P520 and $184.98 for the 900 W one. Use the per-slot watts instead — two 75 W x16 slots on a P520, four on a P620 — and remember that anything above 75 W needs an auxiliary cable; our used GPU guide covers the card side.

The efficiency floor is high and the derating is printed. From the P330 onward almost every ThinkStation supply is 92% and 80 PLUS Platinum, where HP's cheap Z440 supply is 85% Bronze. But the P900 and P910's 1300 W supply drops to a “1120W (restricted) mode” on 100–110 V input, and the P920's 1400 W unit is “limited to 1125 watts” under 115 V. Each machine's footnote is its own; do not generalise one to another.

What we can sell as a spare, and it is thin. Of the 100 purchasable listings in our power supply category on September 17, 2026 — the shelf our power supply guide covers — exactly four name a ThinkStation, five units between them: a 690 W P520/P720 unit at $49.99, a 900 W P520/P720 unit at $204.49 (two units), a 300 W P340 unit at $49.99 and a 650 W P500 unit at $34.99. The 1400 W P920 unit has since sold. Nothing fits a P510, P710, P620, P330, P360 or P5.

Search every ThinkStation PSREF sheet for “acoustic” or “dBA” and you get nothing, which is why the usual verdict is that Lenovo publishes no acoustics. It does — in its ECO declarations, Lenovo-hosted PDFs reporting declared noise per ISO 9296, measured per ISO 7779 and ECMA-74, read on September 14, 2026.

Each machine's Lenovo ECO declaration, ISO 9296 with ISO 7779 / ECMA-74 measurement, read September 14, 2026. Sound power is in bels, sound pressure in decibels. Lenovo also declares 22 dB idle for the P320 Tower and 24 dB for the P410.

The 55 litre flagship is the quietest thing Lenovo declares. ECO declarations, read September 14, 2026.

The result inverts intuition. The quietest machine Lenovo declares is the biggest one, the 55 litre dual-socket P920 at 15.8 dB idle; the loudest is the 17 litre P360 Tower at 33.7 dB idle and 38.2 dB working, with the 280 W P620 just under it.

And the caveat that has to be printed with them. Lenovo's post-2017 declarations give one idle and one operating figure per machine and name no configuration at all. HP's QuickSpecs name the configuration beside each figure, which is how we know HP's 13 dB is a Z4 G4 with a Quadro P400 and a 465 W supply, and 22 dB with a P6000; Dell publishes nothing for Precision towers. So Lenovo's numbers are comparable to each other and only loosely to HP's.

The 2014 generation is declared per drive type instead: a P700 with a 2.5-inch SATA SSD at 32 dB idle, the same machine with 15K SAS drives and two processors at 37 dB idle and 40 dB operating. We have used HP's 13 dB figure in our music production article; the Lenovo answer for a quiet room is the P920.

All prices here are ours from a live catalog pull on September 17, 2026, except where a dealer is named. The honest aggregate first, because ThinkStation stock counts are easy to misread: we hold 97 purchasable ThinkStation listings, whose stock levels sum to 5,421 — an upper bound, not a count of machines, because eighteen P520 listings all report the same 110 units and every P5 listing reports 1. Counting each shared pool once gives a floor of 1,636.

PCSP catalog, September 17, 2026. “Complete” means the listing names a processor, memory, storage and an operating system; bracketed figures are stock levels, which several listings share. Ceilings: P510 $1,161.95, P520 $1,921.87, P5 $8,923.40, P920 $1,177.22 and clearance only.

Now the outside price, because this is one week we have one. The dealer PCLiquidations listed a ThinkStation P520 with a Xeon W-2123, 8 GB, a 256 GB SSD and no operating system, under a one-year warranty, in three grades on one page on September 14, 2026: Grade A $294.99, Grade B $229.99, Grade C $187.99, against its own “Was $1,010.99”. That dealer is cheaper at the bottom:

• Their Grade C at $187.99 includes 8 GB and a 256 GB SSD. Our cheapest W-2123 P520 is $164.98 with no memory and no drive — $23.01 less, and you still have to fill it.
• Their Grade A at $294.99 is the same 8 GB and 256 GB. Our nearest equivalent is $352.95 with a W-2123, 16 GB and a 512 GB SSD — $57.96 more for double both, and neither has an operating system. Our cheapest complete P520 with Windows 11 Pro is $371.84 on a Grade D clearance chassis.

That dealer page also carries a line worth repeating, from a party with its own stake in the narrative: “we can no longer install Windows 10 on systems due to Microsoft's end-of-support timeline.”

What filling one costs. The cheapest DDR4 on our shelf is the oldest: registered 2133 and 2400 modules, P510 and P710 speed, run $5.00 to $5.75 per gigabyte; DDR4-2666 for a W-2100 P520 runs $6.75, DDR4-2933 $8.75, DDR4-3200 for the P620 $11.75. A 128 GB fill is therefore $735.84, $863.84, $1,119.92 or $1,503.96 depending only on the processor in the socket — the reason our DDR4 memory analysis keeps saying the sticks are the purchase. Our processor shelf holds one loose Xeon W, a W-2235 at $64.99, and our graphics shelf two Quadro RTX 6000 24 GB at $999.99, nine Radeon Pro W6600 8 GB at $249.99, and in depth only a consumer RTX 3070 8 GB at $299.99, 201 of them.

For the record, so the brand articles agree: against our whole workstation shelf on one pull — 330 purchasable listings, 15,539 units — Lenovo is 29.4% of the listings and 34.9% of the units, HP 41.5% and 15.5%. Lenovo has far more depth per listing, and nearly all of it is one model.

Lenovo is 29.4% of the workstation listings we sell, so read this as the disclosure it is.

• Four model lines have nothing to sell and a fifth has nothing at all. The P620 (50 listings), P340 (14), P360 (19) and P710 (21) have zero purchasable units, and the P410 category has no products on it at all. The P920 category joined them this week: all 69 of its listings read zero, and the only P920 we can sell is a Grade D clearance chassis.
• Anything that must run Windows 11 and is a P300, P310, P320, P410, P500, P510, P700, P710, P900 or P910. The processor is on no Microsoft list and the model on none of Lenovo's three. The TPM is not the fixable part: the P320 has 2.0 and it changes nothing.
• A P620 from us, today. Zero purchasable units and no Threadripper PRO — no AMD workstation processor at all — on our parts shelf, so we cannot build or repair one either. We stock the DDR4-3200 registered memory it takes in depth, 32 GB modules at $375.99 with 83 units, and have no machine to put them in.
• A P5 or a P360 that needs more memory. Both are DDR5 machines and we hold no DDR5 module of any kind; we stock no Xeon W-2400, W-1200 or W-1300 either. Nor can most of the rest be repaired here: four power supplies in the catalog name a ThinkStation, five units between them, and none fits a P510, P710, P620, P330, P360 or P5.
• A quiet room with a P620 or a P360 in it: 32.6 and 33.7 dB idle against 15.8 dB for the P920 — and the same for any 2014 machine advertising 15K SAS drives.
• Virtualisation on VMware. Broadcom's KB 318697 puts Xeon E5-1600 v4, E5-2600 v4, E3-1200 v5, E3-1200 v6, Xeon W-2100 and Skylake-SP in its Discontinued table, where the installer “will block or prevent the installation” — covering the P320, P410, P510, P710, P910, any W-2100 P520 and any first-generation Scalable P720 or P920. Broadcom is silent on the W-2200 and names no Threadripper PRO, so we will not say what ESX 9 does with a P620; our Proxmox article has no such floor.
• Where Lenovo's paperwork is thinner than a rival's. HP publishes a graphics-watt ceiling per power supply for every Z tower; Lenovo publishes nothing for the P520. Dell sells a user-installable 950 W upgrade for the Precision 5820, $149.99 in September 2026 per our Precision article; Lenovo publishes no equivalent. And a P520 is four DDR4 channels, so bandwidth-bound work wants the P620 — which we do not have.
• A factory warranty, current ISV certification or a forward firmware promise. Ours is our own one-year warranty, extendable to five, not Lenovo's. If that is contractual, buy new — our buying guide works the same decision from the workload end.

Two traps that are ours, not Lenovo's. Our clearance tree is mis-filed in two places — the clearance P720 category contains a P920, the clearance P920 category a P520 — so trust the model name in a product title over the category. And two complete P520 configurations name no graphics card; no Xeon here has integrated graphics.

What are the Lenovo ThinkStation P520 specs?

One FCLGA2066 socket on Intel C422, a single Xeon W-2100 or W-2200, announced January 2018. Eight DIMM slots over four channels, registered ECC only, to 512 GB: DDR4-2666 with a W-2100, DDR4-2933 from the W-2225 up. Five PCIe 3.0 slots plus one PCI slot, two of them x16 at 75 W. Power supply 690, 900 or 1000 W, all 92% Platinum. Discrete TPM 2.0. 33 litre tower, two flex bays.

What is the difference between the ThinkStation P520 and the P520c?

Different machines, not two trims of one. The P520 is a 33 litre tower with eight DIMM slots, a 512 GB ceiling, six expansion slots and a 690, 900 or 1000 W supply; the P520c a 25 litre, 14.5 kg box with four DIMM slots, a 256 GB ceiling and a 500 or 625 W supply. Both take the same Xeon W-2100 and W-2200 processors. The P520 succeeds the P510, the P520c the P410.

When were the Lenovo ThinkStation P520, P620, P720 and P920 released?

Lenovo's PSREF changelog dates the P920 and P720 to September 2017 and the P520 and P520c to January 2018. The P620 was announced on July 14, 2020, available from September 2020, with a 5000WX refresh on March 8, 2022. Earlier: the P500, P700 and P900 on August 12, 2014; the P710 and P910 on April 5, 2016, the P410 and P510 that June.

Can the Lenovo ThinkStation P520 run Windows 11?

Yes. The Xeon W-2100 and W-2200 series are on Microsoft's general Windows 11 supported Intel processors list, the P520 and P520c ship discrete TPM 2.0, and both appear on Lenovo's upgrade list and its 24H2 list. They are absent from the 25H2 list, but that page states it is a representative list and that upgrades are also supported for older systems within Lenovo's support period of five years past end of production.

Which ThinkStation is the quietest?

By Lenovo's own declared figures, the dual-socket P920: 15.8 dB sound pressure at the operator position at idle, 16.7 dB operating, from its ECO declaration of May 18, 2022. The P720 follows at 18.0 dB; the loudest are the P360 Tower at 33.7 dB and the P620 at 32.6 dB. Lenovo does not state the configuration measured, so these compare well with each other and only loosely with HP's.

What power supply does the ThinkStation P520 have, and what does the P920 have?

The P520 shipped with a choice of three — 690, 900 or 1000 W, all 92% Platinum — and the P720 has the same three; the P520c has 500 or 625 W. The P920 has exactly one, 1400 W, limited by Lenovo's footnote to 1125 watts in countries with input under 115 V. Lenovo publishes no graphics-watt ceiling, only a watt figure per PCIe slot.

How much memory does the ThinkStation P620 take, and how many channels?

Eight DDR4 slots on eight channels, registered ECC at DDR4-3200, up to 1 TB using eight 128 GB modules — one module per channel, where the P520 is four channels across eight slots. Note that 128 GB DDR4 registered modules are a specialist part in 2026, so 1 TB is a specification rather than a realistic used configuration.