Can Qualcomm, Lenovo, and Microsoft come together to make a real Mac Mini competitor? The short version is that while it’s a good effort, it’s not quite there yet.

Specifications

• CPU: Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus X1P-64-100, 10-Cores @ 3.4GHz
• RAM: 32GB LPDDR5X-8448 (Soldered)
• SSD: 512GB NVMe Gen4
• GPU: Qualcomm Adreno X1-85
• NPU: Qualcomm Hexagon NPU (45 TOPS)
• Ports:
  • Front: USB-A, USB, C, 3.5mm audio jack
  • Rear: DisplayPort, HDMI, 3x USB-A, USB-C, AC power connector, Gigabit Ethernet
• OS: Windows 11 Home for ARM64

Initial Impressions

First things first, after reading PCMag’s review of this PC, I was slightly disappointed to find out it only has Gigabit (1Gbps) Ethernet. As of this writing (December 20th, 2025), PCMag still claims it has a 10Gbps Ethernet port. It doesn’t, and from what I can tell, there is no variant of this system that does.

Lenovo build quality tends to be decent, even on their lower end consumer grade systems. It feels solid, and the included stand holds it nicely. It has plenty of ports for connecting anything and everything you might want to plug into it, and the fan was never annoying.

In terms of value, 32GB of RAM at the $679 price point this thing was on sale for is excellent. But, can you actually do anything on this machine where all that RAM matters? More on that later.

But, Windows is as as Windows does, and the out of box experience is trash. Every fresh install of Windows does this thing where it requires an internet connection, spends an hour downloading updates, and reboots half a dozen times. This is absurd. Not Lenovo’s fault, but Microsoft, you need to fix this. Everyone knows I’m not an Apple fanboy by any means – after all, I have like a dozen PCs and a single Mac, but you can get your new Mac online in about five minutes, and that’s how it should be for any computer.

And that’s not the first comparison to an Apple product I’m going to make in this article, because the IdeaCentre Mini X is trying to be a direct Mac Mini competitor.

Anyway, an hour later, I was at the desktop. First things first, more updates. I know these Snapdragon-powered PCs have had a lot of updates since their inception, and as per Lenovo’s website, a new BIOS update was just done a week ago, so I went ahead and installed.

If you want to skip the next section that involves me getting very frustrated, and probably adds nothing of value to this review (unless you want to run Linux on thing thing, which I’ll tell you right now, you don’t), click here.

The OS Saga – Don’t Even Try Linux

Linux – Impossible

Originally, I bought this to use as yet another server in my homelab, because I read somewhere that Ubuntu Server 25.10 for ARM would work.

Well, it didn’t. At all. I spent hours trying to get it to install, and I was never even able to boot the installer completely. I also tried PXVirt, a Proxmox fork for ARM. That didn’t work either. So, long story short, anything but Windows on these Snapdragon X PCs is basically impossible.

Reinstalling Windows – Also Impossible

But, then it was time to try Windows again – but at this point, the original Windows 11 Home install that came on the PC wouldn’t boot, because Bitlocker didn’t appreciate the fact that I’d messed with Secure Boot during my attempts to install Linux.

And honestly, typing in a 48 digit key that I had to dig up from somewhere in my Microsoft account seemed like way too much of a hassle. Plus, I wanted Windows 11 Pro anyway (which I do have a spare license for). So, I plugged in the Windows 11 installer USB flash drive I’ve used a million times, before I realized that the standard USB installer created from the Microsoft Media Creation Tool doesn’t work on ARM systems, only standard x86 PCs.

But no problem, we’ll just use the Microsoft Windows 11 for ARM image, that should be simple – right? Nope. I tried everything. Microsoft’s command line imaging tool, Rufus, formatting the flash drive as FAT32 instead of NTFS, nothing.

So, the next thing I tried was getting recovery media from Lenovo. But, when I put my serial number into their support site, the only mention of recovery media was a big blue “Order Now” button, and I had no intention of spending a penny to reinstall my operating system.

So, I called Lenovo. After about an hour on hold, I got a “tech support agent” that didn’t even know what an ARM processor was and why a regular Windows installer wouldn’t work. They gave me a case number, and told me an advanced technician would give me a call within the next 1-3 days at some random time. By the way, they never called.

By the way, here we are a week later, and on a whim I went back to the Lenovo website. I clicked “Order Now” and was able to pick a free “Digital Download” of some sort of Recovery creator. I had never bothered trying that, as to me, Order Now implies payment. Anyway, if the Lenovo tech support person would have simply told me I could click that Order Now button and download their recovery tool for free, that would have pretty much solved my problem.

2 NVMe Slots – 0 Compatibility

My hopes and dreams of running Windows 11 Pro gone, I decided to repurpose my other desktop PC into a home server, and use this little IdeaCentre as my main desktop. And Windows 11 Home would be fine for that. So, I tried to boot back into the original Windows install.

And it didn’t work. I put in the Bitlocker key, and it seemed happy, but then the trouble continued. It boot looped, tried to do Automatic Repair, that failed, and eventually booted into the troubleshooting menu. I tried Reset this PC, and nope, that didn’t work either.

Another dozen reboots later, the Automatic Repair thing got stuck on “Connecting to network…” at which point I had a thought… what if whatever basic Windows environment didn’t support the Qualcomm Ethernet adapter? So, I plugged in a generic USB to Ethernet adapter. And hey, that made the network connection error go away, but alas, the automated repair thing still didn’t work.

But, I wasn’t going to give up that easily. I had read on PCMag’s review of the IdeaCentre Mini X that it has a second NVMe slot. So, I flashed the Windows 11 for ARM image from Microsoft’s site onto a spare NVMe SSD using a different computer (remember, at that time, I hadn’t realized you could “Order” the official recovery media for free on Lenovo’s site).

So, I took the IdeaCentre Mini X apart, put the second SSD in, and powered it on. And… it would show the BIOS splash screen, then hard shut down. Weird. I tried a different SSD, that didn’t work either. It seemed putting anything in that second NVMe slot would make it power off. Two different NVMe SSDs, no luck. If you care, the NVMe SSDs were a 128GB Patriot and a 250GB SanDisk. But, NVMe is NVMe, and it should just work.

Frustrated, I put it back together in its original configuration, plugged it back in, powered it back in, and went to go to do something else, thinking that I’m just going to return this thing and give up on it.

But next time I walked by… it had booted into the original Windows 11 install, like nothing ever happened, and it’s worked perfectly since. WTF?

The Review Part of this Review

Three days after embarking on this journey, I began using this computer as a computer, not an experiment.

I have it connected to two 4K60 monitors (4K resolution, 60Hz refresh rate), and use it for streaming video and web development work. Not a single hiccup in that time.

My workflow mainly consists of VSCode, Git, and Docker. Everything I use on a daily basis runs great on the Snapdragon chip, and most of it even has native ARM64 support. Nice!

But it’s not perfect. Like I mentioned in my previous article about the Dell Inspiron with Snapdragon laptop I also have, the biggest issue is drivers and software support when it comes to anything that could benefit from the GPU… gaming, content creation, etc.

The Adreno GPU might be OK on paper, but in reality, while it has no problem pushing pixels to my two 4K monitors when it comes to normal stuff, anything GPU-heavy performs like trash, if it even works at all. That’s fine, because I have a gaming laptop I can use for, well, gaming, but if you’re comparing this Snapdragon-powered Lenovo to its main competitor, the Mac Mini, the Mac is a far better choice.

CPU & GPU Performance

While numbers aren’t everything, benchmarks do give you an idea of how systems compare, and are a valuable tool. Let’s run Geekbench 6 on four computers, and compare their CPU scores and GPU scores. All scores were rounded to the nearest hundred.

System	Specifications	CPU Score (Single Core)	CPU Score (Multi Core)	GPU Score (OpenCL)
Lenovo IdeaCentre Mini X	Snapdragon X1P-64-100, 32GB RAM, Adreno X1-85	~2300	~12600	~20200
Dell Inspiron 15 5441	Snapdragon X1-26-100, 16GB RAM, Adreno X1-45	~2100	~10500	~9600
Acer Nitro 15″	Intel Core i5-12450H, 32GB RAM, nVidia GeForce 3050 Ti Laptop GPU	~2200	~8800	~69800
Apple MacBook Air M4 (base)	M4 10-Core CPU, 16GB RAM, M4 8-Core GPU	~3600	~14600	~36200

What does this table show us? That the Snapdragon X chips are pretty lame when it comes to single core CPU performance, and absolutely abysmal when it comes to GPU performance, but in multi core CPU workloads, which is what matters most to the average user, they are competitive.

But, keeping in mind that even the base model Mac Mini has the 10-core GPU, not the 8-core GPU of my MacBook Air, the Mac Mini would perform much, much better, than the Lenovo Mini X in literally everything. Oh, and remember, it’s cheaper.

AI Performance

So, Geekbench results were disappointing. Let’s try AI, after all, that’s been the biggest buzzword of the last two years. And this is a “Copilot+ PC,” whatever that means (hint: nothing).

Loading up Gemma3 12B in LM Studio and prompting it with “Tell me how many inches of fur your average shiba inu has” gets us as interesting result:

• Lenovo Mini X: 12.07 tokens/second
• Apple MacBook Air M4: 14.39 tokens/second

That’s… actually pretty close. Still, neither are usable for any real AI tasks, and you’re better off with a dedicated GPU, a dedicated AI server, or cloud services like Grok or ChatGPT. The NPU on the Snapdragon PC didn’t do anything, at all, BTW – 0% utilization the entire time.

So, Should You Buy it? (Probably Not)

Honestly, it’s neat that all three computers I use on a daily basis – this Lenovo IdeaCentre Mini X with the Snapdragon X Plus, my cheapo Dell Inspiron with the Snapdragon X, and my MacBook Air with M4, are ARM-based. And ARM is really is the future of computing – from servers to laptops.

But at this point, no, it probably makes no sense to pick this platform. At the “estimated value,” aka MSRP, of $899.99, this thing is dead in the water. When it’s on sale, it’s a better choice. It was $679.99 when I picked it up, and today it’s $699.99. But, despite being the cheapest way to get a name brand PC with 32GB of RAM, given that it can’t actually run the majority of the software you’d want to utilize all that memory, you’re better off either going with an x86 Lenovo mini PC, or going with a Mac Mini.

Comparing the IdeaCentre Mini X to Lenovo’s own Intel-powered IdeaCentre Mini’s, right now you can snag one with an Intel Core 7 240H, 16GB of memory, and the same 512GB of storage, for $599.99. Yes, it’s actually cheaper than our Snapdragon variant.

Or you can get the base Mac Mini M4 with 16GB of memory and 256GB of storage for $479 on sale at Best Buy right now. But even at it’s regular price of $599, it’s a better computer, albeit with less storage. Apple absolutely rips you off on upgrades – if you want the 512GB of storage, the cheapest Mini with that capacity is $799. That’s plain absurd.

But, while the Mac Mini might also have 10 ARM-based cores, real-world performance is way better. Plus, for GPU workloads like gaming, content creation, and the ever-hyped AI/ML stuff, it’s actually usable. Yes, I just said that a Mac is better for gaming than a PC. Lol, what a world we live in.

In Conclusion: Do your research, and either buy the Intel version of the IdeaCentre Mini or a Mac Mini instead. And Lenovo, not only is your website trash, but your customer service and tech support suck.