Rare Google Stadia DevKit from Japan: Custom AMD + Xeon Build Tear-Down
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Date: 2022-12-06
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Comments and reviews: 15
AaronShenghao
I think it's a bit missing the point when judging the non-ATX standard connectors.
To be fair, those non-ATX standard parts are terrible if this is a consumer-centric product.
But this is intended to be an enterprise product. Who won't go buy consumer power supplies, motherboards, GPUs to upgrade. They probably have service agreements with Lenovo, shipping the computers back to them and getting new computers as upgrades. An example would be large universities where computers are upgraded every 2-3 years.
The returned computer might well sold cheaply to high schools and libraries. This is the concept called circular economy, where product are returned to companies to be remanufactured to like-new standards and resold.
From a Sustainable Manufacturing stand point, the workstation have excellent design, you can easily and quickly remanufactur the computers. Swap out the front panel (easy to wear out), motherboard (easy to become obsolete), and power supply (probably need upgrade or out of warranty). You don't have to worry about cable management aside from plugging in the GPU ones.
Retrospectively, a bad design would be having the front panel as part of the motherboard, like the Dell/HP consumer PC GN took apart before. (Acer, and Lenovo's budget ideaCenter is the same, but their Predator, Legion line and HP's Omen are using mostly standard parts, Dell's Alienware have no excuse there)
I wonder if Dell and HP's workstation will have a different design.
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I think it's a bit missing the point when judging the non-ATX standard connectors.
To be fair, those non-ATX standard parts are terrible if this is a consumer-centric product.
But this is intended to be an enterprise product. Who won't go buy consumer power supplies, motherboards, GPUs to upgrade. They probably have service agreements with Lenovo, shipping the computers back to them and getting new computers as upgrades. An example would be large universities where computers are upgraded every 2-3 years.
The returned computer might well sold cheaply to high schools and libraries. This is the concept called circular economy, where product are returned to companies to be remanufactured to like-new standards and resold.
From a Sustainable Manufacturing stand point, the workstation have excellent design, you can easily and quickly remanufactur the computers. Swap out the front panel (easy to wear out), motherboard (easy to become obsolete), and power supply (probably need upgrade or out of warranty). You don't have to worry about cable management aside from plugging in the GPU ones.
Retrospectively, a bad design would be having the front panel as part of the motherboard, like the Dell/HP consumer PC GN took apart before. (Acer, and Lenovo's budget ideaCenter is the same, but their Predator, Legion line and HP's Omen are using mostly standard parts, Dell's Alienware have no excuse there)
I wonder if Dell and HP's workstation will have a different design.
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Puzzle
As someone who's worked with these as their job, they're really easy to work with and work on. If you are unsure how to work on these, Lenovo has tons of guides available on these as well as their other business machines. As many fellow IT persons have explained - the modularity for these machines is top priority, and being able to swap out the PSU or front I/O on the fly is a great asset. Additionally, the use of circuit boards as opposed to cables saves a lot of time as we do not need to manage it all to get a machine back up and running after a component failed. On top of that, it saves a lot on rubber and copper for cables that are unnecessary or just go completely unused. In that sense I'd say this is a pretty environmentally conscious design.
I dunno, the way this was handled here as just OEM sludge without recognising its environment is kinda leaving a bad taste in my mouth.
I'm not gonna lie, it was kind of baffling to see you try to take it apart without any prior knowledge (especially without the manual which, as you explained, this is a run-of-the-mill Lenovo business workstation with nothing really special about it minus the developer software) - the documentation is easily available and found using the service tag that's still on the machine. Even if this was somehow an OEM specific Stadia unit, you already have found the corresponding unit (the P520) this was based on - why didn't you take it apart with that manual in hand...?
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As someone who's worked with these as their job, they're really easy to work with and work on. If you are unsure how to work on these, Lenovo has tons of guides available on these as well as their other business machines. As many fellow IT persons have explained - the modularity for these machines is top priority, and being able to swap out the PSU or front I/O on the fly is a great asset. Additionally, the use of circuit boards as opposed to cables saves a lot of time as we do not need to manage it all to get a machine back up and running after a component failed. On top of that, it saves a lot on rubber and copper for cables that are unnecessary or just go completely unused. In that sense I'd say this is a pretty environmentally conscious design.
I dunno, the way this was handled here as just OEM sludge without recognising its environment is kinda leaving a bad taste in my mouth.
I'm not gonna lie, it was kind of baffling to see you try to take it apart without any prior knowledge (especially without the manual which, as you explained, this is a run-of-the-mill Lenovo business workstation with nothing really special about it minus the developer software) - the documentation is easily available and found using the service tag that's still on the machine. Even if this was somehow an OEM specific Stadia unit, you already have found the corresponding unit (the P520) this was based on - why didn't you take it apart with that manual in hand...?
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Daniel
Steve, I have to disagree for once with your criticisms on Lenovo's design. This is a corporate deployment type machine, where it has to be field serviceable by technicians or internal IT departments without having to take the machine to a service bay. Everything that can fail or be damaged needs to be modular, so when a trouble ticket is issued, the tech can come equipped with the parts necessary to swap out. In field service, every minute counts -- either in user downtime and/or technician time. That means diagnostic time has to be minimized. If a front I/O USB port is not working, it's more efficient to swap the module out instead of tinkering with the wiring and probably damaging the extremely fragile USB 3.0 header. The PSU is similar to a server design, where if it fails, you pull the module out and slide in a new one and not have to deal with unplugging and replugging a bunch of connectors and then worrying about cable management. Every time you introduce a screw, you increase the odds that there will be an accidental short from one left in. Lenovo is descended from IBM's PC division, and this design rationale is decades old-- IBM PS/2 computers were some of the first toolless modular machines designed specifically for field service in the same manner. Decades of corporate deployment experience to validate and refine the design.
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Steve, I have to disagree for once with your criticisms on Lenovo's design. This is a corporate deployment type machine, where it has to be field serviceable by technicians or internal IT departments without having to take the machine to a service bay. Everything that can fail or be damaged needs to be modular, so when a trouble ticket is issued, the tech can come equipped with the parts necessary to swap out. In field service, every minute counts -- either in user downtime and/or technician time. That means diagnostic time has to be minimized. If a front I/O USB port is not working, it's more efficient to swap the module out instead of tinkering with the wiring and probably damaging the extremely fragile USB 3.0 header. The PSU is similar to a server design, where if it fails, you pull the module out and slide in a new one and not have to deal with unplugging and replugging a bunch of connectors and then worrying about cable management. Every time you introduce a screw, you increase the odds that there will be an accidental short from one left in. Lenovo is descended from IBM's PC division, and this design rationale is decades old-- IBM PS/2 computers were some of the first toolless modular machines designed specifically for field service in the same manner. Decades of corporate deployment experience to validate and refine the design.
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Friedrich
I have to disagree with Steve here on the system design part of the commentary. In system design such as this it follows the right ideas and goes in directions that if followed through all the way would make a very compelling offering. Reducing wire and moving to board to board and card edge connectors simplifies the design massively for production enabling a noticable delivered cost reduction at time of assembly. Further the slide in front panel if dissembled as intended is very simple and replaceable making for quick swapping as others have pointed out. I agree that if viewed through the light of consumer diy desktops it's not great. But in reverse I would love if some of these features where standardized and introduced into diy PC's. Where old standards are still prevalent mostly for the fact that they are amortized and available. But better solutions exist and held back by standardization mostly imo. In total I think this commentary was fair from a certain viewpoint. But of the design goals that this system had I think it did it pretty well and maybe even didn't go far enough with some things like eliminating cables. If you wish to make good OEM design you would have to start from the beginning and introduce these goals during the design phase where I hope modern efforts such repairability are being heard now.
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I have to disagree with Steve here on the system design part of the commentary. In system design such as this it follows the right ideas and goes in directions that if followed through all the way would make a very compelling offering. Reducing wire and moving to board to board and card edge connectors simplifies the design massively for production enabling a noticable delivered cost reduction at time of assembly. Further the slide in front panel if dissembled as intended is very simple and replaceable making for quick swapping as others have pointed out. I agree that if viewed through the light of consumer diy desktops it's not great. But in reverse I would love if some of these features where standardized and introduced into diy PC's. Where old standards are still prevalent mostly for the fact that they are amortized and available. But better solutions exist and held back by standardization mostly imo. In total I think this commentary was fair from a certain viewpoint. But of the design goals that this system had I think it did it pretty well and maybe even didn't go far enough with some things like eliminating cables. If you wish to make good OEM design you would have to start from the beginning and introduce these goals during the design phase where I hope modern efforts such repairability are being heard now.
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oldsk00l
I totally get the asinine feeling design approach, but as commented elsewhere, a corporation doesn't give AF. I've worked on enterprise routers and switches, in addition to high end workstations with stuff like the PSU that makes you cringe internally. A company just looks purely at metrics and it's 100% function over form with no elegance whatsoever. In big pharma, engineering (think large architectural firm) or any business using high end visualization and/or modelling tech, it's like this everywhere. They will even go through the trouble to make the CPU as quick-modular as possible. In Dell Poweredge servers I've had a CPU assembly module that's almost just as quick-swappable as the GPU in this system was. It made me cringe right to my core because of the absolute garbage TIM it came prepackaged with, but I was able to change the CPU's and heatsinks in under 15 seconds once the system is powered off. Server slides on the rails out, pop the chassis, and the plastic levers and pull tabs are there for everything.
It's far from pretty or elegant, but it gets the job done and it gets it done right TF now....to hell with the PSU costing 2x more, a large enterprise will just place the order for like 400 to keep onhand for break-fixes and just go nuts with it.
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I totally get the asinine feeling design approach, but as commented elsewhere, a corporation doesn't give AF. I've worked on enterprise routers and switches, in addition to high end workstations with stuff like the PSU that makes you cringe internally. A company just looks purely at metrics and it's 100% function over form with no elegance whatsoever. In big pharma, engineering (think large architectural firm) or any business using high end visualization and/or modelling tech, it's like this everywhere. They will even go through the trouble to make the CPU as quick-modular as possible. In Dell Poweredge servers I've had a CPU assembly module that's almost just as quick-swappable as the GPU in this system was. It made me cringe right to my core because of the absolute garbage TIM it came prepackaged with, but I was able to change the CPU's and heatsinks in under 15 seconds once the system is powered off. Server slides on the rails out, pop the chassis, and the plastic levers and pull tabs are there for everything.
It's far from pretty or elegant, but it gets the job done and it gets it done right TF now....to hell with the PSU costing 2x more, a large enterprise will just place the order for like 400 to keep onhand for break-fixes and just go nuts with it.
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Farley
I'm seeing a lot of IT based justifications and defensiveness for OEMs in these comments regarding Steve's criticisms. Mainly that designing this way can be fast and easy and serviceable in a very specific enterprise environment and therefore criticism isn't justified, yada yada.
Here's the thing, IT staff... It can all be hot swap, serviceable, quick, easy, etcetera, while ALSO following a standard. We could have standard front IO connectors. We could have a standard for slotted power supplies and motherboard power distribution. We could have literally every other perceived benefit here in enterprise, only standardized, where a third parties can also make parts that work, and, heaven forbid, compete.
Instead, we have ten different walled gardens that are mutually exclusive and inevitably bound for a trash heap every few years because, by design, they have no ability to be serviced or repurposed as soon as the OEM says time's up.
Maybe don't inadvertently push corporate nonsense, anti-consumer strategy, and blatant anti-environmentalism just because you incorrectly believe it has to be this way to make your 9-to-5 easier.
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I'm seeing a lot of IT based justifications and defensiveness for OEMs in these comments regarding Steve's criticisms. Mainly that designing this way can be fast and easy and serviceable in a very specific enterprise environment and therefore criticism isn't justified, yada yada.
Here's the thing, IT staff... It can all be hot swap, serviceable, quick, easy, etcetera, while ALSO following a standard. We could have standard front IO connectors. We could have a standard for slotted power supplies and motherboard power distribution. We could have literally every other perceived benefit here in enterprise, only standardized, where a third parties can also make parts that work, and, heaven forbid, compete.
Instead, we have ten different walled gardens that are mutually exclusive and inevitably bound for a trash heap every few years because, by design, they have no ability to be serviced or repurposed as soon as the OEM says time's up.
Maybe don't inadvertently push corporate nonsense, anti-consumer strategy, and blatant anti-environmentalism just because you incorrectly believe it has to be this way to make your 9-to-5 easier.
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Alan
You say asinine, I say quality of life :). I love this design for a fleet computer. Terrible for home consumer and DELL should rightly be called out for putting this sort of thing in their Alienware lineup, but damn so cool in a large environment.
PSU swap whilst its still on someones desk? Just plug it in, no lugging it back to base, no untangling all the wires, no spending ages scraping knuckles trying to get the cables in? Yes please. Onsite IT staff have to deal with a lot of varied problems (mostly software) and may not be hardware guys, this makes it easy if you have spares or a CRU gets couriered in or even (worst nightmare) it's a remote office and you have to talk someone through it. If you have the vendor sending in a field engineer they can be in and out in 5 minutes and onto the next call and not trying to get everything back together (and maybe making mistakes as they know they have to get back on the road).
Only thing I'd change is making all the 'push to release' sliders a different colour so it is obvious which are the release tabs. I think that's something I used to see on DELL precsions.
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You say asinine, I say quality of life :). I love this design for a fleet computer. Terrible for home consumer and DELL should rightly be called out for putting this sort of thing in their Alienware lineup, but damn so cool in a large environment.
PSU swap whilst its still on someones desk? Just plug it in, no lugging it back to base, no untangling all the wires, no spending ages scraping knuckles trying to get the cables in? Yes please. Onsite IT staff have to deal with a lot of varied problems (mostly software) and may not be hardware guys, this makes it easy if you have spares or a CRU gets couriered in or even (worst nightmare) it's a remote office and you have to talk someone through it. If you have the vendor sending in a field engineer they can be in and out in 5 minutes and onto the next call and not trying to get everything back together (and maybe making mistakes as they know they have to get back on the road).
Only thing I'd change is making all the 'push to release' sliders a different colour so it is obvious which are the release tabs. I think that's something I used to see on DELL precsions.
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Mike
Steve complaining about but also complimenting about IBM Carolina(s) modular chassis continued by Lenovo. V320/V340 'dual' is that the coherent parallel bridge port on top of the card? IBM modular chassis design is always better than most of the pre-built you have looked at I can assure you even now at Lenovo on quality control and enterprise ease of maintenance. Not a DC ow workstation card? These cards can be paired what are u talking about? PSU quality assurance on compatible chassis modular but yes I'm not convinced. It's all very modular. Start think mountain bike system integration and then Steve you and Patrick might comprehend modular PC. Yea head tube compatibility is always interesting discovery. W-2175 L3 cache starved on 14/12 but cloud/business/enterprise are all standardized on XSL/XCL waiting for whatever the next high volume x86 or other platform standard is. mb
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Steve complaining about but also complimenting about IBM Carolina(s) modular chassis continued by Lenovo. V320/V340 'dual' is that the coherent parallel bridge port on top of the card? IBM modular chassis design is always better than most of the pre-built you have looked at I can assure you even now at Lenovo on quality control and enterprise ease of maintenance. Not a DC ow workstation card? These cards can be paired what are u talking about? PSU quality assurance on compatible chassis modular but yes I'm not convinced. It's all very modular. Start think mountain bike system integration and then Steve you and Patrick might comprehend modular PC. Yea head tube compatibility is always interesting discovery. W-2175 L3 cache starved on 14/12 but cloud/business/enterprise are all standardized on XSL/XCL waiting for whatever the next high volume x86 or other platform standard is. mb
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Strangerdanger101
I'm so disappointed in this video. It really shows Steve's lack of knowledge when it comes to enterprise workstations and why they are build the way that they are. Almost all his complaints about the issues were ones that he himself created right from the start with the latch (pull up like a car door handle). The front I/O tray literally pops out in 5 seconds if you release the latch on top of expansion bay cage. Nothing in that workstation requires the removal of the front cover to service.
Steve reviewing this like a cheap consumer pre-built from Walmart is pretty sad. Lot of engineering went into this to make it an enterprise workstation that is easy to configure and service and it sucks that it's overshadowed by his ignorance and failure to understand the product.
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I'm so disappointed in this video. It really shows Steve's lack of knowledge when it comes to enterprise workstations and why they are build the way that they are. Almost all his complaints about the issues were ones that he himself created right from the start with the latch (pull up like a car door handle). The front I/O tray literally pops out in 5 seconds if you release the latch on top of expansion bay cage. Nothing in that workstation requires the removal of the front cover to service.
Steve reviewing this like a cheap consumer pre-built from Walmart is pretty sad. Lot of engineering went into this to make it an enterprise workstation that is easy to configure and service and it sucks that it's overshadowed by his ignorance and failure to understand the product.
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notlekrut
This whole rant is out of touch. Feel like Steve is missing the point, or is just not knowledgeable in workstations and even servers to a degree... although a lot of this is proprietary(even more so in servers honestly), it's all for a purpose. Incredibly fast maintenance and component swap that honestly just makes this whole rant sound silly. There's needs to be as little downtime as possible. And honestly, WE WISH some of these things were industry standard, let's not kid ourselves. We only complain because it isn't, but in their environment, workstations and servers have a purpose. And again, if you think just because it's proprietary it's harder to service(??) you missed the whole point of these type of systems.
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This whole rant is out of touch. Feel like Steve is missing the point, or is just not knowledgeable in workstations and even servers to a degree... although a lot of this is proprietary(even more so in servers honestly), it's all for a purpose. Incredibly fast maintenance and component swap that honestly just makes this whole rant sound silly. There's needs to be as little downtime as possible. And honestly, WE WISH some of these things were industry standard, let's not kid ourselves. We only complain because it isn't, but in their environment, workstations and servers have a purpose. And again, if you think just because it's proprietary it's harder to service(??) you missed the whole point of these type of systems.
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bunter6
This is a such a poor teardown video, all you've done is highlight you don't understand the complexities of producing a product for the professional market. Almost everything you complained about is actually a plus for people who have to support users in large corporate environments, modularity and uniformity are key, nobody servicing these wants to mess around with thumbscrews (case side) cables (psu & I/O bay) etc. They want to be in and out as quickly as possible as they have a user standing over them wanting it fixed because they can't do my job & they have another 10 support tickets to get to right after this one.
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This is a such a poor teardown video, all you've done is highlight you don't understand the complexities of producing a product for the professional market. Almost everything you complained about is actually a plus for people who have to support users in large corporate environments, modularity and uniformity are key, nobody servicing these wants to mess around with thumbscrews (case side) cables (psu & I/O bay) etc. They want to be in and out as quickly as possible as they have a user standing over them wanting it fixed because they can't do my job & they have another 10 support tickets to get to right after this one.
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MrXenoOfficial
I'm not saying this is justifired for lenovo to do or any OEM.
Most of us that buy these simply don't care and don't change stuff out inside at all.
It will live for 3-5 years and get changed and zero service will have been made to it.
Most of us that buy these for company simply don't care about how to take it apart. This is a workstation made for work and nothing else.
It just need to work day in and out and if there is a problem we will send it to service and get it back when they fixed it.
I don't get why this is such a big issues when the market for these pc's don't care and never will
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I'm not saying this is justifired for lenovo to do or any OEM.
Most of us that buy these simply don't care and don't change stuff out inside at all.
It will live for 3-5 years and get changed and zero service will have been made to it.
Most of us that buy these for company simply don't care about how to take it apart. This is a workstation made for work and nothing else.
It just need to work day in and out and if there is a problem we will send it to service and get it back when they fixed it.
I don't get why this is such a big issues when the market for these pc's don't care and never will
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sokar
On a consumer system, I get the critism on not using standard parts. But the business world and workstations work differently. They are not serviced by the user, but at best the companies IT department, if not the manufacturer itself. Having everything plug and unplug fast is critical, as it safes time for the person servicing, which is literally money. If you exchange 10 power supplies a day, you don't want to replug all the cables over and over again, having just a new one plug into the case is much faster. Time is literally money in the business world, saving even a small amount amasses quickly.
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On a consumer system, I get the critism on not using standard parts. But the business world and workstations work differently. They are not serviced by the user, but at best the companies IT department, if not the manufacturer itself. Having everything plug and unplug fast is critical, as it safes time for the person servicing, which is literally money. If you exchange 10 power supplies a day, you don't want to replug all the cables over and over again, having just a new one plug into the case is much faster. Time is literally money in the business world, saving even a small amount amasses quickly.
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MicHaeL
I kinda like quirky OEM designs at times. Like I have this old DELL Dimension from the Pentium 4 days, and the way you d open is by putting the tower on its side and it would just fold open, which is actually still cool.
There s also a Compaq desktop case I have, and by that I mean an actual horizontal desktop one, which also has a feature like that. Although in turn it has a very annoying cover that s difficult to remove and put back, but oh well I just like unique cases, or at least ones that have some interesting idea.
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I kinda like quirky OEM designs at times. Like I have this old DELL Dimension from the Pentium 4 days, and the way you d open is by putting the tower on its side and it would just fold open, which is actually still cool.
There s also a Compaq desktop case I have, and by that I mean an actual horizontal desktop one, which also has a feature like that. Although in turn it has a very annoying cover that s difficult to remove and put back, but oh well I just like unique cases, or at least ones that have some interesting idea.
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Dan
Steve. You're a smart guy. But this video really showed ignorance here and you're way way way outside your wheelhouse. Workstation class computers like this are made to be serviced quickly. Having the PSU like that allows for a quick replacement. Enterprise customers would not be running to the local best buy or microcenter to get parts. They spend millions for critical SLA service. Usually within 4 hours. Unless you're just being critical just for click bait, stick to what you know.
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Steve. You're a smart guy. But this video really showed ignorance here and you're way way way outside your wheelhouse. Workstation class computers like this are made to be serviced quickly. Having the PSU like that allows for a quick replacement. Enterprise customers would not be running to the local best buy or microcenter to get parts. They spend millions for critical SLA service. Usually within 4 hours. Unless you're just being critical just for click bait, stick to what you know.
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