For $600 the Minisforum MS-R1 gives you 64GB DDR5 ECC, 12 cores, dual 10GbE, a real PCIe 4.0 x8 slot, M.2 NVMe, Pi-compatible 40-pin GPIO, and actual UEFI boot. It runs Debian and Proxmox/KVM.
I’ve read that the CPU is trash compared to intel/amd in performance and in TDP, but you can’t build a mini pc/server on intel/amd right now for thaf price with that amount of RAM.
Even just buying the 64GB ddr5 RAM as sticks will be like over 800$…
In the low budget range you can go with a Pi 5 16GB which is now ~$300. Add PSU, case, NVMe HAT, PCIe HAT and you’re at $500+. It’s way too expensive for what you get, compared to spending a bit more and going with minisforum.
Yeah you can get old used boxes with that amount of RAM for maybe the same price, but they’ll such 200W and electricity is expensive where I live.
My current pine64 soquartz cluster over the past 5 years has been dying node by node and I can’t run anything more demanding on it (like game servers or local AI). It cost me about 600$ back then with 5x blade + nvme + soquartz module, a poe switch and a case with fans. Kinda seems like a bad deal now, I’m stuck with all the docker swarm issues and the bad cpu cores and max 8gb ram per node. Oh and it draws 52W. If the minisforum 12W TDP is correct, I will save over 100$ per year on electricity costs alone.
Maybe i’m biased and trying to justify my own purchase … let me know if I’m wrong about it being good value.
I’ve had two different Minisforum mini PCs. Each one of them failed. One was one I purchased which was replaced with a different model when it died one morning. Then the replacement died after a few weeks of use.
Their customer service and shipping services were awful. It was like pulling teeth to get them to do anything.
Their stuff always sounds good on paper but I had nothing but miserable experiences. Not telling you to avoid but I just wanted to share my pain.
If you don’t mind me asking, which model did you have these issues with? I’m sorry to hear you had a bad experience.
The UM560 was my first device, the one I actually purchased.
The NAB6 was the one they took forever to send me as a replacement. It died within a week.
Getting my UM560 replaced took ~50 emails.
They tried to charge me the difference between units even though I was under warranty. It wasn’t my fault they didn’t have any more UM560s.
Then they tried to charge me a “depreciation charge”.
I won’t do business with them again after their horrible customer service.
Seems indeed relatively good value for money, but how is the mainline Linux kernel support for that SoC?
Edit: also in the early reviews people found some strangely high idle power consumption, which really isn’t good for a home server.
they seem to ship their own kernel, but I’ll try when it arrives later today
Yikes. If there’s no mainline support you’ll be stuck on whatever version the vendor gives you.
I’ve downgraded my server from 1st gen i7 10 GB RAM (don’t ask) to Core 2 Duo 4 GB with the same load and barely felt it. my entire infra including desktop, laptopS, tablet, phoneS, etc costs like a third of this “missed value”.
not shitting on your choices, but positing that the price-gouging retail market is all there is, kinda disingenuous; there’s sooo much stuff being discarded although perfectly usable.
like, I couldn’t bear the super-expensive raspberries while they were in the $50 range, let alone now. marketplaces are awash in busted laptops, with way better value and performance. discarded corpo desktops can house cheap HDD and run 24/7 for eons. etc.
10 GB RAM (don’t ask)
I wanna know
Minisforum gets a ton a hype. Nothing they make gets slept on.
You said it’s trash because of performance. That’s not the whole story, it’s trash because the CIX chip causes a list of goofy issues that the engineers never solved. This includes power issues but also other things that will pop up and make things much harder than they should be. It’s cheap because they’re getting rid of their year-old stock that predates most of the RAM price increases.
If don’t think you will be able to get it run everything you have in mind. I don’t think it will be near 12W either.
