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Minisforum Stuffs Entire Arm Homelab in the MS-R1
- mcny 10mo agoMy minisforum mini PC is dead and useless. I will never, ever recommend anyone to buy a minisforum again. Please do not buy a minisforum. And it wasn't just me. https://old.reddit.com/r/MiniPCs/comments/1ocvjby/minisforum_um780xtx_dead/nkpp4gi/ https://old.reddit.com/r/MiniPCs/comments/1ocvjby/minisforum...
- cout 10mo agoSame here. Did yours have a fan or was it fanless?
- mcny 10mo agoIt has a fan. I bought it from Amazon and it has been over a year but when I emailed them, I got no response at all.
- bhouston 10mo agoI've owned a couple and Minisforum has generally been amazing.
- porphyra 10mo agoSame, I have a fairly positive experience with minisforum.
- d3Xt3r 10mo agoI can't speak for the Intel ones but I hear the AMD Zen 4 and later ones have been solid. I have a UM780 XTX that I've been using in a homelab setup and it's been rock solid. Zero issues with Linux (Arch btw), zero hardware issues after nearly 2 years of 24x7 operation.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- g947o 10mo agoI think minisforum products are generally decent, but there are things that give me pauses. I had a mini PC that would sometimes briefly show black screens followed by "AMD driver timeout" issues. I emailed their support, who instructed me to play with a few BIOS settings (slightly weird), and eventually asked me to start a warranty replacement. The emails were not tracked by any ticket system, just as regular emails, and the shipping address was a residential address in California. All of this feels slightly unprofessional, and the residential address thing is almost alarming. But in the end, the issue got addressed, so whatever. The overall service definitely cannot possibly match Intel with their NUCs or Apple products, not a surprise. But the actual machines are ok. If your mini PC died within warranty period, I don't see why you cannot do warranty returns. Otherwise, you just had bad luck, just like what could happen with many other devices from other manufacturers.
- m00x 10mo agoI got a defective MS-01 and the return process was smooth and they paid for everything. I got a full refund even after the Amazon refund window expired. I have a MS-A1 and a MS-A2 now and both have been serving massive web traffic for the past 8 months with 0 issues.
- vachina 10mo agoThese Chinese mini PCs are generally quite unreliable. I have one Minisforum that had the HDMI glitch out periodically and another that would reboot on high MEM load. And the stock SSD died without any warning. I relegated them to a NAS role and at low loads they’re ok.
- Havoc 10mo agoYeah I don't mind a ~250ish gamble on aliexpress but 500+ minipcs is above my risk tolerance. At that level I'd rather DIY a desktop sized build where I can troubleshoot individual components
- futuraperdita 10mo agoHaving bought other systems in the MS-line, these boxes are heavy on cool homelab specs but aren't all that reliable and dealing with Minisforum for support is abysmal. I ended up moving back to old enterprise hardware (TinyMiniMicro or rackmounted gear). I don't recommend purchasing these systems if you're looking for anything more than a novelty; they're not any better than buying one of the random AliExpress mini PCs.
- jauntywundrkind 10mo agoI still bought my 795s7 (a cheap 16-core MoDT (mobile on desktop) zen4 box) anyways, but accepting that I would probably never get bios updates ever was a hard pill to swallow. I haven't had to deal with support for anything defective, but support as in available bios updates being so so so spotty is really unfortunate. AMD is talking about replacing closed AGESA BIOS with open OpenSIL bios some day, and maybe perhaps possibly it means end users get some chance to maintain & upgrade bios themselves, eventually, possibly. Given how some vendors seem uninterested in doing the work themselves, this sliver of a hope would be nice to see happen.
- amitprasad 10mo agoHow is the 795s7? What do you put it to work on? Just sprung for one at a good price.
- sidewndr46 10mo agoI have the BD795M with an RTX 3090. It's a good desktop and gaming machine if you're looking for a compact build. Support is abysmal
- sidewndr46 10mo agoI have the BD795M, the support is non existent and the BIOS updates are questionable. There exists a BIOS update but I've read it breaks more than it fixes. At current the temperature control of the fans is just abysmal. I can live with that for now.
- bhouston 10mo agoI really like Minisforum in general and the current generation of AMD-powered Mini PCs. I have one as a media PC and I replaced my dad's desktop with one. They are cheap, fast and silent. I was thinking of getting a high end AMD one as a replacement for my daughter's aging gaming PC, although as of this week I am thinking of waiting for Steam Machine. This ARM machine seems a bit slow (I would have suggested a new Qualcomm CPU, some of them are crazy fast) but it is nice to see a major Mini PC manufacturer getting into the ARM space.
- SG- 10mo agothe performance and power usage is pretty bad on it. for $50 more you can get a Mac mini M4 that blows it out of the water.
- znpy 10mo agoSupposedly that could be fixable with a bios/firmware update… but there’s no guarantee that will ever happen
- geerlingguy 10mo agoAnd note that Radxa launched their O6 with the same SoC earlier this year, and they haven't brought down idle power consumption either. There's also the Orange Pi 6 Plus, and the Radxa O6N with the same SoC, they would all benefit from the power issues on this chip being resolved. Not sure if it'll happen.
- porphyra 10mo agoThere has got to be some firmware bugs causing high power usage, but also the CIX CPU is fabbed on TSMC 6 nm process which is a couple generations old.
- bhouston 10mo agoI think that is a result of this being their first entry into the ARM market. IT takes a while to get all the hardware and drivers in sync. Hopefully they don't give up and also upgrade to a better CPU.
- ndiddy 10mo agoThe performance on this machine is similar to the Snapdragon 8cx from Microsoft’s first big Windows on ARM push a few years ago (so nowhere near even the 4 year old Apple M1) while the idle power draw is similar to an x86 computer. If they’re not targeting either performance or power efficiency, I’m not sure who would be interested in this computer. I’d say that if you can tolerate Mac OS X for your use case, a used Mac Mini would be a far better choice.
- geerlingguy 10mo agoThe one niche they could hit I think is Arm devs who need an Arm machine, want to run Linux (and not rely on Asahi, which still only runs on M1/M2), and want some hardware expansion (PCIe, M.2, dual 10 GbE, etc.). That's a lot smaller than the general homelab niche, or those who want a small, efficient, quiet computer for some purpose. As I mentioned in the post, the M4 mini is only $50-100 more (though RAM upgrades quickly negate the price comparison past the base model), and it's many times more efficient—and powerful. And while you can't do everything with Thunderbolt... there are some halfway-decent external PCIe docks you can use with some devices on macOS now.
- Aurornis 10mo ago> That's a lot smaller than the general homelab niche, or those who want a small, efficient, quiet computer for some purpose. The homelab niche always surprises me for how many people are willing and able to buy hardware they don't really need. I'm sure it's still a small niche, but I wouldn't be surprised if minisforum was selling a lot of devices to homelab builders looking for the next toy to add to their collection.
- bluGill 10mo agoI don't understand this niche. Linux does not need to run on an ARM machine for almost anything. Linux has very good cross platform abilities and so you can build and test on whatever CPU (presumably x86, but any CPU will do), and then when you are confident that everything works cross compile for ARM and things will almost always work. You also have qemu which is slow but plenty good for running some code where this matters. You do need a little testing because ARM is different, but the odds that are are doing something where it matters are low. I've been doing the above for years and only found two things. First was a bug in GCC (already fixed in a newer version by the time I traced it down). Second was x86 has a strong stronger memory model for sharing data between threads - hopefully you are not doing that (I only hit it because I maintain our cross thread message system). You also can't test anything that uses GPIO type things - but this computer has different setup and so you couldn't with this anyway. (and you should abstract your GPIO for testing anyway so this because a small test case when you do switch to real hardware)
- Aurornis 10mo agoI consider myself relatively adventurous with ARM SBCs, but I don't see the draw for this box. $500 for the 32GB of RAM version is a lot to ask, especially with no path to upgrade the RAM and coming from a company known to have mediocre quality control and difficult warranty support. I always appreciate Jeff Geerling's willingness to do in-depth reviews and comparisons. In this case I would have liked to see a cheap x86-64 option in the ranks, though. I understand that it's supposed to be about ARM and low power, but with this box drawing 17W at idle and coming with a $500 price tag for 32GB RAM and no storage, we might as well start comparing to x86 options in the same price and power envelope.
- midtake 10mo agoRunning Linux directly on ARM is the dream, but this looks slow. So for now I'm stuck with UTM VM's on the Mac.
- wmf 10mo agoDGX Spark but don't ask the price.
- daviddever23box 10mo agoIt would be great to have a full Snapdragon X Elite-based box, with working Wi-Fi drivers. That said, it feels as if the fragmentation in the non-Windows space ends up being worse for non-Intel/AMD platforms, both commercially and from a devrel perspective. Qualcomm and Apple still have the best arm64 platforms above a Raspberry Pi.
- LeoPanthera 10mo agoI bought an MS-01 (the earlier Intel version of this) for homelab use and I don't know what was wrong with it, but Debian just refused to reboot on it. It would boot, but not reboot, freezing up every time. I replaced it with an Asus NUC, which came with a non-functional BIOS, but was eventually coerced into working after forcibly flashing it. I haven't had a lot of luck with mini PCs.
- mperham 10mo agoMore than anything, reading this review acts as an ad for the Mac Mini M4. $600, with performance and efficiency well beyond the other options.
- arjie 10mo agoThis was my experience looking for an ARM Linux machine. The Apple M-series processors were so far ahead of anything else currently available on the market for the price. And the Ampere stuff is in an Epyc class of price with not an Epyc class of performance.
- lostlogin 10mo agoThat power usage is abysmal. I can’t see that it states how the draw was measured, but on a mini my average usage is 6.4w over a month, and that includes all usage. I moved from a nuc 9 which was using about 70w.
- immibis 10mo agoI don't like the word "homelab". Some people have a lab at home (computing, optics, chemistry, wherever) - that's fine. But this is just... a computer.