[HN Gopher] Minisforum Stuffs Entire Arm Homelab in the MS-R1
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Minisforum Stuffs Entire Arm Homelab in the MS-R1
Author : kencausey
Score : 56 points
Date : 2025-11-14 18:42 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.jeffgeerling.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.jeffgeerling.com)
| mcny wrote:
| My 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...
| bhouston wrote:
| I've owned a couple and Minisforum has generally been amazing.
| porphyra wrote:
| Same, I have a fairly positive experience with minisforum.
| cout wrote:
| Same here. Did yours have a fan or was it fanless?
| d3Xt3r wrote:
| I 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.
| g947o wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| I 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.
| futuraperdita wrote:
| Having 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| How is the 795s7? What do you put it to work on?
|
| Just sprung for one at a good price.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| I 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- wrote:
| the 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 wrote:
| Supposedly that could be fixable with a bios/firmware update...
| but there's no guarantee that will ever happen
| geerlingguy wrote:
| And 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 wrote:
| There 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| I 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)
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| I think I'm probably in the target market for this. I have
| a board using Linux on an Arm v9.2 chip. It'd be nice to
| run unit tests with exactly the same binaries and compiler
| settings. The actual boards are a bit expensive and
| unavailable for CI purposes (vs HIL). Graviton isn't v9.2.
| QEMU doesn't support v9.2. This does.
|
| Probably won't end up buying this, but it's not hard to
| imagine a small number of other people would find it
| useful.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| This, basically - if you target embedded, automotive,
| mobile (Android, perhaps), then having good native
| machines supporting the latest Armv9 features is helpful,
| compared to emulating it on another machine, or running
| stuff in the cloud.
|
| Like I said, a niche, but not one that's nonexistent. I
| know Minisforum was hyping the Android angle a bit,
| though in my small amount of mobile app dev, I was happy
| enough doing that on my Mac.
| ndiddy wrote:
| Besides TSO like you mentioned, the SIMD implementation is
| different (SSE/AVX vs. NEON) which is important if you do
| anything that uses SIMD intrinsics directly. If you're
| deploying to ARM servers, it's also nice to be able to test
| the exact same binaries you'll be running on the server.
| ndiddy wrote:
| Yeah Asahi makes this machine even more of a niche product.
| Even if you're stuck on the M2 Mac Mini, that still gets you
| ~2x the single core performance and ~40% more multi-core
| performance than the MS-R1, with much better power
| efficiency.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| Once I looked at the price tag I quickly arrived at the same
| conclusion. It's a neat product, but I can get so much more
| computer for less money.
| NewJazz wrote:
| Doesn't asahi run on the Mac mini? Probably better than it does
| on a laptop, no peripherals to support
| dwood_dev wrote:
| If you can't tolerate macOS, you can get a used M1/M2 which
| will run Linux really well.
|
| That's a challenge this machine has, it has to compete with
| things like a used 64GB M1 Max Mac Studio for $900 when the
| equivalent config is $700. The M1 Max would be wildly faster in
| everything.
| Aurornis wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Running 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 wrote:
| DGX Spark but don't ask the price.
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(page generated 2025-11-14 23:00 UTC)