Familiar, yet completely different - Minisforum MS-A1 Mini Workstation

The Minisforum MS-01 debuted to rave reviews from both Mini PC and Homelab users alike. The 14-Core Workstation touting 10Gb Networking and PCIe expansion was a breath of fresh air in the Mini PC space.

The latest model ditches Mobile CPUs, instead opting for a full Ryzen 8700G Desktop APU, promising uncompromised performance in an incredibly small package. But is it second-time fan-favorite for the Minisforum MS-A1?

But first... What am I drinking???

Cold Brew Coffee (Silver Falls Coffee Roasters)

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[jothain]

Please add power consumption figures of tested hardware. I couldn't care less about manufacturer given figures, but what is actually pulled from wall on idle and load.

[scytob]

Nice little workstation. I do wish vendors started marking USB-C ports with the right USB labeling to say what it does and doesn't support.

[Spreadie]

My MS-A1 arrived last week. Unfortunately, the DEG1 Oculink dock that I ordered at the same time still hasn't shipped. Demand must be high, I guess. I went for the barebones kit because there was a killer deal on the 8700G in the UK at £230 shipped, I already had 32GB of DDR5 RAM and I have plenty of m.2 SSDs.

One thing I've found so far is the TPM 2.0 chip isn't detected by the Windows 11 installer, despite it being enabled in the BIOS - a quick cast around the interwebs suggests I am not the only one to see this, although it does seem to be a quirk on the barebones unit only. Minisforum support have, so far, suggested I clean and re-seat the m.2 drive. Super helpful.

I set it up on Win 10 for the moment and it's a pretty impressive little box - really looking forward to playing with the DEG1 dock.

[bropella]

I love the content that Jeff brings to the table. Love his podcast as well! Great combination of beer and tech. Great work!

[skipbreakfast]

Amazing that you uploaded this today. This morning I was looking at where to buy this thing and not finding it in stock.

[TechnoTim]

Great review! As soon as I saw the specs for this, I thought exactly the same - this is an actual workstation system vs the 01 which seemed to be more of a homelab-like system

[DS-pkeh]

18:05 Actually, you can "cram in" 16 cores chip in there, just run it at 65w (known as eco mode) or get the latest 9950x. With 2x32Gb of RAM and some nice SSD, this is a beast.

[_Jonny_]

Just sent my MS-A1 back to Minisforum, as I've been running it as a proxmox host for 3 weeks but it's randomly restarting on me. Running it with Ryzen 7700, 96GB RAM, 2x SN850X NVMe. Not getting any logs or kernel panic errors, when it happens, so really hard to diagnose the actual fault. Support offered to replace it, so taken them up on the offer, if that doesn't fix it, could be my NVMe drives (never happened with those drives in a M920Q), or something that needs fixing with a BIOS update. I've seen the MS-01 has needed a few bios updates for people to get theirs stable, so could be the same case here.
I collected it from my colocation and sent it back this weekend, will post back with an update if someones interested in the issue I'm getting.

One thing I did notice, you said the second NVMe slot on the back wasn't PCIe 4.0 but PCIe 3.0. I'm pretty sure I saw the link speed of that slot showing as 4.0x4 when I did `lspci` and also the manual confirms my findings but the US store product page is misleading/incorrect, they've mixed up the bottom and top sides, but it does explicitly say the M.2/U.2 slot is 4.0x4.


Wonder if we will ever see OCuLink to SFP+ adapters, rather than needing to convert it to a PCI-E slot, then put a SFP+ card in it. Currently don't need 10gbit with mine, but that would make for a nice upgrade in the distant future.

[LeoS-]

I’ve contacted Minisforum because of conflicting information on the M.2 NVME SSD slots. On their website they provide a link (“More MS-A1 support”) showing the characteristics of the M.2 NVME slots depend on the CPU used. For Raphael CPUs (7000 series) and the Granite Ridge CPUs (9000 series) this is: one PCIe3.0x4 slot, one PCIe4.0x1 slot (single lane) and two PCIe4.0x4 slots (both four lanes). For Phoenix CPU’s (8000 series, including the Ryzen 7 8700G they supply) one slot is PCIe3.0x4, one slot is PCIe4.0x1 (single lane), one is PCIe4.0x2 (two lanes!) and only one is PCIe4.0x4 (four lanes). Please note that the information in the Manual is incorrect.

[marcogenovesi]

The level of innovation of (relatively small company) chinese/taiwan mini PCs is mindblowing, no conventional OEM gives a flying about any of these features, they have been makign the same identical office SFF designs for a decade with minor changes

[nadtz]

I'm so sad they dropped the SFP+ ports from this unit and why no PCIE gen 4 for the U.2? This could have been a really awesome little machine for homelabbers who want 10GbE, I really hope they do another unit without the oculink and bring back the SFP+

[jeremybarber]

Please do test a handheld PC with the DIY e-GPU dock. Also, I would love to see if you can throw a R9-7900 into this mini-PC (12C/24T 65W) and if it would do any better in R23. That barebones is very very tempting.

[criostasis]

This trend of mini pc's with oculink and gpu docks is baffling. It makes more sense to me to just build a mini itx system that will take up the same, if not less space on your desk at around the same total volume, maybe a little more. When it comes to price you can build the mini itx system for around the same price or slightly higher and get better performance. What makes sense is more laptops need to come with oculink to add the external gfx power.

[Will-schw]

One thing you never mention . It's can run a dual CCD cpu at 100w TDP. I'm running a 7900x in mine with 96GB ram

[AzNcRzY]

@6:30 Sorry to say this here aswell but you are also wrong. 2nd Tech YouTuber who says you have to remove more than 2 screws to access the system.
You actually just need to remove the 2 screws closest to back and use the removal tool.
This is also stated in the quick installation guide.

I agree that the chassis button of the MS-01 is by far better.
I have both systems.

[Mike-xyjz]

introducing the A1-a10-b9999 not to be confused with the older A1-a10-b998! why is every product manager like that??

[ewenchan]

It's a pity that the MS-A1 dropped the dual 10 GbE SFP+ ports and the internal PCIe 4.0 x8 slot otherwise that would've been a killer combo.

[hxor]

another great mini-server candidate for proxmox clusters

[gdropbox]

Bought one. Returning it. 7900X and 96GB. Love everything about it except obvious flaws like no 10 gig or video over USBC despite advertising that it can do video over USBC. Hoping that mine is just broken and the next one will work.

[pyroslev]

A deep, deep review needed on that dock. If we can find a way to use that through USB-C, they just dropped one of the most budget friendly eGPU enclosures to date.