Is the Minisforum MS-01 Worth It for Homelabs?

The Minisforum MS-01 is one of the most talked about and requested products for me to take a look at in quite some time. Inside this tiny little box, there's an Intel Core i9-13900H 14-Core Raptor Lake CPU, DDR5 Memory, 3x m.2 NVMe slots, 2x 2.5GbE AND 2x 10Gb SFP+ for Networking, and a full Desktop PCI Express slot for expandability. Is this the perfect small homelab PC, or were too many compromises made to bring this home server to market?

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

Pfriem (Hood River, OR) Winter Ale (7.5%)

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[Kajukota]

This mini pc's board has the most efficient distribution of PCIE lanes that i've seen for a long while...and to pack it all in something so small is impressive.

[KiraSlith]

I wish every home lab hardware review came with a PCIe lane breakdown like this. So many home lab products these days ship with insane PCIe configs, and it's very helpful knowing if it's Intel/AMD's fault, or the ODM was just being dumb. In this case, the blame lands fairly squarely on Intel for not integrating enough PCIe bands for an upper-end mobile CPU. Good review, much appreciated.

[deechvogt]

@CraftComputing I've seen ALOT of reviews on this unit and yours was by far the best. STH, L1Tech, Hardware Haven your review was by far the best. Good job and it not always important to be first.

[chromerims]

*Surpassing video* 👍 thank you.
MS-O1 looks very interesting.
We all want more PCIe lanes.
I personally want to keep working towards a vintage threadripper system while not get sidetracked by other opportunities, even highly compelling ones like MS-01.
Kindest regards, friends and neighbours.

[christopheoberrauch]

Thanks for the video. I couldn't resist and ordered an MS-01. I know it sounds strange, I bought an oculink low profile card to be able to run an external graphics card. I hope the oculink card will be recognized correctly.

[Smooj]

Nice, I saw a few videos about this awesome mini pc, and was looking out for your review of it!

[michaelj.]

Great video! So thorough and so much good information!

[GundamExia]

This is awesome. This will also works great with my 7 slots PCIe Magma expansion chassis, if I need to do some heavier lifting.

[mcmormus]

Hey Jeff,
could you please include idle power consumption in the future? It's one of the most important factors for me.
Thanks!

[bullet]

Been hearing about this mini pc...but now I know about this pc...great review and information...💯👍

[Merrlin]

This is the most in-depth tech review I've watched so far about this device and its hurting my brain.

[chrisumali]

Thanks for the demo and info, have a great day

[accesser]

Very keen to see some more SKU's of this model, perhaps with other CPUs, feels like they are onto a winner, but may needs a few more models to fit different needs

[petitpoispanta]

OK Thx, it has been since Linus' first talk about framework that I wanted to buy a PC (there was not one with a Ryzen tough) .
Now I have another one in view because of your presentation.
Thx again.

[TrTai]

I absolutely love it, they've done such a good job fitting it into the niche of lab server + workstation, I might still pick one up as a standalone workstation, but I'd love it for home server use as well except for the fact that my main lab environments are work tangential and don't support the heterogeneous cores (yet?) but for a lot of labs, it'll work just fine and faster than much else you can piece together at that price point... it was also announced right after I blew too much money building a cluster, which is awesome, but a cluster of these guys would have been absolutely killer. Maybe an AMD version with the intel NICs if we're lucky and Minisforum hears our pleas.

[dustinphillips]

If you could get a HBA card working in that it would make a great Truenas box connected to a disk shelf.

[johndoughto]

Pre-ordered mine in December, hoping it would get somewhat good reviews! Still waiting to see it!!! Proxmox soon! Thanks!

[PeterPan-qyue]

Awsome!! 😀I love the combination of Hard-and Liquidware!

[livewire]

I just bought one a few weeks ago pre-release based on some other reviews I've seen. Part of the reason I was confident to buy it was your earlier videos on proxmox on the big/little Intel systems, thank you.

The only gripe I have about the MS-01 reviews is that they're all of the 13900h. I bought the 12900h because the whole system is overkill for what I want to do with it, but I wanted something 10g capable and future-proof. The prerelease pricing on these isn't much more (and sometimes less) than other 10g/2.5g units out there. I would have actually gone with the 12450h except that it doesn't support vpro. I would love to see some reviews of the 12th-gen unit.

If this thing is half as good as it looks like it's going to be, that's going to be a game-changer for this space. I have a couple other minisforum machines, so I have high hopes.

[wolf]

09:40 A2000 Mobile in desktop (AIC) factor is a frankenstein'd product of certain Chinese manufacturers (e.g. JieShuo), paired with a modded driver literally called FrankenDriver to make it function.