Minisforum Stuffs Entire Arm Homelab in the MS-R1
jeffgeerling.com
jeffgeerling.com
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.
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)
Probably won't end up buying this, but it's not hard to imagine a small number of other people would find it useful.
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.
I’m just thinking that the Mac Mini might also be better for that usecase, even with the virtualization in place. If you need to support a specific processor, you probably want to work with that exact processor. But if you want to use any ARM, a virtualized Linux running on a Mac isn’t a bad option.
The downside is that it eats into power usage. Even then, I’m averaging just 6.4w over 30 days.
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.
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.
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.
Please do not buy a minisforum.
And it wasn't just me. https://old.reddit.com/r/MiniPCs/comments/1ocvjby/minisforum...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Just sprung for one at a good price.
Support is abysmal
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.
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.
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.