MinisForum MS-01: A Pint Sized Workstation Powerhouse 

Minisforum MS-01 Compatibility Database: forum.level1techs.com/t/minisforum-ms-01-compatibility-database/208655/3

I'd love to see this sort of device with an AMD CPU.

ETA Prime had a video not to long ago about a company who is making after market coolers for the RTX 2000 and RTX 4000 cards that fit inside the MS-01. He had an early version of the cooler for the A2000 and it work. Looked neat.

I literally purchased a MS-01 a few weeks ago to replace my entire huge homelab, and its been running great for weeks. I'm using Unraid, not Proxmox, because I was able to migrate my master server in 5 minutes. Migrated my storage as well without a hitch, I'm using a Terramaster D6-320 DAS via USB 3.2gen2, and works great. Very pleased, the only issue I see is that it gets very hot.

Amazing they packed all that connectivity into such a small package. Wanted to do a usff server a while back but ended up doing a ITX system in a Jonsbo N1 instead because dammit I want 10gb AND a SAS card! This is definitely a step in the right direction!

They shipped mine a couple of days ago. Can't wait to get my hands on it. This is as close as it gets to a perfect mini PC for my needs right now

Great video. I bought two of these a couple of weeks ago and am awaiting shipping. I'll be doing a whole new video series on documenting my migration. I'm really excited with the prospect of a thunderbolt 4 ring backhaul network. Pretty cheap in theory... Wish me luck haha. Look forward to the SR-IOV vid.

Also when you install proxmox; or any hypervisor you need to do the intel microcode update because of the e-cores.

I’ve got those in the proxmox cluster already and no issues so far … and damn fast for customer level low power mini boxes.

These videos are so good for me. Keep it up Wendell

Are you sure about the location of the headphone jack?

Nice, ty for doing the compatibility db. I’m running the Google Coral TPU (single) in the e-key slot (I don’t need wifi/bluetooth). All good, but the dual TPU doesn’t show up at all, not even as a single. I agree on the case size miss. Being able to fit the A2000/A4000 would be a great add.

Finally! Been waiting for this from Wendell.

I'm genuinely tempted to see if I can pick one of these up, but due to the problems with the intel chips, definitely would be looking into AMD for now. This is pretty awesome, and it sure beats having my laptop with screen open (to stop it overheating) stuck in my rack at home. Use the laptop for trips only, and I don't really see the need for a full desktop setup now. For business use, this is awesomeness.

Finally someone making stuff that is interesting. This is definitely the right direction. Tired of manufacturers making the same old configurations that no one really wants. Now if we could only get more pcie lanes and kick Intel in the balls for purposely restricting bifurcation.

i would definitely buy this if it was able to fit an A4000 or similar. very much looking forward to hosting a full blown llm home assistant with this type of machine in the near future!

If only they had a 7945hx like they do in their BD790i

I JUST WANT THIS in a 1u pretty much

Another great reason for U.2 is the Optane 905p. Game changer.

Since the case just slides onto the chassis, it would be fairly easy to make a 1u rackmount shell that had a built in full size PCIe slot with an extension cable. If they don't release one, someone should do it in the aftermarket. I would buy the rackmount case without the pci-e slot tho, I'm planning on using mine as a firewall and network services VM host.

kinda missed the headphone jack overlay. also, thanks for the video! i love these little pcs and all the variety they offer.

I'd love to see these exact features, but in an ITX motherboard.

I wish they would make a slightly thicker one so we can put a dual slot card or birficiation thing there

A plus-size version with space for a full sized (compact) GPU would be very appealing.

I have not had luck getting enterprise 20110 with the power loss caps to fit under the cooler. Similarly the u.2 can't be more than 7mm

need more clearance on pcie options + storage, but the bios is kind of mid if even

AMD + unbuffered ECC SO-DIMM, please.

Pretty cool but I would love to see it with the AMD chip from the BD790i and a little bit more GPU room.

I really wish this thing was just a little taller. Being able to fit some dual-slot GPUs would really open up some options.

Wendell, is it worth saving a little bit of money and going with the 12900h instead of the 13900h? What would I be missing out on in your scenario here with a 12900h?

7:15 Yo that RTX 4000 would make a sick compact rendering thing.

Your microphone jack highlight dot is mirrored to the wrong side of screen

stick it in a 1u with a few tweaks and we are certainly moving into the home lab environment.

One omission is the power consumption :( For some reason it's very difficult to find power consumption data for these products, even though idle power consumption in particular is highly important for a lot of users. I'd want to know how much does it consume while idling, out of the box, what bios tweaks it has to decrease power draw, and whether it allows to disable some onboard components to decrease the power draw.

I would much prefer if the next model was exactly half the width of a 19" rack and would fit in 2ru to give it extra height for PCI cards and cooling. It's neat being so tiny but the excellent hardware possibilities are somewhat crippled simply because of that tinyness.

External GPU testing, in a third video?! Great work looking into the MS-01 powerhouse.

I like these little Minisforum machines, but you can't get firmware support for them. I'm still on their release firmware for their B550 mini-pc (the one with the mutant PCIe dock) because they haven't bothered to release any updates.

Would love to see something with specs like these that is slightly bigger to put 1 1/2 - 2 slot cards in like the sff a380 for a secondary streaming/editing PC.

i want these features in a nas case to do a ceph cluster

ECC, it's always ECC. Though to be fair that is a problem of Intel's creation that everyone gets to suffer from. And is it me or has the Intel segmentation gotten even worse lately?

Please guide/link us on how to set up a local LLM one can talk to! :)

Thanks, very impressive system at a good price. I am disappointed the 4000 doesn't fit!

I had a super weird issue while migrating from my old pve, that was a massive pain to diagnose. I was running pfsense in a virtual machine within proxmox, Other virtual machines on the same host were getting dhcp addresses completely fine but anything outside of the box wasn't, Turned out it was because of one of the 2.5G ethernets (I226-LM) Was discarding the DHCP packets, Read up on similar cases and apparently it is due to the fact that it is the designated vPro interface and even though I had ME Bx (vPro / AMT) disabled in the BIOS, It was still not working. Super frustrating but there's a workaround the other interface (I226-V) works just fine! Swapped the bridge over to the other port and swapped the cables and everything worked fine.

you can also cross connect the usb4 connections, and get 25gbit some one got 2.7GB/s with those ports

Would be interested if A4000 fit.

If only it had ECC memory! I actually like vPro more than IPMI, because it allows you to remotely control an Intel GPU instead of a garbage 2D VGA chip. But on the other hand, vPro serial-over-LAN has been unreliable every time I've tried it.

I would like to see a video about the minisforum ar900i ❤

I'd love if people using the word proxmox would say in the beginning if the tin has ecc or not

Finally Wendell gets one of these!

I really hope the next iteration of this computer is 1U in height (or 2U but with a width to put 2 or three side-by-side in a rack)

Love my MS01, after cpu firmware update in proxmox 100% stable. 1 month uptime as of today. I went with Ableconn PEXM2-130 in pcie slot to get two more m.2 slots. Tempted to get a owc thunderbay for it, but I've never had good luck with usb & stability. No idea if thunderbolt is any better.

This is perfect for the p2p proxmox cluster

does anyone have sort of a "paranoia" of Chinese brands? I am really impressed by Minisforum effort to develop hardware in such a small form factor but still undecided whether I should trust this Chinese brand.

What is the idle power consumption like? European homelab people would be very interested to know the power consumption under various workloads :)

Have 2 in use and 2 en route. Work great with Proxmox and XCP-NG.

Been thinking this PC would be a good starting point for a small NAS server instead of a mini-ITX board

Wendell, I would be interested to hear your musings/thoughts on the implications of running a Disk Shelf with this unit even though it lacks 'real' ECC memory. This topic in general interests me due to my recent learning efforts in ZFS.

Can you do a video on setting up a ceph cluster using USBc HDD Docks like the 5bay from Sabrent. Think these are super cool and easy to throw on a shelf

N3rdware is currently working on a single slot cooler for the RTX 4000 Ada SFF, which should be available soon.

Is there any good reason to buy the 13th gen other than the slightly higher frequency?

Check out the new Erying 13th gen motherboards . You can use desktop DDR5 and there's way more expend-ability

I thought it was STH Patrick that mentioned 15mm thick U.2's don't fit with the enclosure closed. Are you sure those Kioxia's fit? He could be wrong of course

Heads up, if you're using Opnsense to build a router on this machine, make sure that you don't use the i-226 LM NIC as your LAN. The DHCP is not working on this interface.

Ok, I want this.

I wonder if someone is going to 3D model a top hat for this workstation to allow for bigger graphics cards like the RTX 4000 SFF Ada. I hope someone else does it before me so I don’t have to try and experiment with my 3D printer when I get one of these.

How do you feel about using this as a Forbidden Router? I’d like to get one and put Proxmox on it, then passthrough the iGPU to the Debian VM and use it for all my Docker containers. I’m debating putting an Opnsense FM on there for Forbidden Router purposes, but I don’t know if it has all the ports I’ll need without an add in card.

Lack of ECC is a deal breaker sadly

I have just one question: using proxmox, will I be able to fully passthrough the iGPU to a VM so the VM will output to HDMI both video and sound ?

If only you could use the 10gb interface with Opensense in Proxmox VM. Only delivers 1gb throughput. =(

Would you also consider a review of the Qotom Q203xxG9?

1:48 is off by a few pixels ;)

Is there anyway to have dual power supplies that's reliable on these kinds of mini pcs?

Overall opinion of that product as someone who ordered 2 of those for our company for Veeam backup proxy - because of the SFP+ ports that just takes space, i would not call it a "workstation". More like a wrong-named product Yes - you can put an PCIe card - so even an GPU, but you are forced for a single slot height model... so really Quadro T1000, RX 6400 or A380 is max you can place in it... so kinda missing those workstation horsepower. I really hope for MinisForum to relase a variant of this MS-01 WITHOUT SFP+ ports and rearranged back ports so they could fit 2 slots high low profile cards - imagine using an A2000 inside of it or something like that

Did the Post about the thermal pads on the SPF+ modules ever get made? I can't find it anywhere and i really could use some guide to get the chassis fully dissasembled and the appropiate thickness of the pad to use.

Needs larger housing to accommodate bigger storage (longer m2/thicker u2), pcie cards. Needs ecc. Maybe amd cpu. Then it would be really attractive.

How would you suggest dealing with the heat? Things like this usually have a problem holding on to heat. I know 80 degrees centigrade is not high, considering cpu's can run up to 100° c, but overall if it is used the way as intended, other components would certainly do well to avoid long-term exposure to the captured heat.

A real bummer that the height of the U.2 drive must not exceed 7mm, which excludes some of the most popular U.2 drives on the market, such as Kioxia CD6, WD SN640, or Samsung PM1733/1735, which are all 15mm drives. It is a show-stopper for me as it makes the U.2 idea a lot less useful.

Wendell, do you know that we can't use KVM Hyper-V nested virt since Alderlake alongside with Intel Iris Xe SR-IOV? There's a thread in your forum that keeps unsolved bc Intel somehow broke this feature on this gen architecture god knows why if you use host-passthrough CPU model. Solved with changing the CPU model with QEMU options, but then the problems comes with Intel Iris Xe driver on Windows that will refuse to initialize and make the VF for SR-IOV to work showing error 43. Disabling nested virt and using host-passthrough CPU model makes it to work, but we're again on the start point bc you have to choose between SR-IOV OR NESTED VIRT. I just want a low-power Intel system that's able to share its iGPU alongside with using dev environments like WSL2 or WSA while i can access linux on the host too. Tried with the Minisforum NAD9, but seems like Raptor Lake is also affected as i tried too on desktop platform and is affected by the same issues regardless of which kernel i was using on linux. Seems like Intel never planned on this scenario, while using nested virt and sr-iov on linux as guest works flawlessly. As such i blame intel gpu driver team for not allowing iGPUs to work regardless of CPU model, and or fixing nested virtualization using host-passthrough CPU models. But maybe is just me doing wrong configs. Seems like i'm experiencing this behavior also with a i7 10700 so i'm not sure at all of anything i've tested. Anyways, from myself Intel's not getting any money soon enough until they fix these issues. On AMD AM4/5 all of this works flawlessly, except for the SR-IOV part, but just bc they have not any compatible products. That's solvable by using standard VFIO but you need an additional GPU if you don't want a headless host system (or single-gpu passthrough).

Idle power usage?

Does anyone know if this machine would support a Tesla P4 passed through to a Windows VM running Plex?

Have you tried playing with thunderbolt networking on this box? I am planning to get three of these and create a proxmox cluster with thunderbolt network (ring topology) for ceph internal network. Would love to know if that would work before purchasing three of them.

How do you get the Raid 0 to work, there is not setup in bios.

Sinner!! Moving a computer while it's turned on , you'll damage the HDD..... oh wait... 🎞😂

Do you know what is the GPU compatibility with this MS-01? I was hoping to get a pretty big graphics card and just run it with the top off the case, something like a RTX 4060 but what about the power requirements? What's the most powerful GPU that this can take, assuming you are willing to mod the case or run it while open :) thanks!

I'd love to know if the new nVidia a1000 will work for transcoding (single slot, 50W, half height, unsure about the card length).

If I understand correctly, you can cluster them using thunderbolt and have the ethernet ports free? So with 3 of these you could technically have a switch(6x10+ 6x2.5)/router/nas(with hba and jbods) all rolled into one contraption?

I ordered one more than month ago, and I'm still waiting one for being sent... :/

Have you tried to put Optane in the U.2? Is it too tall? Does the case not close?

How would you connect 4 - 12TB HDD's to the MS-01. There doesn't seem to be any sata ports. If one could, would the supplied power brick be enough?

What about the network routing performance with OPNSense or vyos ? I have a 1 Gig service but want to upgrade to 10 Gig and wonder if this would fit as a router.

1:16 96gb modules like 2x96 (do they even exist?) or 2x48 for 96gb total?

ECC support?

I want this as an atx cpu & MB combo! :/

I've been living at the salvation army and I still prefer AMD CPUs

Just kind of a shame to offer all that connectivity and CPU in a mini-pc form factor. It seems like just a little more space would make this a more compelling device.

what's the cheapest mini pc with at least 2x USB 3.2 (or higher) ports?

Does the Intel Arc A380 low profile card can be used for VDI passthru? Ej: up to 5 VMs. It has 6 GB of RAM. I think for a small VDI server could be a good option but not sure if it works

This and DAS?

Question for ya Wendell... What are the benefits of a Linux box or proxy mox, with a vm running plex vs Windows and plex server? Curious as I have run a windows based plex server for years, without issue.

People are returning this product because it has random crashes. The forums are full of it.