MINISFORUM MS-01 Mini Workstation Core i9-13900H Barebone Version Mini PC, HDMI + 2xUSB4 8K Display, 2x10G SFP+ Port, 2x2.5G LAN Port, Support M.2 2280/22110/U.2 SSD/RTX 3050 Graphics Cards

this thing is an awesome, well-constructed, small package, needed the Oculink for the minisforum eGPU dock, works great with that.

There are plenty of in-depth reviews on the Minisforum MS-01 but I'll just add - this box rocks. I stuffed an Nvidia RTX2000 Ada SFF graphics card in it and use it for AI learning/experimenting as well as other homelab experiments. Mine is the i9 13900 model and runs everything I have thrown at it so far. If you are thinking about purchasing one, do it before they have to raise the prices.

Very nice small server. I am using this machine as a VMH and it works very well. It is a little loud when you are using a good percentage of the CPU. I would like to see some better cooling solution for this system, but the foot print and the performance is very good!

Awesome product! Have two replacing multiple power intensive servers to run my home lab. One as a nas with external drives via pcie card + leveraging usb 4.0 and other running containers/vms/plex… Had to replace one of the two after 4 months but no issues with warranty. Love the dual 10g nic slots available to leverage! No more bottlenecks!!!

I had ordered this to make a small gaming system for someone using a 7800X3d, then it simply didn't work. I assumed it wasn't getting enough power and forgot about it for a while. Later I read some stuff and determined this was meant for lower power chips. Fast forward a few months, the cheap b650 board I had in a 7950X system died dead. No post no nothing. I pull the processor. Then for whatever reason, I decide to try a 170W processor in this little box. Boots up instantly. That blew my mind because I'm used to the 7950X taking an easy 60 seconds to boot on everything. It has a known long boot. I check the bios settings. Very simple, but it has the options I want. Thermals are great. It can see the 96GB of ram from Mushkin. It just works. I did some benchmarks, and it's not really lagging behind the prior asus board. A few percent, but that's to be expected with it running in eco mode, and the slightly slower ram timings. I had never gotten to the oculink dock. That also just worked. Plugged in a 7900XT to the DEG1, connected the cable, powered it on, saw it immediately. Like it was native. I'm not expecting things to work this easy. Turns out the 7800X3D was bad. This is a great little box. I might have to get more of them. The 7950X in eco mode is probably not the best pairing. I'm betting the 65W 9700X is about perfect in this. Great product.

Stay far away. I purchased this and it continues to crash under load. I have tried adding external fans. I have replaced the RAM and drives and it still crashes. Support won't replace it even though it is only a few months old.

In the past few years, I have used a number of mini PCs as terminals (all my compute is in a server cluster elsewhere), and this is now by far my favorite machine. I wasn't 100% convinced about this purchase at first because the form factor is a little bigger than what I'm used to. However, there aren't many options for dual-SFP+ ports, and this computer seemed to have the best price to performance ratio at the time of purchase. The bigger case actually turned out to be a huge improvement: air ventilation is much better, so the computer runs very quiet and doesn't get hot even with two 10G transceivers plugged in. The Core i9 is also much faster than other mini PCs that I was using most recently. The PCIx slot allows me to upgrade my connectivity to 200GbE, which is impossible with other mini PCs. With other mini PCs I regularly had to replace the small and cheap built-in Chinese laptop fans, which tend to stop working after a while. The fan in the MS-01 is bigger and looks much more durable. I will update this review after one year to report on its longevity. The case is also very easy to slide open with the push of a button; no screws need to be removed to get inside. I was already satisfied with my previous setup (a Moginsok dual-10G mini PC), but I was nevertheless surprised about the graphics performance increase of the MS-01. I'm now driving two 5120x1440 ultrawide displays at 100 Hz (via DisplayPort) and one 3840x2160 screen at 60 Hz (via HDMI); mouse and window movements feel a lot smoother. Running Debian Linux, I did not have to install any drivers or firmware. I simply moved the existing NVMe from the Moginsok to the MS-01, and everything continued to work as usual; no reinstall needed. Another problem I've had with previous mini PCs is the power supply. They tend to burn out within a year or less because they are too weak and get too hot. The MS-01 comes with a large over-dimensioned 180W brick that will hopefully stand the test of time. I contacted support only once via Amazon regarding the purchase of a second power supply, and they responded immediately and were able to help me out. Four months into using this computer on a daily basis (I have it on 24/7), I am very happy with the performance and glad that I took a chance to purchase it.

I bought the barebone version and I added 32Gb RAM and two M.2 SSD. Adding these were very easy and problem-free. There are smaller versions of mini PCs out there and this one is among the bigger ones. MinisForum has Ryzen versions with half of this size. Performance is OK but nothing spectacular. Again, some Ryzen models of MinisForum perform better at Geekbench and in gaming. I guess PCs with Intel CPUs are always more expensive even though some are under performing.