Minisforum Stuffs Entire Arm Homelab in the MS-R1

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/minisforum-stuffs-entire-arm-homelab-ms-r1

19•kencausey•1h ago

Comments

mcny•59m ago

My minisforum mini PC is dead and useless. I will never, ever recommend anyone to buy a minisforum again.

Please do not buy a minisforum.

And it wasn't just me. https://old.reddit.com/r/MiniPCs/comments/1ocvjby/minisforum...

bhouston•49m ago

I've owned a couple and Minisforum has generally been amazing.

porphyra•33m ago

Same, I have a fairly positive experience with minisforum.

futuraperdita•53m ago

Having bought other systems in the MS-line, these boxes are heavy on cool homelab specs but aren't all that reliable and dealing with Minisforum for support is abysmal. I ended up moving back to old enterprise hardware (TinyMiniMicro or rackmounted gear). I don't recommend purchasing these systems if you're looking for anything more than a novelty; they're not any better than buying one of the random AliExpress mini PCs.

jauntywundrkind•35m ago

I still bought my 795s7 (a cheap 16-core MoDT (mobile on desktop) zen4 box) anyways, but accepting that I would probably never get bios updates ever was a hard pill to swallow. I haven't had to deal with support for anything defective, but support as in available bios updates being so so so spotty is really unfortunate.

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.

bhouston•49m ago

I really like Minisforum in general and the current generation of AMD-powered Mini PCs. I have one as a media PC and I replaced my dad's desktop with one. They are cheap, fast and silent.

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.

SG-•49m ago

the performance and power usage is pretty bad on it. for $50 more you can get a Mac mini M4 that blows it out of the water.

znpy•38m ago

Supposedly that could be fixable with a bios/firmware update… but there’s no guarantee that will ever happen

geerlingguy•18m ago

And note that Radxa launched their O6 with the same SoC earlier this year, and they haven't brought down idle power consumption either.

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.

porphyra•27m ago

There has got to be some firmware bugs causing high power usage, but also the CIX CPU is fabbed on TSMC 6 nm process which is a couple generations old.

bhouston•15m ago

I think that is a result of this being their first entry into the ARM market. IT takes a while to get all the hardware and drivers in sync. Hopefully they don't give up and also upgrade to a better CPU.

ndiddy•32m ago

The performance on this machine is similar to the Snapdragon 8cx from Microsoft’s first big Windows on ARM push a few years ago (so nowhere near even the 4 year old Apple M1) while the idle power draw is similar to an x86 computer. If they’re not targeting either performance or power efficiency, I’m not sure who would be interested in this computer. I’d say that if you can tolerate Mac OS X for your use case, a used Mac Mini would be a far better choice.

geerlingguy•20m ago

The one niche they could hit I think is Arm devs who need an Arm machine, want to run Linux (and not rely on Asahi, which still only runs on M1/M2), and want some hardware expansion (PCIe, M.2, dual 10 GbE, etc.).

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.

Aurornis•5m ago

> That's a lot smaller than the general homelab niche, or those who want a small, efficient, quiet computer for some purpose.

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.

Aurornis•14m ago

I consider myself relatively adventurous with ARM SBCs, but I don't see the draw for this box. $500 for the 32GB of RAM version is a lot to ask, especially with no path to upgrade the RAM and coming from a company known to have mediocre quality control and difficult warranty support.

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.

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