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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.