Is the Minisforum MS-01 Worth It for Homelabs?

this tiny little box is rocking an Intel Raptor L CPU with 14 cores ddr5 memory enough nvme to keep just about any one happy dual 10 GB networking and a desktop PCI Express slot all for $679 it's the Mini PC of my dreams and it might just make the perfect PC or home lab box for you too let's Dive In today's video is brought to you by me check out craftmore for all of my official merch and help fund the content that you enjoy watching here on the channel from custom laser engraved pint glasses to coasters and whiskey stones and even our brand new double wall insulated coffee tumblers all of my merch is designed 100% inhouse and made to order by me I'm also now offering flat rate international shipping to 23 different countries and if you live in the continental US free shipping on orders over 30 $5 so what are you waiting for head on over to craft computing. store and start drinking like a pro cheers everyone welcome back to craft Computing everyone as always I'm Jeff so this is the minis forum ms01 and if you haven't already heard about it you are in for a treat today this is one of the most requested and talked about PCS in my comment section over the last couple of months and for some very good reasons before we get into it a huge thanks to Min form for sending over the ms01 for this review as well as 32 GB of ddr5 and a 1 TB mbme drive like all reviews on this channel no money changed hands mini Forum has no input over the production of this video nor will they have the opportunity to see it before it goes Live on YouTube with disclosures out of the way inside of this we've got an Intel Raptor like I9 13900 hcpu with 14 cores and 20 threads thanks to its six performance cores and eight efficiency cores for memory we've got 32 GB of crucial ddr5 running 5200 megga transfer per second with up to 64 GB supported inside the system if you've shopped for many PCS in the past you know that's where the spec sheet tends to stop but we are far from done talking checking out the back of the PC there are a couple USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports an HDMI 2.0 for video and now is where it starts getting interesting with a pair of USB 4 ports each supporting up to 40 gbit per second for networking high-speed storage or external Thunderbolt gpus 2.5 GB ethernet is quickly becoming the new standard and here we've got a couple of 2.5 GB ports thanks to the Intel I 226 Network controllers on board and normally I'd be pretty excited about a pair of 2.5 gbit ports but those are easily overshadowed by the real star of today's show with a pair of Intel x710 10 GB Network ports to round out the io moving inside of the ms01 believe it or not it starts looking even better for storage there are three m.2 nvme slots with two two of them supporting 22 110 length drives the third slot can also be adapted over to a 2.5 in u.2 mvme Drive opening up your options for drives with massive capacities last but not least there's actually a desktop PCI Express expansion slot inside of here now this is a bit of a good news bad news situation as well it's great to have this kind of expansion potential you are a little limited on what you can actually do with it the port is a full x16 slot but it is limited to just eight Lanes that's not to worry though as this is actually wired to the PCI Express Gen 5 inside of the CPU meaning bandwidth will never be a problem with 256 gbit per second of bandwidth available here that is a ton of features crammed into such a small box and it's pretty easy to see why people have been excited about this hitting the market specifically for home lab use one of the reasons I spent a full week testing out proxmox on Intel's hybrid mobile CPUs recently was because I knew this review was coming down the pipe and wanted to fully flush out what virtually ization would look like running on something like Intel's I9 13900 H if you want a full Deep dive on proxmox running on big little architecture I'll leave those links down in the video description but let's just say that performance is incredible when properly configured now obviously there's a whole bunch of expansion potential inside the ms01 and overall I'd say that many forums nailed the execution of it all the I9 13900 has a total of 28 PCI Express Lanes available to it but they're not all Gen 5 speed and there are some specific limitations on how they can be used by devices Downstream first off let's break down exactly what we're working with here the 28 lanes are broken down into eight PCI Express Gen 5 Lanes eight PCI Express Gen 4 lanes and 12 PCI Express gen 3 Lanes the eight Lanes of Gen 5 were intended to be used with an onboard graphics card and a laptop but cannot be split up or bifurcated to support multiple devices that's important for a couple reasons one the only logical place to put the Gen 5 Lanes is into the desktop PCI Express slot as wiring up the Gen 5 Lanes to say a single m.2 slot would be an absolute waste of resources secondly it means you can't install additional nvme cards via the X8 slot if they require bifurcation as that's not supported by the CPU platform on that Port installing a single nvme drive would absolutely work but you can't add in cards like this that are designed to hold multiple PCI Express cards unless the expansion card itself contains its own PCI Express switch moving down the chain there are also eight PCI Express Gen 4 Lanes broken up into two sets of four one of these is wired directly to the primary m.2 slot for Gen 4x4 nvme giving you the full bandwidth potential for that drive the other four lanes are wired internally to a pair of Intel x710 10 GB Network controllers both the Gen 5 and the Gen 4 lanes are wired directly to the CPU and do not share bandwidth with any other devices inside of the PC of note as well the pair of USB 4 are also wired directly to the CPU and each Port is capable of 40 gbit per second transfers again without sharing bandwidth with any other devices those paying attention might have noticed I didn't mention the other two m.2 nvme slots yet and that's because those are wired into the PCH chipset Lanes via PCI Express gen 3 the second m.2 slot is a gen 3x4 and should be good for speeds up to 3500 megabytes per second the third m.2 slot is only wired up to a gen 3x2 Lane which is going to top out at around 1,000 megab per second the Wi-Fi and each of the Intel I 226 2.5 GB Network controllers also each get a gen 3x1 Lane wired in which is more than enough to handle traffic on those devices as well now all of the Gen 3 lanes are connected to the chipset and that has a dedicated 8X Lanes of opio otherwise known as PCI Express Gen 4 to connect up to the 13900 H die proper which means there shouldn't really be any bandwidth limitations between the chipset and the CPU itself so for all intents and purposes all of the PCI Express gen 3 connectivity won't share resources either but there is some potential for some bottlenecking if you max out everything small form factor systems like this often have some serious compromises when it comes to PCI Express connectivity but I'm actually not disappointed at all with the layout here we do get access to both a full gen 4x4 envme slot as well as dedicated dual 10 gbit networking there are going to be some limitations on local storage speeds with the other two .2 slots with some pretty hard fallof in performance if you utilize all three drives but if you're using this primarily as an nvme file server even the Gen 3x2 slot is going to be more than enough to saturate a single 10 gbit Network line I also really like the inclusion of a desktop PCI Express slot as it adds a host of expansion potential not usually seen in boxes quite this small with PCI Express Gen 5 25 40 or hell even 100 gabit per second networking is not out of the question though again you will be limited by storage bandwidth if you want to push network connectivity much Beyond 10 gbit per second keep in mind that any high-speed networking or nvme expansion card will likely need active cooling as well as the msl1 has no system fans on that side of the PC there is a dedicated fan for cooling the ddr5 and the CPU as well as a fan on the underside to cool your nvme drives also while the PCI Express slot does support a full 75 wats of power delivery of a true desktop motherboard I found comp ability with some cards to be hit or miss again if you want to add additional storage via an nvme expansion card there's no bifurcation on this slot so you'll need a card with its own controller and most likely those aren't going to fit into this system anyway with Cards Limited to being half height and half length adding in a video card for workstation use is going to be off the table for most people as well as all but cards like the RX 6400 or nvidia's old Quadro sff cards likely are not going to fit if there was room enough for a fan solution I actually considered trying to add in a Tesla P4 or a Tesla T4 but that's obviously a no-o without an active cooler on those I did try out some of the small form factor cards that I have laying around and a couple of them refus to even be recognized in the Bios while my Pascal based p1000 worked just fine the newer Tesla T400 wasn't even seen by the PC even though the fan on the GPU did spin up when the PC was powered on curiously mini form advertises support for gpus up to and I quote the RTX A2000 mobile which I have never seen offered for sale from any vendor ever and I know where to buy some pretty weird it struck me as a bit odd for that recommendation to appear on the ms01 product page as that's not exactly a card that Nvidia made in a desktop form factor it's typically an addin card for laptops in an mxm form factor or built directly onto a laptop motherboard one thing I would have loved to see support for in this system is two slot small form factor cards as that would significantly open up the potential for GPU expansion cards like the A2000 and the A4000 Ada sff would make amazing combos to go along with the 13900 H but as it is you're likely not going to be using the PCI Express slot much at all and certainly leaving some potential use cases on the table because of its size and compatibility limitations also thickening up the case just a little bit would actually give you room for a couple of 2.5 in SSD further adding to the storage expandability on the system so I'd have loved to see the system about 1 in thicker so we've got tons of expansion potential but how well does it actually perform jumping into Windows I did run it through its Paces in cinch R23 and got a multi-threaded score of 11938 and a single threaded score of 1694 pretty respectable for a CPU that draws only 45 watts of power from the wall after 30 seconds and more than enough horsepower to drive most home Labs whether you you want to run services on bare metal in container or even virtualized for comparison's sake I've been doing some testing on a Zeon 5218 gold 16 core processor on my test bench for another project and that managed a score of just 14,750 with single threaded performance coming in at a painfully slow 841 now the 5218 is no speed demon with its Cascade Lake architecture and 3.6 GHz boost clocks but it does go to show just how much performance is packed into the 13 900h keep in mind the 5218 was also drawing 130 watts to get that level of performance while the 13900 H doeses have a listed Max TDP of 115 Watts I actually never saw it climb higher than around 70 Watts at that power draw the PES did clock up to 4.5 GHz with the efficiency cores reaching about 3.1 GHz and temps peaking at around 76° however the turbo mode on the CPU is limited to just 30 seconds after which the power limit Falls to 40 45 watt which it can hold so long as there's enough cooling available at 45 Watts the CPU sat very comfortably at around 67° C though clock speeds also dropped off significantly P cores fell to just 3.2 GHz while efficiency cores managed just 2.1 not spectacular but I also don't think the main use case for this box is going to be 100% utilization 100% of the time Raptor like mobile CPUs shine in more bursty performance scenarios anyway where clock speeds can reach upwards of 5.4 GHz however I never saw clock speeds run faster than 4.5 GHz in my time with the ms01 the BIOS was set for full turbo performance but I also didn't see any adjustments for Turbo Power limits now that's not a huge deal as again turbo mode only runs for around 30 seconds at the start of a task anyway overall performance was more than solid considering we're working with essentially a laptop CPU though I do have a bone to pick here I wish Intel would allow for for Turbo unlocking for devices that aren't installed in laptops the reason Intel limits turbo duration in these mobile CPUs is often because coolers used in Ultrabooks can't sustain 115 Watts for more than a few seconds at a time meanwhile the 13900 H installed in the ms1 has a copper finned heat sink that's 20 mm thick with a 60 mm blower taking care of airf flow cooling isn't a problem in this PC as proven by the 76° max temperature I observed while testing the the 13900 H also has a t Junction of 100° C which means there's more than enough thermal head room to increase performance by 50% if intel would let us take the leash off this thing though I'm pretty sure someone will release a modded bios for the msl1 before too long as this has drawn plenty of interest from the home lab and performance communities alike now like I mentioned earlier I spent nearly a week testing out prox MOX on Intel's hybrid big little architecture partially in preparation for this review and I'm really glad that I did as I mentioned in one of those videos with the Intel micro code package installed stability was Rock Solid and performance automatically scales perfectly between performance and efficiency cores I tested out the ms01 and prox MOX by installing five Windows Server 2022 virtual machines each with four threads and 4 GB of memory in order to stress this system to the absolute limit that's all 20 threads from the 13900 made available to the virtual machines at any point in time again I did test out cined R23 running in Windows on bare metal and wanted to compare that score to Windows running in a VM with all five VMS up and running but only a single VM running C bench we see multi-threaded scores of 5,410 and a single- threaded score of 1572 that actually lines up with testing I did a couple weeks ago where cinebench will use for peores in the multi-threaded test giving us almost perfect performance scaling over single-threaded so long as we stay inside of the 45 W power limit running cend bench on 2vm sees performance drop slightly in each test as with only six performance cores a couple of the efficiency cores were put to use in the multi-threading testing still solid performance overall though and finally stressing every thread possible I ran sentimen on all five VMS at the same time and we get an average of 1954 or a combined score of 9774 that is around 19% slower than the theoretical Max of 11938 when testing on bare metal virtualization does have some overhead costs but again keep in mind we're running five Windows Server VMS and expecting 100% utilization on a mobile CPU that pulls just 45 watts of power also I don't expect people in the market for a super compact Home Server Like This are going to expect it to run at 100% utilization all the time again Raptor lake is at its best when you need rapid burst of performance not sustained utilization and burst performance is where most home Lab Services tend to find themselves on top of performance and virtualization there are some other cool features I didn't even mention yet as the 139 00 has Intel's Iris XE graphics on board that means you've got Intel Quicks sync support for Hardware video encoding built right into this as well that's important if your home lab plans include media servers like Plex or jelly fan or if you wanted to run an NVR service for recording security camera footage Intel vtd support is also included for PCI Express pass through to a virtual machine that means you could pass through one of the network controllers for dedicated use on a router or pass through a video card in the PCI Express slot for additional Hardware encoding or workstation use just keep in mind the limitations and potential compatibility issues I mentioned earlier regarding the desktop pcie slot overall if you couldn't tell I am a huge fan of the mini Forum ms01 as of the time of filming the barebones model with an Intel I9 13900 is selling for $679 though it is worth noting that may be a reduced price as they quote a retail price of $839 even at the higher price though it's competitive with many PCs equipped with the same CPU but without the wellth thought out PCI Express Lane distribution or built-in 10 GB networking I have done quite a lot of testing and tinkering with Intel's mobile CPUs in my home lab over the last year most notably swapping out some of my 16 core xon V4 powered systems for a couple of 11th gen tiger Lake 8 core CPUs and the results have been absolutely fantastic not only is multi-threaded performance basically identical the single threaded performance is nearly 2 to1 in favor of the 11 900h chips currently powered my virtual machines given the 13900 H is nearly 50% faster still it's safe to say that most home labers are going to be more than happy with the performance found inside of the 13900 H it definitely has some limitations when it comes to local nvme performance and you'll still need a dedicated solution for mass storage but if you're looking for a sub $1,000 PC to power all of your home lab needs you can do much worse than the minis Forum ms01 if you're interested in picking up the minis forum ms01 for yourself I will have affiliate links down in the video description make sure to go give those a look on your way down there make sure to drop this video a like And subscribe to craft Computing if you haven't done so already follow me on the social medias at craft Computing for daily Shenanigans like this and if you like the content you see on the channel and want to help support me in what I do go on over to craft computing. store pick up one of our fantastic nucleated pint glasses coasters or various other accessories and start drinking like a pro that's going to do it for me in this one thank you all so much for watching and as always I will see you in the next video cheers everyone oh that is such a good beer beer for today is from free Brewing out of Hood River Oregon it is their Winter Ale clocking in at 7.5% how good does that look this is such a good beer winter alses are a weird breed because they're not a real welldefined category of beer anyone can make a winter ale and all you need is an ale that reminds you of winter or holidays or something like that and so it's kind of the Wild Wild West as far as beer Styles this one it's like an orange peel coriander and a little bit of I don't want to say nutmeg but some kind of like Warm Spice right on top of it it reminds me of all the best aspects of a hot totty in a very very cold drink and I don't think that's something that's really easy to pull off and then the body is this super warm thick inviting cozy wrap yourself up in a blanket by a fireplace kind of a malt I know that's a weird descriptor but a winter ale is supposed to remind you of winter and this drink absolutely reminds me of winter sitting in front of a fireplace you know curling up with a good book it's weird how flavors can play with your mind and memories and and Trigger different things for me Winter Ale could not be a more apt description of this beer it's fantastic I love this one I highly recommend it cheers

Channel: Craft Computing

Views: 49,271

Keywords:

Id: bC1A2qrJmRE

Length: 20min 41sec (1241 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 18 2024