The Pinnacle of Mini PC Servers - Minisforum MS-01

this Mini PC has dual 10 gig SFP plus ethernet it has dual 2 and2 gig ethernet dual USB 4 ports that support Thunderbolt 3 devices and a lowprofile pcie expansion slot all of that means that this Mini PC has almost every feature folks have been asking for for these mini PCS as servers and even workstations there's a lot here so let's get to it hey guys this is Patrick from s and this is a miniforms ms01 this Mini PC has a ton of features that folks have been asking for and let me give you an example we've reviewed systems like this Lenovo and folks have said that these things would be perfect if they just you know handle one more SSD plus some more networking or something like that and what Min swarm has managed to do is fit a ton of functionality into a system that's not much bigger than a project tiny mini micronode it is definitely bigger and you can kind of see that right here as I have them lined up and so when the product designer from Min form actually got on the St forms back I think like in August 2023 they were like hey you know we have this new idea what do you guys think about it and I was like okay this is cool we will definitely review this if you send me one and so they did send one and we did an article just before the end of the new year and we also did a short on our new shorts Channel St Labs if you haven't checked it out definitely go do that now there are definitely things in this system that we found that are undocumented and are completely awesome on the other hand there are definitely some things in here that I really want folks to know before they buy this system there are things in the system like there's a switch that if you have it switched the wrong way you could potentially kill your m.2 SSD when we started testing things in the PCI slot there were that just didn't work and those are just two examples of some of the things that I want to go into so during our key Lessons Learned we're going to go look at a whole bunch of different configurations I'm going to talk through some of the things that we learned while using the system frankly the based Hardware is completely awesome and I do really like the system but if you try expanding it you're going to find some things that um well I think are really important to know before you buy one and at this point I also just want to say a quick thank you to the St YouTube members who are subscribing and helping us get the budget to go buy all the little cards and stuff that we put into a system like this so we can test it out and give you a better idea of how it works Jen if you can support us that would be great because it means that we can go buy more stuff to go testing these systems with that let's get to the hardware okay so looking at the front system you're going to see that we have a power switch we also have our combo audio jack and then we have a couple of USB ports now there are two USB 2 ports and these are really for things like your mouse and keyboard there's also a usb3 type a port so if you have like a USB flash drive or something like that that's always useful and frankly if that were the main features of the system it be super boring but you're going to see a couple of other things that are pretty cool as we get to the back on top and on bottom you do have venting and the venting is very important because this is a pretty high power system even though it's a pretty small system what we don't have is we don't have vents on the sides we do have a mini form branding which is kind of nice that it's not crazy big and it's just still there okay so getting to the back of the system this is where the magic really happens and the first thing I'm going to point out is not even a port instead there is a lowprofile pcie slot so you do need a lowprofile bracket but you can install a lowprofile pcie card here next to that you're going to see some venting because uh this system definitely needs it now on the bottom we get two SFP plus ports now these SFP plus ports are powered by an Intel x710 Nick which is a pretty highquality Nick now the next feature are two 2 and2 gig ethernet ports but there's something different now normally in a lot of the Min PCS we see they just use Intel i26 vs but this one has a Intel i26 LM and that LM is important because that's what allows you to get management features in a lot of the corporate PCs For example you'd have an Intel i219 LM which was the one gig version of this i26 LM and that i26 LM has the ability to run a management interface which gives you access to Intel VPR Now intel VPR is not as good as the ipmi that you would see on servers it's really meant for desktop and like remote troubleshooting and like corporate environments where you're doing that kind of thing from an IT Help Desk perspective the other side to it though is that it is still pretty useful you can do things like you can do remote power cycle you have a remote KVM feature and you can also Mount remote media I just want to say personally for a server I am a much bigger fan of ipmi and baseboard management controllers but this does have some functionality but since we don't have that in the system this is a decent compromise now having four Network ports two 10 gig and two 2 and a half gig are pretty awesome but there's even more high-speed IO because there are two USB 4 ports now these usb4 ports can do things like they can you know be display outputs so there are a total of three display outputs on the back of this the other thing that you can do though is you can plug in high-speed USB devices or you can even connect things like Thunderbolt 3 adapter so if you wanted to have like a 10g Bas T Thunderbolt 3 adapter you can go plug that in or something like that and that is absolutely awesome there's also an HDMI port for video output and then there are two USB 3 Type A ports finally there's a 19v power input now 19 volts for these things is very common but what's not common is the size of the power brick now this is a 180 W power brick which is which is uh you know a pretty decent size power break if you ask me okay that's enough of our external hardware overview let's get inside the system to see all of the really fun and funky things that are in here okay now one of the things that the mini Forum Skies did a great job on is designing the way that you get into the system so there's this like little lever here and you just pop it out and then the system comes out now once you're inside the unit we're going to do a quick overview you have the memory and CPU fan over here the CPU the core 9 CPU is over on this side this is the area for our lowprofile pcie slot and then when we flip around to the other side that's when we get to our storage and our wireless networking so you're going to see up in this corner that we have our RZ 616 which is our Wi-Fi 6E solution a little bit weird that we have an Intel platform and RZ 616 but still that's what we get and then we have under our cooling shroud we have our three m.2 slots although you're going to see that we have a u.2 drive there we're going to get to that okay so first let's start with the CPU and memory area now one of the weird things about this is that although the entire chassis is pretty easy to service um the memory is a little hard to get to well I wouldn't say that it's necessarily hard to get to but you have three little screws to get in there and once you undo the screws you're going to be able to just go and pop this little shroud out and this has your fan in it so you can see that we have our fan and I just kind of wish that this was toolless right like kind of the HP guys they have that little mechanism where they just kind of like clamp it in I mean it's just it's awesome right the one thing I want to show you guys that we have in here which is pretty exciting is that this system normally comes with 32 GB of DDR 5 memory now 32 GB is well and good 26 gig dims is probably all you really need but of course there are a lot of folks like me that like to have at least 64 GB of memory and the supported memory configuration in this is going up to two 32 gig sod dims and that gives you 64 gbes total now something that is not an officially supported configuration but we tried and it worked was we tried two crucial 48 gig ddr5 5600 dims and they worked no problem giving us a total of 96 GB of memory okay now the other big feature on this side of course is the lowprofile pcie slide which I think a lot of folks are going to want to utilize now there is a normally a cover here and the design of it is I would say mediocre at best now to be able to install a card you have this little retention mechanism which is like a little springy clip hopefully you guys can you guys can see this thing um and there's a little screw that's on the top and it goes up in this kind of corner up here now one of the reasons that this design is really cool is that it works one of the negatives of the design is that it's um I I frankly fumbled this every time we did it and we installed something like 20 or 30 cards at this point so um I I would definitely say that this is not my favorite design I also think that we're going to show you a card that specifically hits this a little bit later and we found a couple that did but this little nub back here where this thing sits frankly it shouldn't be there that that nub actually prevents you from installing some cards and so what you can do if um if you really want to we didn't know this when we were doing the b-roll but we figured it out a little bit later is that there are little Clips to take this face plate off and so for some cards because of this design you may have to actually take this back face plate off to be able to like actually put the card in just because and it's just a weird design so I don't know why it's there now flipping the unit around we get to our storage area and one of the kind of cool things that this system has is it actually has a fan which cools the ssds that are down here which by the way is a super important thing on a small chassis like this we see a lot of systems that don't have the proper cooling on the bottom as especially for like ssds and that just tends to be a a bad recipe these days now once you get the three screws off and again I wish that this was tooless but it's not at this point um you can actually pull out this little shroud and you'll see that there's a little blower fan here and it may not seem exciting the fact that there's a blower fan but it actually has a big impact on what you can do with the system well I guess it does in like two ways because this portion is where a u.2 7 mm SSD would basically fit and that means that this fan protrudes a little bit from this face plate that may not seem like a big deal until you realize that if you want to go and put an SSD with a heat sink on well it would have to be under this fan which is pretty darn hard to do now once you get the fan shred off you can now get into the main part with the ssds and you kind of by the way have to if you do put a u.2 drive in here you're going have to hold this a little bit but what you'll see here is that we have first our RZ 616 which is our Wi-Fi 6E solution so this does have Wi-Fi as well but then we get an array of three different m.2 slots now the boot drive for this is this Kingston SSD and that's the one that we got with the system it's a 1 tbte drive and something that the drive had on it which I'm just going to show you guys real quick you'll see in some of the photos probably but it had this little heat sink on it which was cool but you'll notice that it has this these rubber bands and the reason that these rubber bands are really here I think is because um there's not a ton of clearance underneath the ssds they sit pretty darn close to the motherboard the motherboard has components on it and so I think that you have to have something like this kind of like heat sink with rubber bands or something like that if you even want to go put it and you can only use that in the far slot so you can only use it in this kind of far slot down here otherwise it will run into the fan now mini SW sent us a couple drives just to kind of show you this these are not like huge capacity drives or anything like that but you they do have the ability to have either m.2 2280 or m.2 22110 which is what the Samsung Drive is now this third m.2 slot that we currently have a u.2 drive in I'm going to pull this out real quick uh this is actually the one that our Kingston Drive was originally installed in so we found it with the heat sink and it was down there when it originally R from the factory but there are other things that you can do with that slot so of course we took off the heat sink and we moved the original drive and what you'll see here is that we have our md2 slot and we have our 80 mm and our 110 mm mounting points so you can put either size drive in this slot as well there's a little bit offset from the other so it looks a little bit not neat but um there is kind of a reason for that and the reason for that is because it comes with this little adapter here now this adapter has an m.2 connector on one side and then it also has a u.2 just kind of interface here now this u.2 interface allows you to use a u.2 SSD but it doesn't allow you to use any u.2 SSD most likely if you're going to go buy a u.2 SSD you're probably going to get like a 15 mm drive and a 15 mm Drive is just simply too thick for a system like this so you have to use a 7mm Drive which limits your performance options it limits Your Capacity and all that kind of stuff as well and so the way that this works is that you install this in the m.2 slot and then it uses the uh fan uh portion the fan shroud to go and kind of secure this at two different points but I think you can see it's actually pretty easy to go and install this thing it makes a lot of sense how it works but then we get to the kill switch there is a switch up here that has two different settings u.2 and m.2 and there is a huge warning label below it and the reason for that is because this switch changes the voltage supplied to the SSD now now if you've ever used an m.2 to u.2 adapter you'll know that you always have to go and add like you know auxiliary power into that because you don't have the right voltages going over the line ud2 is frankly designed for higher power and that's really one of the design goals so it's a different voltage running in it this little switch changes the voltage of that m.2 slot which means that if you have this set to the u.2 setting and you put it in an m.2 SSD there is a decent chance you are going to destroy your drive but let me just show you real quickly the problem with this right so you'll see that we have our m.2 u.2 thing there which is the label for the switch now when we put this drive in and with this drive in you're going to see that you can't see that m.2 and u.2 label so instead you don't really know when you have the u.2 drive installed like which one it's on and even though this has a warning label and all that kind of stuff I do think that this is going to end up hurting someone's SSD one day it's just a part of the design and that's kind of what it is so if you've watched this video don't do that other just little tiny features I want to point out real quick is that we we have an srk TV Nick over here and this bottom one is the srk TT so that is how you know if you have the i26 V or i26 LM okay so let's get to the performance before we get to our power consumption noise and then we're going to finish up with our key Lessons Learned which is really just going to be a big plugfest I'm going to show you all the cool things that we did with this system specifically that PCI [Music] slot okay so looking at the performance of this this is an Intel Core I 9 13900 H and when we ran the system you see that we get pretty darn good performance we get really about the performance that we've seen of this processor in other systems there wasn't really any difference especially when we didn't have anything installed on the PCI slot now something to note that if you do like install like a GPU or something into the PCI slot it will lower the power limits on the CPU which will reduce your performance now you can go back into the BIOS and adjust it manually if you want to after that but it is something I just want to point out to folks that um you know depending on how you configure this thing you may get less performance than we're getting here now I just showed you the bottom of the system where we have things like two m.2 drives and we also have a u.2 drive and I just wanted to see if we installed all those drives all at once what would be the performance using Crystal dis Mark and so we ran the simple Crystal dis Mark Benchmark on all of those and we got performance that um definitely showed that we had mvme drives but they weren't necessarily like crazy fast speeds that we were getting out of these drives another item that I think a lot of folks are going to ask is like you know can this push 2 and a half gig ethernet can this push 10 gig ethernet guys like let me just be very clear if you have that Intel Atom c3758 Processor that we just showed on a recent video um well frankly that thing can push two 10 gig things you can run firewalls at two 10 gigs like 18 gigs or something like that total of traffic and so something like this where you have a high-speed core I 9 processor with like way more cores and all that kind of stuff you're going to have absolutely no problem with the performance of this just using as a network box but on the flip side I would also say that if you're just going to use this as like a router with like 10 gig like routing or something like that or you 10 gig firewall you probably have like way too much CPU in here now the system that mini for sent has has six performance cores and eight efficient course because it has the core I9 13900 H frankly um that's a really nice processor now there is another option in this which is a core I9 12 900h which is the ALR Lake the previous gen one and that one had the same core config had a couple different features like different clock speeds and stuff like that but overall they are largely similar CPUs and for $130 less I would have actually probably if I were buying this system myself I would probably have gotten that because I think it's just uh just frankly a little bit better value but folks if you're buying a core I9 Mini PC you probably want the most performance you can now of course this system also has the Intel Iris XE graphics and so you have a you know a okay GPU not necessarily something that's going to play like really top end games at this point but you also get quick sync video so if you do build like a media server or you just want to have that kind of video offload I think that's a really great capability and it is something that is better than the C 3758 system that we saw recently but I mean end of the day this thing has a ton of performance now you probably want to know how much power this thing is using because frankly I would want to know too but uh I thought of a fun idea what if instead of doing it P what if we went and did the power consumption at the new Scottdale Studio set let's get to that welcome to the new set or at least what we're testing out as a new set and what you can see is that over here we have the mini form ms01 already up and running and let's talk about this mini system's power in terms of three things first we're going to look at the power at the package so the CPU package power consumption we're going to look at the at thewall power consumption then we're going to look and talk about the overall noise cuz this is not a completely silent system although in most use cases the fans are very good at in this okay so at idle the CPU package power consumption is around 10 watts and what we get on our power meter is somewhere in the 25 to 30 watt range I'm going to point out right now that we have the system set up in performance mode and the reason we have it in performance mode is because we were doing benchmarking and we want to show the same performance numbers as we show Power numbers now of course you can go in the Bios and there's a lot of settings that you can change and lower this number I just want to keep everything consistent now the fans are pretty quiet but they are definitely audible this is a 342 DBA noise floor studio and our sound meter that's sitting right here will go up to about 3738 DBA with the system and idle so it's not silent but it's also not super loud we've definitely heard plenty of much louder systems and I actually do like the fact that this case is a little bit bigger which gives you a little bit better Cooling in a system like this versus some of the other Mini PC form factors out there okay so now we're turning on stress NG and you're going to see that the package power consumption has gone from 10 watts all the way up to 80 Watts at the wall our power consumption has gone all the way up to about 115 or so watts and the fan is starting to spin up we're going to eventually get this fan up to maybe 42 to 45 DBA so it's definitely audible I can definitely hear it now but on the other hand this is remember a 100% CPU utilization test the other thing that you're going to see is that our temperatures have now gone into the red range because the fan is still trying to catch up and is ramping up right now the other thing that you're going to see in a couple seconds is that this red is going to start to turn back to that teal blue color and the reason for that is that our package power consumption is going to drop from 80 Watts down to 60 watts our power at the wall will accordingly go down from 115 Watts down to about 95 Watts that happens somewhere in that maybe 4550 second Mark so you do get a nice little burst of speed but then on the other hand it does dial the settings back and the power back so that way it can keep thermals under control that by the way is very standard most mini PCS and most laptops and other systems that you buy today in the consumer side will do that the server side is a little bit different so we're going to kind of leave that over there for now now one thing I do want to tell you is that if you do add a GPU in the system this system only has a 180 wat power Bri so adding a GPU is number one going to be challenging just from a thermal standpoint but on the other hand the system itself will lower the package power consumption so you're not going to get that like 80 watt boost anymore out of the box because you're going to see a lower power limit instituted by the BIOS now of course you can go in and change all these settings if you do have enough Cooling and you have enough power you may need to replace the 180 W power brick with something like a 240 250 W brick but I know some folks are going to look at this and say like okay let's go gpus and I just want everybody to keep in mind that there are some challenges with adding gpus to a system like this now speaking of adding things to a system like this we have a bunch of carts here so let's go back to the other set and start plugging things in so we can talk about what works and what doesn't work okay for all of these videos I like to have key Lessons Learned and this one is uh pretty simple if you just look at it like a normal Mini PC it's awesome that you get 10 gig ethernet you have a super fast processor you can get up to 96 gbt of memory and uh you have a lot of m.2 expansion or u.2 expansion for storage and you get things like that PCI slot but for R key Lessons Learned that's fine I really want to get to the PCI slot and talk about what worked what didn't work things that surprised us some design things up let's just get into it okay so the first thing I just want to show you is the first card that we thought of you know we have a low profile slot so we can go and put something like a you know lowprofile card it also you know has to be a single slot card so you can't have a dual slot card there's no power adapter here so if you need extra power for your card um well you're just kind of out of luck and there's also no fan on this side of the system so I like the idea of having something that's actively cooled and so that led us to this little qap card but it's the qm2 2p 2G 2T so this would give you two extra ssds two extra Network ports and there's a little PC switch here so you don't have to worry about bif forcation so we thought like oh of course this thing is going to work um and the answer is that it did not work whenever we ran this in the system the system just gave us a black screen and it never booted we gave it 30 minutes just didn't boot now one thing that I found which was kind of fun is that we had an Old Dell wise like 5070 or something like that we were going to do an article on but then we just kind of ran out of time so we never did it it's called an AMD e91 3 and this is a low power GPU that's meant for like thin clients and stuff like that it has a cooling fan on it which is really good and you get a couple of display output so if you are not happy with just having three display outputs you can get six if you use this card which is pretty good and you also see that while we have a pcie by6 connector this only by8 that's populated on the actual uh little finger here and that is good because that kind of matches the slot but one thing I do want to point out is that this only comes with a 180 W power brick so if you do go and put something like a big GPU in this somehow and finding the way to cool it and all that kind of stuff then you do have to worry about the power and that 180 watt limit you're most likely going to have to go up to a 240 watt power supply just um it's kind of a bummer where you're going to have to go buy one of those if you do want something like that and if you just wanted something like 10g based te ethernet you can get something like this a quanta this is a Nick Giga a quanta aqc 113c Nick and this thing works no problem although we put the full hey bracket back on but it definitely work worked in here so that is awesome now one card that I was super excited about when I first saw this is the microti CCR 2004 now the reason I'm super excited by this is the fact that this has dual 25 gig ethernet ports it has the 1 gig Port which really you're going to use for management let's call it what it is and then there is a way to interface this with the system now there are definitely some caveats here like the number one caveat of course is the fact that uh this thing really doesn't work in Windows so um you know we installed it Windows you get the device couldn't start and that just kind of is what it is under Linux you will get this thing to work and microtic supports it so it is an option for you if you want to go and have like a like a router switch that you can put in here I think that's actually kind of a cool use case let's keep going and this is a broadcom 95740 which is also a dual 25 gig ethernet Nick you'll see that we already have the low profile bracket on here because I wanted to show you what happens when we try installing this in the system now I've already taken out the little clip that keeps everything in there and here's the challenge it is just slightly too long to be able to fit inside the chassis when we were doing this testing there were just a couple little like physical things that we found with this slot that they could improve and make it just a lot easier to work on and this is one of them it just needs a couple extra millimeters for this to work you can actually go and take this face plate off and if you do that it'll fit no problem but it's just kind of a pain in the butt to do that okay this is an Nvidia melanox connect X4 LX which was like the 25 gig ethernet adapter back in the day so there are tons of these things out there there are absolutely everywhere and frankly this thing worked no problem you just PL pop it in ready to go easy peasy now something that was a lot less easy peasy though is this card now this is a quad 10 gig adapter I think it's like an xl710 or x710 adapter it's quad port adapter and so you know you don't really have that much real estate on the back right for the different ports so you have these four SFP plus ports and when you try putting it in the system you run into an issue and hopefully you guys can see this but what you run into is a weird problem where you have the card about ready to get seated but then the SFP plus cages protrude just a bit from the back plate and when they do that this extra kind of plasticky thing that I don't really know why it's here in the first place gets in the way and So eventually we did get this card to work and the way that we fit it in there was we had to go and unlatch this and pull off this back like kind of face plate thing and once we did that we had no problem having an extra four ports of 10 gig ethernet giving us six total okay now let's get to the storage side uh things that worked well easy like little m.2 adapters if you just want to add an extra m.2 Drive no problem but of course folks are going to always want more storage so we found an old as dirt LSI or now it's broadcom SAS 38e or 8e which means that we have eight external ports in these two connectors and uh you know this one when we put the low profile bracket in plopped it in and it worked no problem when we saw it once we installed the drivers in both windows and and worked automatically in Linux so pretty darn easy to get working this allows you to do something like connect a SAS jbot or SATA jbot and get eight drives connected to the system externally which is just awesome just for Giggles we tried this cheap 9300 series uh like 16 port adapter and that did not work at all we just didn't find it in the system I have no idea and one just super easy one while we're at it is uh you know we just showed in our recent c3758 uh fanless system video we showed this qap unit attached to the back of that system with an sff 888 to an sfff 887 cable but the kit actually comes with this little qap card which has a little tiny not great as media s or SATA controller on it and it came with a low profile bracket and an sff 888 Port now this only has half of the ports of that old SAS 3 2008 but it does have some advantages like one it just worked in everything both Linux Windows no problem didn't have to worry about it just worked out of the box two it's so low power that you don't really have to worry about the heat which is always a challenge in a system like this and so we took our cable connected the two and we had four satad drives hooked up 18 tab SATA drives so we can go and create a Windows array easily that we could also take out and move to a different system if we wanted like that little fanless box that we reviewed recently one really cool thing if you want more drives is that we were able to install the 8 port card that came with the qap TL D800 s into the system two cables later and we had 18 8 tbte drives for a total of 144 tabt that we had installed and we're ready to use if you just want to have a lot of hard drive storage this is a pretty easy way to go do that and we also tried some kind of like really hot pcie SSD some things like a Bluefield 2 dpu um there are things that worked in the slot but on the other hand they were so hot because they're pushing so much power that um you know I just didn't really feel comfortable telling folks that they should put in a system like this so I think that my kind of just general just after playing with this for about a week and throwing just tons of different cards in here something I would say is that like if it's under 25 watts you're probably okay 15 under 15 I feel pretty comfortable about um but then once you start getting over like 25 watts you're definitely going to start noticing that cooling is going to become a challenge so I do think that there are folks that are going to figure out how to mod this thing and get cooling onto these cards especially if they want to run higher power cards on here but I know based on the first piece that we did on this that this is going to be a popular system but I also know that a lot of people are going to have just seen this key lesson learn and be like oh my gosh what am I going to do so what I think we should do is we're going to create a form thread on the S forms we're just going to go and like make a place where we're going to go list some cards that we found working in the ms01 I'm going to put the ones that we found and we tested that worked that didn't work so that way folks don't have to redo the same work but I do have an ask if you do get one of these systems you do put a card in well go to that form post and go and put like what works because I think that's super important that we do that as a community so that way we can utilize this little system as well as possible hey guys I know this is a long video but I also knew that we were going to be one of the first ones to review this and I wanted to be thorough didn't want to just say like oh this has everything and it just everything works there are weird things in this like that little plastic nub that means that you can't put in Quad Port Nicks for example some things just don't work there's an SSD destructive switch and all that kind of stuff so I wanted to make sure that we could be as thorough as possible while also getting this out as fast as we could so if you did like this video well why don't you share it with your friends but also give it a like click subscribe and turn on this notification so you can see whenever we come out with great new videos as always thanks for watching have an awesome day

Channel: ServeTheHome

Views: 352,807

Keywords: servethehome, serve the home, minisforum, ms-01, minisforum ms-01, mini pc, intel, core i9, intel core i9-13900h, 10gbe, sfp+, 2.5gbe, rz616, qnap, jbod, sata, m.2, u.2, nas, nas pc, proxmox ve, ubuntu, windows, vmware, homelab, home server, mini server, small server, proxmox, virtualization, router, firewall

Id: d3j4aEAZR7w

Length: 28min 55sec (1735 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 09 2024