This Might Be The Perfect Mini PC

this PC is all I've ever wanted well pretty much it's extremely compact has tons of CPU horsepower and IO and expandability unlike pretty much anything else in its class there is one big problem though I only have one of them just kidding there are definitely some complaints and things that I think could have been done differently but the system is still really fascinating so let's dive into it [Music] now before we get started how good is your air quality right now not sure well that's probably because you don't have something like the rnet 4 from today's sponsor rnet there are many studies showing a negative correlation between CO2 levels and cognitive function higher CO2 levels can also be an indicator of poor ventilation which can lead to higher transmission rates of Airborne illnesses now you can't fix what you can't measure and that's where the rnet 4 comes in it has one of the most accurate ndir CO2 sensors on the market with up to a 15-year lifespan and it doesn't just measure CO2 levels you also get temperature relative humidity and atmospheric pressure it's completely wireless but because it uses this nice eink display the battery life can last up to 4 years using Bluetooth you can connect to the free mobile app to tweak settings turn on or off the optional audible signal and check out historical data you can even export the data as a CSV but you're not just limited to their app using Bluetooth you can easily connect it to home assistant and monitor and measure the data however you choose plus it's local push so no need for a cloud service or even an internet connection there's also some cool options for stickers you can put on the front but I personally prefer the default clear aesthetic if you want to know the quality of the air in your space and you want a highquality non nonsense device to do it make sure to check out the rnf4 by clicking the links down in the description below this is the ms01 from Min Forum now really quick as with anytime a company sends me a product to look at I get to say whatever I want no money exchanged hands and frankly I don't mind Burning Bridges with companies that don't like me saying things about their bad products while I try to be as transparent as possible I totally understand if you don't want to entirely trust me it probably makees sense anyway this is the ms01 from min's forum and I think the first thing we should talk about is the form factor this thing is basically the same size as one of these little one L mini PCS from Brands like Dell HP and Lenovo it's slightly taller and a little bit bigger but realistically has about the same footprint this thing packs a lot more inside though starting with the CPU this features the Intel 13900 H with six performance cores eight efficiency cores with a total of 20 threads and a Max clock of 5.4 GHz the CPU has plenty of cores for running a bunch of different virtual machines and tons of horsepower for heavy lifting when you need it but it's still relatively efficient which we'll get into more later the CPU also includes Intel's Iris XE Graphics this isn't quite as impressive in terms of things like gaming for example when compared to the offerings from AMD but the irx graphics are great for transcoding this system comes with 32 GB of ddr5 but can technically support 64 GB officially now unofficially it seems to be able to support up to 96 GB it also comes with a 1 TB gen 4x4 in VM SSD the front IO is pretty modest with some USB ports an audio jack and the power button but the back is where things get nuts probably the most notable thing are the two 10 GB SFP plus ports right next to those are two RJ45 2 1/2 GB Nicks one is the Intel I 226v and the other is the I 226 LM and this is actually important because the I 226 LM provides support for Intel vpro but more on that later there's also two USB 4 ports which I believe support Thunderbolt 3 adapters but can also connect to a lot of other things including multiple displays if you want to use this for example as a workstation there's also an HDMI port two usb3 type A ports and a barrel Jack for the 19v power supply now you might have also noticed this pcie slot here and yes this does have a PCI slot and to get to that we need to open it up which is one of the coolest aspects about this system you just push on this little tab here and most of the internals slide right out from here you can see that this does indeed have a pcie slot however it only supports half height single Slot Cards and runs at gen4x 8 even though it's a by6 slot on the bottom beneath this fan bracket there are three m.2 sockets of varying speeds starting from the left there's a gen 4x4 a gen 3x4 and a gen 3x2 these support the more standard m.2 2280 inm ssds but they also support the longer 22110 ssds that you see more in the Enterprise world now originally I didn't test these out because I didn't have one and then after I finished most of my testing I realized minis form actually sent one over but it had just Fallen to the bottom of the box so Oops I Did test it and it does in fact work great one of the other fascinating things about this system is that it technically supports a u.2 drive this is accomplished thanks to this included adapter that connects to the leftmost m.2 mvme slot now this brings me to one of my first and probably one of the biggest complaints about this system which is a small switch that's labeled U2 and m.2 essentially when you're using an m.2 SSD in the leftmost slot it needs to be set to m.2 and vice versa if you happen to run the u.2 drive while it's set to m.2 your u.2 SSD just won't work however if you have it set to u.2 with an m.2 nvme you're going to unfortunately provide 12 volts that that nvme SSD is not expecting now Min Forum did warn me about this and I wasn't quite sure about their language in an email if this is a prototype issue and will be fixed in the final version or if this is the solution from the final version regardless just pay attention to it and be aware now while testing late at night and switching out a bunch of different ssds I did indeed find out the hard way that injecting 12 volts into your m.2 SSD will produce some Magic Smoke however somehow my SSD survived although I'm sure it probably has a blown capacitor or something on it somewhere so that's pretty much the specs of this system let's talk about how well it performed I ran a few really basic benchmarks starting with cinch R15 here the 13900 H scored a 2581 now for you in100 lovers out there that's six times the performance of my cam Ru n100 that I tested just a little while ago in the much newer CCH R23 the ms01 achieved a multi-threaded score of 15699 and a single threaded score of 1730 now compared to the n100 that's still over six times the performance in the multi-threaded score however the margins are quite a bit tighter in the single threaded score and I know these CPUs are in total different weight classes they're completely different but I thought it was kind of fun to compare the two since I hear about the n100 a lot something probably a bit more comparable would be my desktop which has a ryzen 3950x that system scored a pretty massive 22 971 in the multi-threaded test but only 1218 in the single threaded test now performance isn't everything what about power draw when sitting idle and windows the entire system drew around 14 watts but ramped all the way up to 107 when starting cab bench but after a few seconds that settled down to 84 Watts now once again for the fun n100 comparison the ms01 system is drawing a lot more power than the 18 watts of the n100 however if you're looking for more of a rough performance per watt calculation the 13900 H has more than six times the performance in cinebench while drawing less than six times the power once again this is not incredibly scientific and these CPUs are in totally different weight classes I just thought it was sort of a fun comparison if you're looking for more detailed benchmarks on this system I recommend checking out surf the homes article as they go into a lot more detail about how well this system performs fan noise was pretty much unnoticeable at idle but it did get very noticeable under heavy load I will say the quality of the sound was pretty decent and wasn't n't whiny or annoying though for some real world workstation experience I hopped into D vinti resolve which is now what I edit my videos in and scrubbing through a timeline was pretty darn smooth even with some color grading and some light effects I had no issues however when I moved over to rendering things weren't quite as impressive my desktop PC with the 3950x and RTX 30612 GB was able to render out a test timeline in a minute and 51 seconds however the ms01 rendered out the exact same timeline in 9 minutes and 15 seconds this performance deficit is probably due to the iris XE Graphics now just for fun I decided to throw in a graphics card to see if that would help at all but the best single slot half height card I had was an old Nvidia Quadro k1200 which just made matters worse but it worked and you can slot a GPU in this now I don't think anyone's buying these for gaming but I was decently surprised in rocket league on low settings at 1080p I was getting a really solid 100 to 200 frames per second when I bumped things up to Mac settings I was still getting over 100 frames per second although there were some noticeable frame time hitches I've been playing Red Dead Redemption 2 for the first time so I thought I'd throw that at it and basically the lowest settings possible at 1080p we were still getting over 30 frames per second while adventuring around the outskirts of Valentine I probably could have capped this at 30 frames per second and had a pretty darn playable experience all right now imagine most of you guys don't really care about gaming or even windows that much so let's move on to some more Home Server type stuff first I installed Debian mostly just to see if I could get the power draw to come down anymore but I was still sitting around 14 watts at idle I ran jelly fin to see some transcoding and man the iris XE Graphics are a beast when it comes to this when transcoding a 4K hdr10 hvvc with VP tone mapping I was seeing nearly 100 frames per second when doing the same thing but encoding to 1080p I saw over 280 frames per second the system would jump up to 40 WTS for just a few seconds while transcoding and then sit around 18 Watts pretty much much the rest of the time I installed the u.2 drive and installed proxmox primarily just to check out those two 10 GB Nicks I set up proxmox with no issues and then started up a simple lxc container with costos just to quickly get an idea of what a file transfer might look like and oh boy first of all I perf 3 was beautiful I know there's tons of videos on YouTube of people getting 100 gbit and such but for me to see just a locked 10 GB per second was pretty awesome to see that speed in the real world I tested out some NB file transfers I started with my true Naas machine which is running 4 10 TB hard drives and there I was getting read speeds of about 400 to 500 megab per second when I switched over to the u.2 SSD and the ms01 I was locked at 1.1 GB per second knowing what the CPU could do I didn't really see a need to spin up a ton of virtual machines or anything but I did spin up one virtual machine to try out pcie pass through for some reason when using this quad 2 and2 GB Nick I was having some weird sleep state issues that I had never run into before and assuming it might be something to do with the card or just my knowledge I swap oh gosh when I swapped it out with a different Nick that I had used before for PCI pass through I had no issues and it was immediately recognized in my PFS VM another really interesting feature specifically of the 13900 H is that it supports Intel vpro and AMT or active management technology now I'm not an IT guy and I'm not going to act like I fully understand the scope and usability of something like vpro but I do know that it opens up options for Remote Management similar to something like ipmi since I don't have any experience in this realm it did take quite a while for me to get it set up first of all I'm pretty sure you have to be using the I 226 LM Nick for these features to work now unfortunately that port's not labeled but I found that it's the one closer to the SFP plus ports you also have to configure some settings in the Bios fortunately I found this guide from mesh Central that helped quite a bit however the HTTP port on 16992 wasn't open like I was expecting but the https port on 16993 was and After figuring that out I was able to get to the web UI this gives you some basic functionality like system status and being able to turn the system on and off but you can do a lot more with software like mesh Commander this is actually the software that Min form recommended that I use but unfortunately this software is recently no longer supported and the download links are completely gone with some digging I was able to find that I could set it up in a dock container and connected to the ms1 running mesh Commander you get a lot more functionality including access to a full KVM now while it was a pain in the butt to get things set up for someone like me that doesn't have a lot of experience with Intel vpro having a KVM pretty much built directly into this system is a big value ad now as much as I love this system I do have a few qualms and most of them pretty much come down to the physical layout as much as I love how you can just slide this thing out this design seems a bit half-baked to me it's completely toolless to get to the internals but you have to remove three screws to replace the Ram or you have to remove three screws and deal with this wonky fan plate to get to the ssds I didn't mention this earlier but the only thing that holds in that u.2 adapter and the Wi-Fi card is this plate so as you're trying to get that plate on it's kind of all wobbling around and it can be a bit awkward as much as I love the pcie slot there's also some issues here primarily with tolerances while I didn't run into any issues where I just completely couldn't get a card to fit trying to get this quad 2 and2 GB Nick to slide in was kind of a pain and I had to really push on it to get it to work over at served the home Patrick mentioned that they had certain cards that wouldn't fit unless they disassembled certain parts of the case also the mechanism that holds the pcie card in place is a little bit odd there's this screw that holds this little black pin tab I don't even know what you call this this little black plastic piece in place and you have to pop that out to be able to get your PCI E card out after a few attempts I started figuring out how to get this out somewhat safely but the first few times it kind of went flying and I honestly wouldn't be surprised if someone ended up damaging the PCB slightly by trying to get this out and while I do love how small this system is I almost feel like they made it unnecessarily small when I first got the system I assumed it was small enough to be rack mountable but it's actually a little bit too tall for that you could set two of these side by side in a rack shelf but you would need two units of rack space to make that work there's also no vase amounting options to mount it on the back of a monitor and honestly it would be a little bit too heavy for that anyway so I don't see why they didn't just make this thing a little bit taller if you made the case a bit taller you could add some more cooling capacity for the CPU but also allow for dual slot half height cards this would open up opportunities for other gpus like an Intel A380 for example and having more room would actually be pretty beneficial for a lot of single Slot Cards a lot of more Enterprise cards are meant to be in servers where they're expecting a ton of air just being forced through the whole system running some of those cards in a case like this is probably going to lead to some thermal issues if you had more height you could add a fan to the card or even have mounting options on the top of the Chassy to undermount like an 80 mm fan or something I think that would be really cool and not really change the footprint of this device any I think you could still even fit two of these together in a 2u rack space coming from more of an AV background I had some cool ideas of how you could use this system in live production or live video applications my first thought was to add something like a Blackmagic deck Link Card to give lots of video inputs and outputs to for example Drive multiple LED walls or projectors or have video inputs for cameras for running a live stream however most of those cards are all full height so it was a little disappointing to see some of the options you could miss out on by not having a full height card however adding a full height card would definitely change the footprint so I get that now let's talk about pricing there's currently some early bird pricing on their website but unfortunately I'm pretty sure by the time my video goes live that won't be available anymore with the early bird pricing the barebones kit is $680 with the model that I have with a 1 tby SSD and 32 GB of RAM coming in at $830 us the normal pricing for these is $840 for the barebones kit and $1,030 if you include the SSD and RAM now I hadn't mentioned it up until this point but there's actually a 12th gen model with the 12 900h for around $200 less that might actually be the better deal now I know that $1,000 is not cheap and I'm not even going to act like that's affordable for most people watching this but with a CPU list price of over $600 and most other systems with this CPU costing at least $800 I think this is actually priced pretty aggressively I mean realistically any other alternative with this CPU is not going to have a pcie slot three m.2 ssds Intel AMT dual 2 and2 gbit nxs or dual 10 GB Nix I mean heck just buying the Dual x710 NYX and a PCI card is going to set you back around $150 or so already so yeah this is expensive especially compared to a lot of other things I cover on the channel but I feel like it's pretty aggressively priced and if you're needing these features I feel like it's a pretty darn good value I think the main thing I love about it though is that it seems that Min Forum actually listen to enthusiasts and professionals rather than just churning out some more Nook likee mini PCS I really hope to see them improve upon and expand on this design because well it's just really stinking cool if you're interested in checking one of these out I'll make sure to have a link down in the description and also go check out surf the homes article because like I said they go into a lot of detail about performance and such I think that's about it for this one though so as always thank you guys so much for watching stay curious and I can't wait to see you in the next [Music] one [Music]

Channel: Hardware Haven

Views: 422,390

Keywords: minisforum ms-01, ms01, mini pc, high end mini pc, workstation mini pc, 10gb mini PC, sfp+, 2.5Gb, home server, 13900h, vPRO, AMT, intel, jellyfin, proxmox

Id: arKdDabcs6g

Length: 17min 35sec (1055 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 19 2024