For $600 the Minisforum MS-R1 gives you 64GB DDR5 ECC, 12 cores, dual 10GbE, a real PCIe 4.0 x8 slot, M.2 NVMe, Pi-compatible 40-pin GPIO, and actual UEFI boot. It runs Debian and Proxmox/KVM.
I’ve read that the CPU is trash compared to intel/amd in performance and in TDP, but you can’t build a mini pc/server on intel/amd right now for thaf price with that amount of RAM.
Even just buying the 64GB ddr5 RAM as sticks will be like over 800$…
In the low budget range you can go with a Pi 5 16GB which is now ~$300. Add PSU, case, NVMe HAT, PCIe HAT and you’re at $500+. It’s way too expensive for what you get, compared to spending a bit more and going with minisforum.
Yeah you can get old used boxes with that amount of RAM for maybe the same price, but they’ll such 200W and electricity is expensive where I live.
My current pine64 soquartz cluster over the past 5 years has been dying node by node and I can’t run anything more demanding on it (like game servers or local AI). It cost me about 600$ back then with 5x blade + nvme + soquartz module, a poe switch and a case with fans. Kinda seems like a bad deal now, I’m stuck with all the docker swarm issues and the bad cpu cores and max 8gb ram per node. Oh and it draws 52W. If the minisforum 12W TDP is correct, I will save over 100$ per year on electricity costs alone.
Maybe i’m biased and trying to justify my own purchase … let me know if I’m wrong about it being good value.
90% of home users won’t need 64gb of ram, let alone ddr5. You can run a basic home sever (plex, nextcloud, frigate, homeassistant and all the rest) on 16gb of DDR4 if you leverage the ram sharing that Linux containers let you do.
not to mention dual 10gb (even single 10gb) is overkill for 90% of us, plus no support for HDD’s so you’ll need a DAS or a NAS for real storage capacity.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters NAS Network-Attached Storage NUC Next Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers NVMe Non-Volatile Memory Express interface for mass storage PCIe Peripheral Component Interconnect Express SATA Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage SSD Solid State Drive mass storage
6 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 10 acronyms.
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Really depends.
It’d be massively overkill for me, so even if it’s technically a “good value”, it doesn’t make sense to buy one if my cluster of $60 thinkcentres is chugging along without an issue (and I get HA).
On the other hand, if you need all that extra performance for something, then it’s probably a great buy (hence its popularity here).
I’ve downgraded my server from 1st gen i7 10 GB RAM (don’t ask) to Core 2 Duo 4 GB with the same load and barely felt it. my entire infra including desktop, laptopS, tablet, phoneS, etc costs like a third of this “missed value”.
not shitting on your choices, but positing that the price-gouging retail market is all there is, kinda disingenuous; there’s sooo much stuff being discarded although perfectly usable.
like, I couldn’t bear the super-expensive raspberries while they were in the $50 range, let alone now. marketplaces are awash in busted laptops, with way better value and performance. discarded corpo desktops can house cheap HDD and run 24/7 for eons. etc.
10 GB RAM (don’t ask)
I wanna know
lol fine - 3x 2 GB 1333 modules out of a busted 1366 motherboard I found and one 4 GB 1866 module I couldn’t pair with anything, worked fine for years. the i7 got upgraded to workstation and a C2D i found by the dumpster took the server role. same drives, same debian, same docker-compose files - all good so far.
I tried selfhosting a game server and it was laggy as hell on 8GB RAM. Then I ran it on my laptop that has 32GB and it ran fine and all friends were able to play. Was consuming aboyt 25GB (but still may run with less)
But I’m not gonna run my laptop as a server because it is fully glued and I can’t take out the battery without destroying it.
Another tool I looked into requires at least 16GB RAM.
So maybe for your usecase it’s fine. But for me, I can’t do half the stuff I want cause my cluster server has low RAM nodes. Even though it has 32GB in total (4x8)
I am interested in trying out an Arm/RISC-V PC for a Linux server. However, what stops me from buying almost all of them is that they require you to use a dubious, poorly-maintained manufacturer fork of some Linux distro.I don’t want my hardware to become e-waste when the manufacturer looses interest in 10 months, so running an upstream distro (like Fedora/Debian/NixOS) is a hard requirement for me. It seems that they half-solved that issue for this machine, so that’s actually good progress.
For this particular machine, Jeff Geerling also reported that the idle power draw is 17W. That’s higher than my faster, fully-upgradable mATX AM5 x86 NAS…
How expensive was your NAS when you bought it and how expensive is it now and how much RAM cause I need a lot.
To be fair, $600 for 64GB of RAM is a steal in this economy (you could probably sell the RAM alone for $800). So if you want that much RAM and are ok with the rest of the system - go for it. I mostly wanted to point out why I personally would not like such a machine (why I’m “sleeping” on it).
Mine was the equivalent of $660 at the time with 32GB of RAM (excl. HDDs). In this RAMpocalypse it would probably cost around $1k.
If I’m going to spend that much on a server it won’t be a mini pc.
So what would you buy for 600$ that has 64GB RAM?
I would spend more, because im not building a server out of a mini pc. I would also optionally buy used or refurbished parts to save money given the state of things.
And as others have pointed out there’s serious concerns about the long term support of its non-standard CPU.
Even you have pointed out that it’s an incredible price for what you get. Why is that? Is it really?
Especially one without a mainstream CPU that won’t have any support
Minisforum gets a ton a hype. Nothing they make gets slept on.
You said it’s trash because of performance. That’s not the whole story, it’s trash because the CIX chip causes a list of goofy issues that the engineers never solved. This includes power issues but also other things that will pop up and make things much harder than they should be. It’s cheap because they’re getting rid of their year-old stock that predates most of the RAM price increases.
If don’t think you will be able to get it run everything you have in mind. I don’t think it will be near 12W either.
I’ve had two different Minisforum mini PCs. Each one of them failed. One was one I purchased which was replaced with a different model when it died one morning. Then the replacement died after a few weeks of use.
Their customer service and shipping services were awful. It was like pulling teeth to get them to do anything.
Their stuff always sounds good on paper but I had nothing but miserable experiences. Not telling you to avoid but I just wanted to share my pain.
If you don’t mind me asking, which model did you have these issues with? I’m sorry to hear you had a bad experience.
The UM560 was my first device, the one I actually purchased.
The NAB6 was the one they took forever to send me as a replacement. It died within a week.
Getting my UM560 replaced took ~50 emails.
They tried to charge me the difference between units even though I was under warranty. It wasn’t my fault they didn’t have any more UM560s.
Then they tried to charge me a “depreciation charge”.
I won’t do business with them again after their horrible customer service.
Seems indeed relatively good value for money, but how is the mainline Linux kernel support for that SoC?
Edit: also in the early reviews people found some strangely high idle power consumption, which really isn’t good for a home server.
they seem to ship their own kernel, but I’ll try when it arrives later today
They should be providing patches then. If so, you can patch a vanilla kernel.
Cool, let us know how it goes and maybe also see if the power consumption has improved with more recent kernel versions.
Yikes. If there’s no mainline support you’ll be stuck on whatever version the vendor gives you.
Seems not too bad. It seems to boot with mainline Linux (or at least Ubuntu ISOs) and the vendor releases patches for recent kernel versions, which is much better than most ARM SoCs.
I like your idea, but minisforum has much better platforms for self hosting. The better options do cost twice as much. Not sure they are cost effective as far as purchase price goes.
I run one with an AMD chip set and very much like it. Its fairly low power usage, but I haven’t measured in a while. For what it’s worth, I really like mine.
The better options do cost twice as much
Yeah thwre are a lot of better options for lots more money. But I don’t have that kind of money.
I need lots of RAM for as cheaply as possible while also being low-ish on the power cpnsumption. There is for example old server hardware on ebay that has 64GB or more RAM but draws like 300W idle. And it’s not even that much cheaper to buy. Like I said for me, a 40W difference is about 100$ per year, so anything lower power than my current server will eventually pay for itself.
I would have gone with amd or intel or whatever, but I didn’t find anything in that price range.
In the space of mini PCs/NUCs, this does seem comparable. But bear in mind that the entire space of “home server” is a lot bigger than NUCs. After all, not everyone just wants to host an NVMe drive or two; they might want to fit some cheaper SATA SSDs or even spinning rust, as part of a cascade of stroage, with caching on SSDs and other nice things.
Likewise, the dual LAN ports with 802.3bz support is nice, but the reality is that most networks are only 1 Gbps with some devices supporting 2.5 Gbps. Quite frankly, for server use that actually needs one or both port’s bandwidth, the link would likely be better served with SFP+ slots, because of better compatibility with cheap enterprise switches available online, and because SFP+ transceivers run less hot than their twisted pair counterparts at 10 Gbps. Heck, you could even use a 40 Gbps QSFP+ NIC, which only requires a x8 or X4 PCIe slot (depending on PCIe generation of the NIC). On that note, a single PCIe slot is nice, but it does preclude the use of a double-wide GPU for transcoding use.
I would sum all this up as lacking expandability. Yes, it can be expanded somewhat. But for folks that want the capacity of an ATX-based build, this ain’t it. And for folks with abundant solar power, electricity consumption for older gen chips isn’t as much of a dealbreaker. It certainly checks off a lot of people’s boxes, yours included, but that doesn’t mean that people are “sleeping on” this, because at the end of the day, if it doesn’t serve their purposes, it’s not the right box for them. In terms of price, never underestimate the cost of $0.00 that is an old, unused laptop; they make remarkably decent servers for light loads.
Also, as of this writing, only the 32 GB RAM variant is available on the USA website.
My personal bad take is it’s trying to be an oversized pi but kinda failed. Arm processor, high idle tdp, 10g baseT, and selling itself with a kernal hack of a kernal hack.
Would be interesting how the power drops by switching the baseT with SFP+ slots.
