11–20 of 49 posts
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…
That's a lot smaller than the general homelab niche, or those who want a small, efficient, quiet computer for some purpose.
As I mentioned in the post, the M4 mini is only $50-100 more (though RAM upgrades quickly negate the price comparison past the base model), and it's many times more efficient—and powerful.
And while you can't do everything with Thunderbolt... there are some halfway-decent external PCIe docks you can use with some devices on macOS now.
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.
Supposedly that could be fixable with a bios/firmware update… but there’s no guarantee that will ever happen
There's also the Orange Pi 6 Plus, and the Radxa O6N with the same SoC, they would all benefit from the power issues on this chip being resolved. Not sure if it'll happen.
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.
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.
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…
The one niche they could hit I think is Arm devs who need an Arm machine, want to run Linux (and not rely on Asahi, which still only runs on M1/M2), and want some hardware expansion (PCIe, M.2, dual 10 GbE, etc.). That's a lot smaller than the general homelab niche, or those who want a small, efficient, quiet computer for some purpose. As I mentioned in the post, the M4 mini is only $50-100 more (though RAM upgrades…
The homelab niche always surprises me for how many people are willing and able to buy hardware they don't really need.
I'm sure it's still a small niche, but I wouldn't be surprised if minisforum was selling a lot of devices to homelab builders looking for the next toy to add to their collection.
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…
I still bought my 795s7 (a cheap 16-core MoDT (mobile on desktop) zen4 box) anyways, but accepting that I would probably never get bios updates ever was a hard pill to swallow. I haven't had to deal with support for anything defective, but support as in available bios updates being so so so spotty is really unfortunate. AMD is talking about replacing closed AGESA BIOS with open OpenSIL bios some day, and maybe perhap…
Just sprung for one at a good price.
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...
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…
I still bought my 795s7 (a cheap 16-core MoDT (mobile on desktop) zen4 box) anyways, but accepting that I would probably never get bios updates ever was a hard pill to swallow. I haven't had to deal with support for anything defective, but support as in available bios updates being so so so spotty is really unfortunate. AMD is talking about replacing closed AGESA BIOS with open OpenSIL bios some day, and maybe perhap…