MINISFORUM MS-01 Mini PC Barebone with Intel Core i9-12900H,vPro Enterprise Support,2x10Gbps SFP+LAN/2x2.5G RJ45/2xUSB4/HDMI/16xPCIe 4.0/M.2 NVMe SSD/U.2 NVMe SSD,Mini Computer(No OS/RAM/SSD)

I am a Mac person through and through but have a few workloads that don’t work well in Parallels, so I started looking for a minimalistic approach that didn’t require me to buy an expensive laptop or bulky desktop. I found great articles about the Minisforum MS-01 and was impressed with its upgradable design, size, and performance characteristics. I bought the largest model and got a 4Tb NMVe SSD and a Yeston RTX 3050 low-profile GPU as upgrades.The PC was super easy to set up. I first cloned the 1Tb SSD to the 4Tb SSD and installed it without any problem by removing just 3 screws. The video card was even easier to install as it required a single screw to be removed. I connected the PC to my 10Gbps network using an SFP+ fiber adapter and was off to the races. The boot time was super fast and after a few obligatory Windows installation steps, I was up and running, connected to the internet, and had a great 4K image. I was glad to see it came with a Windows 11 Pro license and absolutely zero apps; just the necessary drivers.The forums mentioned that upgrading the BIOS was important and that was easy too, although that entire process was much better explained on the forums than in the Minisforum documentation. It took just 5 minutes in the end and allowed me to see a lot of interesting features in the BIOS as well.Now that I’ve run the system for a week, I’m so impressed. It’s unbelievable how powerful this minuscule PC is and how easy it was to expand. It’s not as quiet as my Mac Studio Pro, but it’s totally fine from a noise perspective.I highly recommend the Minisforum MS-01.

Have had it for a week and very happy with performance so far.Note that the system doesn't have a lot of USB ports. I need to buy a USB expander.

I bought three of these for a "small" Proxmox cluster and sadly, one of them came with a mangled socket on account of its own protector coming loose while in transit and hitting the pins. I asked for a refund and proceeded to buy a new unit.However, the new unit had a different cooler on the back, there was no heatsink for the main NVMe and instead it came with a cooler for the VRM, which IMO is not as useful as the previous one. Also, the new unit did not come with the U.2 adapter, which is just unacceptable.All in all, these perform quite well, they come with 2 PCIEx4 NVMe slots (at least per the manual), allowing me to create a 6-drive Ceph cluster. They do support 96GB of RAM, but could not find the option inside the BIOS to make it run at 5600Mts, as advertised; I'm limited to 5200Mts.

Perfect, very versatile and silent mini PC. I absolutely love the PCIe Slot, which gave me the option to add a two port 25 GBit network card. Runs rock solid as a Firewall with Opnsense.

I have purchased a total of 43 systems from Minisforum since 2023. Roughly 25% of them are defective within 13 - 16 months. With Minisforum dont expect longevity. Power adapters fail and they do not want to provide you with the info to replace.Minisforum denies ever selling me 8 of the TH80 systems that are clearly in my amazon orders history. Since that product is no longer available amazon doesnt have the listing anymore but the order history is in my account.I can leave a negative reveiw on all my purchases to explain the defect rate I experience.

I realized I rarely take my laptop anywhere, so I bought this console as a replacement to use in my office. The computer is compact and powerful. I removed the 32GB RAM included and easily added 96 GB DDR5 RAM, which I purchased separately but still came to a total cost of less than half what an equivalent laptop would cost. The memory modules are below the fan. At first, the fan was loud, but I changed the power settings and that stopped.***Update. After adding the additional RAM, I realized the hibernate function stopped working. When I tried to enable it I was getting error code 0xC000007F. I spent many hours trying to figure out how to resolve this error. Nothing worked until I finally learned that the C:\ drive or your Windows partition drive must have the equivalent amount of free space as the memory you've added for Hibernation to work. Thus, I had to shrink a contiguous partition and add it to my C:\ drive until I had 96GB of free space to get Hibernate to work again. I'm not lowering my rating from 5 stars, but be mindful of this if you upgrade the RAM.

This thing puts out a TON of heat, even when it's idle. I installed a half-height controller card that came with my 8-bay SAS/SATA enclosure. Even when there are no VMs running, and just maintaining a low-use 3-node Ceph cluster, it's just billowing out heat from the vents. I suppose it's not a huge issue, but in my eyes that means it could use better cooling and/or a larger enclosure.That being said, I would definitely buy more of these in the future if I want to expand my cluster, or one of my other PC-based servers dies a horrible death. I upgraded to 96GB of RAM, and you can also daisy-chain 3 of these via thunderbolt and have a wicked-fast internal network for heartbeat, Ceph, and live migrations. Then you can use the 20+ Gbps of networking for everything else.