Have you ever acquired a brand new PC in your Christmas checklist this yr to spherical out your homelab setup? In that case, you will need to hear what Jeff Geerling has to say concerning the new Minisforum MS-R1 mini workstation. It’s a whole homelab in a field with some pretty eye-popping specs, and it’s powered by an Arm processor, so you may count on it to be vitality environment friendly as nicely. However is the Minisforum MS-R1 actually all it is cracked as much as be?
On paper you may’t go incorrect. It’s geared up with a 12-core Arm CPU operating at 2.6GHz, 64GB of RAM, and a whopping one terabyte SSD. You additionally get Wi-Fi 6E connectivity, and nearly each port you would possibly want. There’s a built-in Mali GPU as nicely, however with a full-size PCIe slot obtainable, there may be additionally room for an improve. All of this is available in a cute little case that may be tucked away anyplace.
However when Geerling acquired simply beneath the floor, issues didn’t look fairly so good. He famous that in real-world use, the machine was fairly snappy, and that the pc spanked a Raspberry Pi 5 in most benchmarks. Nonetheless, the benchmarks have been unexpectedly inconsistent. In some instances, the Minisforum MS-R1 underperformed an older mannequin with a 6-core CPU. Energy consumption was additionally means greater than anticipated for an Arm machine.
Whereas it’s hypothesis, Geerling’s opinion is that the system’s processor has an odd core structure. He believes that is inflicting latency in communication between the cores, hurting total efficiency in some instances. He suspects that that is additionally the explanation for elevated energy consumption. It might be that extra energy must be equipped to fight the issues related to the awkward core structure.
In any case, Geerling wished to see how helpful the machine may very well be for experimentation, so he fired up a locally-running massive language mannequin. The efficiency was underwhelming once more, however there’s a spare PCIe slot, so he put in an NVIDIA RTX A2000 for acceleration. Sadly, it doesn’t matter what he tried, he couldn’t get the NVIDIA driver to put in on the machine. An try to put in an Intel Arc A310 ECO GPU was additionally met with issues.
He suspected these issues have been as a result of customized working system put in on the machine, so he put in a vanilla Ubuntu picture. This labored with none issues, and the NVIDIA GPU even labored, so it undoubtedly appeared like an improve.
Maybe changing the working system can resolve a lot of this machine’s issues, nevertheless it didn’t change the efficiency. For the worth, you may seemingly do higher. As Geerling reminds us, specs aren’t the whole lot. It’s important to dig deeper if you wish to know the way a pc will actually carry out.
The Minisforum MS-R1 (📷: Jeff Geerling)
The machine could be very compact (📷: Jeff Geerling)
A glance contained in the case (📷: Jeff Geerling)
