> The strange CPU core layout is causing power problems; Radxa and Minisforum both told me Cix is working on power draw, and enabling features like ASPM. It seems like for stability, and to keep memory access working core to core, with the big.medium.little CPU core layout, Cix wants to keep the chip powered up pretty high. 14 to 17 watts idle is beyond even modern Intel and AMD!
$599 seems like a lot to me. You can get numerous older, much more powerful Mini PCs (e.g older ThinkCentre Tiny series) or even a base brand new M4 Mac Mini for that kind of money.
Admittedly, the 10G interfaces and fast RAM make up for some of it, but at least for a normal homelab setup, I can't think of an application needing RAM faster than even DDR3, especially at this power level.
A base Mac Mini (256GB/16GB) would cost me €720 while a Minisforum MS-R1 (1TB/32GB) would cost me €559 (minus a 25 euro discount for signing up to their newsletter if you accept that practice).
Price to performance the Apple solution may be better, but the prices aren't similar at all.
Upgrading the Mac to also feature 1TB of storage and 32GB of RAM, the price rises by a whopping €1000 to €1719.
I just picked up a NAS - a ugreen dxp2800 - for £300. It has 2x nvme slots and 2x 3.5 bays. It’s x86 so if you don’t like the ugreen os you can change it.
It runs docker (supports docker compose) and vms and has the usual raid stuff.
They also do an arm version for half the price but I wanted the intel gpu for transcoding.
Not sure about the CPU performance being much more powerful for some shit-stained NUCs found on ebay, but one selling point for these minisforum machines are hassle-free dual 10G interfaces which are required for decent cluster performance - see ceph or proxmox ( with ceph ) or even kubernetes with, you guessed it - rook-ceph. Getting 10Gbit interface to work on ThinkCentre is possible, but not guaranteed to be reliable. This machine is perfect for such application and price point is not that terrible all things considered.
2x10G is the biggest selling point of this device. This can be very useful in certain use-cases, when you need a high speed interconnect with SSD-backed NAS, for example. Or between a Ceph-cluster nodes for the faster replication.
Nice device but the experience write up is more about distro choices than anything. It's quieter than the older units and it's harder to run 2 disk ssd raid because of some design choices. Is it faster? How many virtuals? What's the throughput if you use it for complex network related roles not offloaded to the microtik switching/routing kit?
Most likely not. This CPU has 3 types of cores. Heterogenous core is still a work in progress in FreeBSD and AFAIK they are targeting the Intel implementation first.
For those who don't need quite that much power I recently added an Orange Pi 5 to my own homelab, the RK3588 SoC packs an impressive punch for what it is
Similarly, a Beelink mini runs one of my Proxmox nodes and it's excellent. Literally sips power, too. I think I measured under 30w while under load. I mainly use it for my Plex instance given the N100 with QuickSync.
I have a personal ban on any hardware that isn't powered by USB-C. (Or if it's large I'll accept a C17 socket.) Either give me a GaN or I will get it myself.
Otherwise I'd probably have a few machines from this company.
Funny, I just bought one of these last week. Agree with the article. Mine came with storage and Debian preinstalled. If you buy one from Amazon, keep an eye on price. I bought, then the next day the price dropped $150. Ordered another one and returned the expensive order.
It's more maintenance due to its frequent release cycles, but it's perfectly good as a server OS. I've used it many times, friends use it.
You can't mess up the release cycle because their package repos drop old releases very quickly, so you're left stranded.
A friend recently converted his Fedora servers to RHEL10 because he has kids now and just doesn't have the time for the release cycle. So RHEL, or Debian, Alma, Rocky, offer a lot more stability and less maintenance requirement for people who have a life.
They claim it's the first ARM mini workstation with UEFI. Which… nope, that would be Solid-run's Clearfog/Honeycomb LX2k (ITX board), several years old at this point.
slight tangent, but anyone had experience with running asahi on a m2 MacBook headless? I have a m2 air with a damaged screen id like to repurpose. Mostly want docker containers or something coolify adjacent
With full disk encryption enabled you need a keyboard and display attached at boot to unlock it. You then need to sign in to your account to start services. You can use an IP based KVM but that’s another thing to manage.
If you use Docker, it runs in a vm instead of native.
With a Linux based ARM box you can use full disk encryption, use drop bear to ssh in on boot to unlock disks, native docker, ability to run proxmox etc.
Mac minis/studio have potential to be great low powered home servers but Apple is not going down that route for consumers. I’d be curious if they are using their own silicon and own server oriented distro internally for some things.
Most likely wanting to run Linux natively. Only M1/M2 can fill that role with Asahi, and still not with 100% hardware compatibility.
On the flip side, an M4 mini is cheaper, faster, much smaller (with built in power supply) and much more efficient. Plus for most applications, they can run in a Linux container just as well.
> There is also one other perk: while the MSRP is $599, I got it for $559 despite a RAM shortage.
At that price, why not a mac mini running linux? I think (skimming Asahi docs) the only things that would give you trouble don't matter to the headless usecase here?
walterbell|10 days ago
> The strange CPU core layout is causing power problems; Radxa and Minisforum both told me Cix is working on power draw, and enabling features like ASPM. It seems like for stability, and to keep memory access working core to core, with the big.medium.little CPU core layout, Cix wants to keep the chip powered up pretty high. 14 to 17 watts idle is beyond even modern Intel and AMD!
avhception|9 days ago
inventor7777|10 days ago
Admittedly, the 10G interfaces and fast RAM make up for some of it, but at least for a normal homelab setup, I can't think of an application needing RAM faster than even DDR3, especially at this power level.
jeroenhd|9 days ago
A base Mac Mini (256GB/16GB) would cost me €720 while a Minisforum MS-R1 (1TB/32GB) would cost me €559 (minus a 25 euro discount for signing up to their newsletter if you accept that practice).
Price to performance the Apple solution may be better, but the prices aren't similar at all.
Upgrading the Mac to also feature 1TB of storage and 32GB of RAM, the price rises by a whopping €1000 to €1719.
thebruce87m|9 days ago
It runs docker (supports docker compose) and vms and has the usual raid stuff.
They also do an arm version for half the price but I wanted the intel gpu for transcoding.
merpkz|9 days ago
ekropotin|9 days ago
esseph|10 days ago
Bluescreenbuddy|8 days ago
ggm|9 days ago
Does FreeBSD work better?
irusensei|9 days ago
orion7|10 days ago
tills13|9 days ago
nine_k|9 days ago
ninth_ant|9 days ago
However I’m not sure of any of the rk3588 vendors that support both UEFI and have a full-size PCIe slot like the MS-R1 has.
metadat|10 days ago
neelc|10 days ago
Minisforum probably reused the x86 power supply for ARM. The x86 MS-01 and MS-A2 supports GPUs after all.
I'm not a hardware engineer, I've failed miserably in software engineering and now run a VPS host.
plagiarist|10 days ago
Otherwise I'd probably have a few machines from this company.
wmf|10 days ago
jdpedrie|10 days ago
cweagans|10 days ago
some-guy|10 days ago
Why is Fedora not considered good for a server?
neelc|10 days ago
Whereas Debian/Ubuntu have 5 years and RHEL/Alma/Rocky have 10 years.
INTPenis|9 days ago
You can't mess up the release cycle because their package repos drop old releases very quickly, so you're left stranded.
A friend recently converted his Fedora servers to RHEL10 because he has kids now and just doesn't have the time for the release cycle. So RHEL, or Debian, Alma, Rocky, offer a lot more stability and less maintenance requirement for people who have a life.
zuntaruk|10 days ago
For myself I've had nothing but positive experiences running Fedora on my servers.
eqvinox|8 days ago
koonweee|10 days ago
drewg123|9 days ago
rubatuga|9 days ago
eqvinox|8 days ago
scottgg|9 days ago
https://archive.is/rIAVo
hi_hi|10 days ago
> I’ve always wanted an ARM server in my homelab. But earlier, I either had to use an underpowered ARM system, or use Asahi...
What is stopping you using Mac with MacOS?
tiew9Vii|10 days ago
With full disk encryption enabled you need a keyboard and display attached at boot to unlock it. You then need to sign in to your account to start services. You can use an IP based KVM but that’s another thing to manage.
If you use Docker, it runs in a vm instead of native.
With a Linux based ARM box you can use full disk encryption, use drop bear to ssh in on boot to unlock disks, native docker, ability to run proxmox etc.
Mac minis/studio have potential to be great low powered home servers but Apple is not going down that route for consumers. I’d be curious if they are using their own silicon and own server oriented distro internally for some things.
geerlingguy|10 days ago
On the flip side, an M4 mini is cheaper, faster, much smaller (with built in power supply) and much more efficient. Plus for most applications, they can run in a Linux container just as well.
pelasaco|9 days ago
yjftsjthsd-h|10 days ago
At that price, why not a mac mini running linux? I think (skimming Asahi docs) the only things that would give you trouble don't matter to the headless usecase here?
hmry|9 days ago