we're at the minis Forum booth at CES 2024 and I get to show you something
I've been waiting to see for a while it looks like an ordinary small computer
but on the back we have dual 10 gbit dual 2.5 gig dual 40 gig Thunderbolt a
core I9 processor a full PCIe slot 96 GB
of RAM this is basically an entire server it even has Remote Management I
can't wait to check it out and don't even worry there is even more craziness
to see behind me let's take it apart naturally I think we should start with
what I came here for this is the ms01
I'm not really sure how they're positioning this thing but as far as I
can tell it's designed to be a mini server but a Mini Server that packs a
serious serious punch the front is kind of the boring side power button combo
mic audio a 10 gig USB type A and two USB 2.0 type A but when you move around
to the back the business side let's say
dual 10 gig SFP plus ports powered by an Intel X7 710 chipset which we like to
see Intel makes great Nicks we've got dual 2.5 gig L don't know the chipset on
those hopefully it's decent dual 40 gig USB 4 two more 10 gig USB ports an HDMI
2.0 power in and then this this I was
not expecting that's a PCIe 16x slot admittedly despite it being wired as a
16x slot which you can see it's soldered like that apparently it runs at 8 by
speed which is fine I guess you can fit
a GPU they have this RTX 2,000 that they
were showing uh which actually apparently fits in here totally fine I
mean let's try it I guess it has to be a
half height like this I think maybe you would call this half length I'm not that
familiar with like the length monikers but it does just slide right in there's
like little foamy bits on the motherboard to make it sit
nicely boom now you have a GPU now the S
so on this system does already have Intel IRS XE Graphics it's it's a 13900
H yep which is a 14 core chip with six
performance cores and eight efficiency cores a Max boost of 5.4 GHz and a 45
wat base power I think it turbos all the
way up to 115 Watts potentially I'm not sure what this chassis can handle they
didn't have it listed on their specs page but this entire section right here
it's got kind of foamy bit so you can't really see it is heat sink now
immediately I don't think that I would ever put a GPU in this system
but this could be a really awesome place to put something like a network card
imagine you could put uh on top of these 10 gig ports how about you put two 25
gig ports on a like a melanox Nick there should be plenty enough CPU horsepower
to route at speeds like that hell you might even be able to go faster can you
tell that I kind of want one yet let's look at the other side you can
purchase this thing as a barebone system that means it would come with no storage
and no RAM but this system is configured with 32 gigs of ddr5 uh along with a 1
TB SSD socketed Wi-Fi card 2230 I like
that but what the really interesting thing on this side is the triple m.2
slots the top one is a gen 4x4 the
second one is Gen 3x4 and then the third one is Gen 3x 2 I think I'm not 100%
sure which one is by two out of these two but one of them is uh again that's
probably going to come from the fact that they're using eight Gen 4 Lanes
just for that PCIe slot but there is kind of an alternate configuration you
can run and something that again kind of goes in line with that server mindset
let's say we'll pop this SSD out with its little included cute little heat
sink and it is this an m.2 to u.2 little
board I try to ask them if this is like an off-the-shelf part or if it's
something that they made um he kept saying that it was just an off-the-shelf
thing I don't know if I believe that it seems is kind of weird but like whatever
um it works it comes with it so you don't really have to worry about that it
just slots in like that I just noticed something cool the Wi-Fi antennas are
mounted up front here so if you were to slide this into like a cabinet or
something like that the Wi-Fi antennas are still able to receive like
unobstructed signal which is a good design choice these M two slots if I
didn't mention already support full 110 mm m.2 drives which again leads into
that whole Enterprise Vibe if you were to get ones that have like power loss protection a lot of the time they are
that full length not a 2280 which is what you would normally see in a
computer or like this one I did confirm
it does come with three of these m.2 heat sinks so if you upgrade the storage
or buy the Bare Bones you have all you need to keep it cool so you don't have to worry about that uh and yeah there's
a fan back here too which is nice oh right the RAM they only sell one
configuration aside from the Bare Bones so these are 16 gig 5600 megat transfer
per second crucial dims you can get 48
GB dims from crucial micron on so this
the max configuration for this machine would be 96 gigs because it has the two
sodm slots they don't have heat sinks on them but I think since it's like
directly where the fan is spinning the fan is open on both sides so I think
it's going to draw a fair bit of air right over it anyways and it's probably
not going to cause any sort of thermal problems I don't know how I feel about
these little screws they screw right into the heat sink and it's very very
short threads so I could see how somebody could accidentally strip these
out so if you buy one of these just be careful let's turn it on thanks to B
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Computing with be quiet! at the link down below this is the power brake it's a 180
W power brake I guess you got the CPU which is over 100 Watts the GPU slot
could be 75 I mean that's basically all the power budget right there doesn't
look like the USB 4 type- C ports do any sort of PD out which makes this power
brick make a lot more sense you can at least use them for display output but
not for power delivery is that a minis Forum in your pocket or are you happy to
see me it's both what we're waiting for
cine bench to run on the ms01 let's talk about this little guy now I kind of at
first I'm like what is the use case for this the answer is digital signage and
apparently education you know you could put this like at somebody's desk as like
a small PC you don't need to run like a whole power cable it's just PoE so it's
a 2.5 gig in which would help if you're using this as a Thin Client you can
actually get some decent throughput it has PD in as well if you want to power
it that way and this can be used as a display output got two 10 gig USBS on
the side and an HDMI 2.0 on the end specs Wise It's not the most powerful
thing in the world as you can imagine it it's about the size of a big USB hub so
there's only so much CPU you can fit in here it's an Intel Core n100 which is a
CPU you'll commonly see in those like little Nas units or the little small
router boxes um it's only a four core I
believe it's a 6 wat TDP so definitely not a performance Monster by any stretch
of the imagination but but it is still enough to run Windows they ship these
things with Windows 11 pre-installed uh I don't think you can get this as a Bare
Bones because I don't know it's definitely soldered memory 8 GB of it
lpddr5 and then there's a 256 GB uh ufs
2.1 storage chip in here look at that
it's so cute got two Wi-Fi antennas
there the cutest of fans that's a pretty
pretty sizable heat syn you can see the little n100 SSC end there just peeking
its head up whoa there's a lot more going on on this side there would be
that looks to be our little RAM chip I think there's a little Wi-Fi chip set
that might actually be the storage they don't have pricing on this one yet
they're expecting this to come out in the coming months but seems to be kind
of filling the role of like a raspberry pie just you don't have to screw around
with any of the stuff like trying to figure out how to PoE power it with a
hat or any of that sort of stuff it's just kind of a One-Stop shop pretty cool
little computer hey cinat is done it scored 800 so about 20% slower than the
155h core Ultra I can't wait to get our
hands on one of these in the office imagine a cluster of these you could
connect them all with 10 gig you don't need any sort of external NY you could
connect them all with 25 Gig if you put 25 gig n or 100 Gig if you're insane if
you're wondering pricing for this one you're looking at $680 us for the Bare
Bones which is it's kind of getting up there for Min Forum compared to some of
the other other ones or 830 with the 32 gigs of RAM and 1 TB SSD sure it is more
expensive but you are getting some stuff for that money that x710 Intel chipset
is not going to be that cheap you know there's three m.2 slots there's a PCIe
slot there's you know just the raw material cost of making a bigger device
like this I would be thrilled if something like this was 450 500 bucks
maybe we'll get there at some point still very cool still want one let's
boot up this Mini PC I just want to see
this boot into Windows I don't need to run cin bench on this we'll be here all
day it's working I think booting into Windows is
going to take a little bit longer on this one just is just a moment it's like come
on really you you got to wait for this one look at that performance the CPU is
just sitting at 100% it's A8 GHz base
clock just the Windows like boot up setup that's still happening is using
100% of the CPU I I just want to see if it will play a YouTube video like
reasonably they do know how much it's going to cost apparently it will be
around $100 maybe 99 bucks uh which
sounds like maybe a lot for it but also like a Ras pie if you get one from a
scalper is like a 100 bucks maybe even more so considering that it's got PoE 8
gigs of RAM 256 gigs of storage that's seems pretty reasonable to me look at
that it's playing back a 720p YouTube
video let's try 1440
that seems to be playing at full speed let's try
4K I don't know that this is playing at
full ah no it's lagging a
bit I think 1440p is the best you're going to get out of something like this
I suspect once all of the Windows fresh startup is done you might be
able to play 4K like Windows update still using 20% of the CPU diagnostic
policy another 20% like almost half of our CPU performance is being used by
random crap that Windows is doing in the background so this one also pretty cool
these mini for un boxes they just keep getting crazier at some point they're
going to run out of weird use cases to fill like this I I really really like
this one this is this is basically
everything I've been asking for in a Mini PC proper networking it's even SFP
so if you want to plug right into your switch you can plug right into your switch if you were to run this as a
router let's say even in a hypervisor install proxmox on this thing have a
fairly substantial amount of storage and virtualize your router maybe you have
two of these things or three of these things in a cluster in proxmox or X cpng
it really wouldn't be that much money if you put it in perspective of something
like the um 790 Pro which has a kind of
similar CPU uh with a Thunderbolt 10 gig Nick you're kind of in the same price
point and this is not a Thunderbolt Nick this is proper Intel proper dual Port 10
gig and still have all the rest of the expansion left over to boot not to
mention PCIe so if you like this video and you like the craziness that min's
Forum keeps putting out get subscribed like the video and let me know what
would you like to see from Min Forum what would you do differently about this
box I would personally ax these 10 gig ports and I'll just put my own card in a
little bit cheaper price point but pretty cool