We're at the Mini's 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 gigabit,
dual 2.5 gig, dual 40 gig Thunderbolt, a Core i9 processor, a full PCIe slot,
96 gigabytes 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 As, but when you move around to the back,
the business side, let's say, dual 10 gig SFP plus ports powered by an Intel X710 chipset,
which we like to see, Intel makes great mix. We've got dual 2.5 gig LAN,
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 eight by speed,
which is fine, I guess. You can fit a GPU. They have this RTX 82000 that they were showing,
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 SoC on this system does already have Intel IRIS XE graphics.
It's a 1300H, which is a 14 core chip with six performance cores and eight efficiency cores,
a max boost of 5.4 gigahertz and a 45 watt 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 bits so you can't really
see it, is heatsink. 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 on top of these 10 gig ports, how about you put two 25 gig ports on a
like a Melanox NIC. There should be plenty enough CPU horsepower to rout 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 bare bone system. That means it
would come with no storage and no RAM, but this system is configured with 32 gigs of DDR5 along
with a 1 terabyte 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 4 by 4. The second one is Gen 3 by 4,
and then the third one is Gen 3 by 2. I think I'm not 100% sure which one is by 2 out of these two,
but one of them is. Again, that's probably going to come from the fact that they're using 8 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 heatsink, 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. He kept saying
that it was just an off the shelf thing. I don't know if I believe that. It seems kind of weird,
but whatever. 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.2 slots, if I
didn't mention already, support full 110 millimeter 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 heatsinks, 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. 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 mega
transfer per second crucial dims. You can get 48 Gigabyte dims from Crucial Micron, so this,
the max configuration for this machine would be 96 gigs because it has the two so dim slots.
They don't have heatsinks 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 heatsink, 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. This is the power brick. It's a 180 watt power brick. 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. It 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 mini's forum in your pocket? Are you happy to see me?
It's both. While we're waiting for Cinebench to run on the MSO1, 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 is 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'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. It's only a 4-core, I believe it's a 6-watt TDP,
so definitely not a performance monster by any stretch of the imagination. But it is still
enough to run Windows. They ship these things with Windows 11 pre-installed. I don't think you
can get this as a bare bones because, you know, it's definitely soldered memory. Eight gigabytes
of it, LPDDR5, and there's a 256 Gigabyte UFS 2.1 storage chip in here. Look at that, it's so cute.
Put your two Wi-Fi antennas there. The cutest of fans. That's a pretty sizable heatsink.
You can see the little N100 SoC under there just peeking its head out. 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 Pi. 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, cinema just done and 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 Nix. You could
connect them all with 25 gig if you put 25 gig Nix 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 kind of getting up there
for a mini's forum compared to some of the other ones, or 830 with the 32 gigs of RAM and one
terabyte 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 Cinebench 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. It's just just a moment. It's like, come on,
really? You got to wait for this one. Look at that performance. This CPU is just sitting at 100%.
It's a 0.8 gigahertz base clock. Just the Windows like boot up setup that's still happening is using
100% of the CPU. 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,
which sounds like maybe a lot for it, but also like a raspy if you get one from a scalper is
like 100 bucks, maybe even more. So considering that, it's got PoE, 8 gigs of RAM, 256 gigs of
storage. That seems pretty reasonable to me. Look at that. It's playing back a 720p YouTube video.
Let's try 1440p. That seems to be playing at full speed. Let's try 4K. I don't know that this is
playing at full. 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 bullshit is done,
you might be able to play 4K. Windows updates still using 20% of the CPU. Diagnostic policy,
another 20%. 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 many foreign boxes, they just keep getting
crazier. At some point, they're going to run out of weird use cases to feel like this. I really,
really like this one. 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 XCPNG.
It really wouldn't be that much money. If you put it in perspective of something like the UM790 Pro,
which has a kind of similar CPU 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 you 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 Mini's Forum keeps putting out, get subscribed,
like the video, and let me know what would you like to see from Mini's Forum. What would you do
differently about this box? I would personally axe these 10 gig ports and I'll just put my own card
in. A little bit cheaper price point, but pretty cool.