I don't care if you hate me because of the title but it's the truth in my mind
the Mac Mini M4 it it might be small but it's dead I don't care anymore because
even though they already had tough competition with computers like the ms01
with a 13900 hcpu it's it's not even a competition
anymore because for pretty much close to
the same amount of money you can now get the MS A2 this is just like the ms01 a
small form factor computer with a ton of expandability except it has a CPU that
is damn near twice as fast that's right everyone we finally have an AMD powered
version of the ms1 I have been asking for this since it came out and they
finally did it so let's check it out we'll get to the performance in a little
bit that's what I'm most excited about but first let's take a look at the computer itself we got a combo audio
jack here power button two USB 5 gig
type A ports and then a USB 2.0 and then on the back we've got basically the same
IO as the ms01 which is great that means we still have dual 10 GB SFP plus ports
here thank God they're also still Intel chipset powered which means they're not
like Jen a qua ncks you're going to get reliable performance out of them we got
two 2.5 gig rj45s and then it gets a little bit
complicated because it's now an AMD CPU there isn't native USB 4 support and
these two ports are actually just 10 gig type-c despite the uh label saying USB 4
and then we've got HDMI 2.0 which might Ela be 2.1 she wasn't sure 10 gig type 5
gig type and the power jack because it has 10 gig that means I get to compare
to the 10 gig Mac Mini uh which is $700 and we'll get to the price of this
one in a minute but I think you're going to like it now aside from the GPU
putting the original ms01 and the new msa2 with AMD power uh they look very
similar there are a few differences for the keite amongst you you might notice
the fan is a little bit different apparently they had some problems with this one if you look really closely like
on the edge here you can actually see the heat sink under here is copper
instead of aluminum uh which is an upgrade you might expect given that this
system on average draws around 20 WTS more than the Intel one more power but
also 1.9 two times the performance not
really complaining got my Precision screwdriver kit here LTT Store.com
perfect for disassembling and reassembling small computers like uh
these Min for I want to see if the heat tank looks any different it definitely is a different color that's a copper
heat tank if I've ever seen one other than that the internal layout and to be
honest a lot of the components are basically identical we still have the
memory slots here so we got two ddr5 sodm slots not ECC supported and they
still have the same pte slot which looks like a by6 one but is electrically by8
it is Gen 4 though so you've got a ton of bandwidth there still uh enough
bandwidth and power that you can actually put a GPU in here which is a
really awesome use case like this one which is kind of a weird GPU it's an RTX
4060 but the laptop chip put into a half
height single slot card although it's made by a Chinese company and they don't
really sell them in North America I think you can find them on AliExpress or
tbell but if you're not into that you can also put an RTX 2000 Ada in here um
and I've even actually seen an aftermarket RTX 4000 Ada cooler that
makes it a single slot car and it probably overheats but still kind of
cool it definitely looks like a beefier fan it's not like a liquid met crazy
thermal solution like you would see on like a790 um they have a little more space
here so it's not necessary but you could probably upgrade the thermal paste
yourself uh if you wanted to do that I know on ours we actually put PTM 7950 in
there on the back side it looks pretty much the same you can see that the
bracket for the back of the CPU is a little different um there is still the
same amount of m.2 slots but there are a few small changes namely there's no
longer a switch to go between m.2 and u.2 because mini for includes a little
u.2 SSD adapter for these machines
sometimes people wouldn't switch the switch and then you can would it damage
the motherboard or just the SSD sounds like just the SSD but even then it
probably would have been fine unless it's like a SATA one even then it doesn't really matter anymore because
they fix the problem instead of having a little switch where you could screw it
up you can't screw it up anymore instead when you use the U2 adapter board
there's just a little connector for power just for the U2 so no way to screw
that up and we do still have three m.2 slots but even better is that we have
more PCIe Lanes instead of just being gen 4x4 gen 3x4 and gen 3x2 it's now 4x4
4x4 3x4 so there's a lot more PCIe back
here which means your SSD is going to run faster I ask them please God can we
have a version that has two u.2 ssds please post in the comments if you want
that that would make this the craziest machine ever you could put like 60 terab
of kyok ssds in here just tell them below Min Forum MSA 2 with two .2 ssds
please thank you we still got Wi-Fi 6C and Bluetooth 5.2 over here um I think
that's all for this oh the fan bracket they don't have it here because this is
still kind of an early unit although it does work um but there will be a newer
fan bracket that works a little bit better in this area uh we just we'll
have to wait and see what that looks like it it's very similar it's almost the same damn machine but uh I guess
that means we get to see how fast it goes hey it's working just like our
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phone imagine if it cracked it didn't I've been teasing you about the
performance of this machine but it is genuinely really awesome it's equipped
with a ryzen 979 45 HX which is a 16
core 32 thread monster of a mobile chip
it has a 55 wat TDP stock but mini form
actually cranks it up to 85 watts in the performance profile and then they also
have two other profiles balanced and Silent which are 75 watt and 60 watt
respectively at least for now they said these numbers could change but
regardless you can adjust it in the BIOS to change between them and at least according to like PassMark synthetic
Benchmark numbers it's around 1.9 time
faster multi-threaded it's genuinely
just kind of a monster of a CPU now it's worth mentioning if you use your ms1 or
msa2 without a graphics card the AMD
chip actually has quite a bit worse integrated Graphics um you can of course
add a GPU and if you need to do Graphics related stuff you should probably just
add a GPU but it is worth noting and I think with that we should try a cine
bench right I was hoping to have the ms01 running side by side so we could
drag race them but but the one that they brought to the show got damaged in shipping unfortunately it got a
seriously Hefty Bonk look at that though 100 Watts uh it does have two power
limits so it will boost up to 100 Watts
for a short amount of time and then it drops down to like 80
85 um let's see what it pulls off I mean
you could in theory customize it in the BIOS like if you put like some beefier
thermal paste look at that
31,000 and that's with HW info running
this is a pre-production like prototype system they're not expecting to have
this out until like around April time frame um so these numbers might change a
little bit but ballpark 30,000 plus cine bench score that's uh almost double the
previous and uh a quite a bit faster than a base Mac Mini
M4 this thing freaking rips I mean look at that it's pretty much the same speed
if not a little bit faster than a 32 core second gen Threadripper it's crazy
how far we've come now at launch they targeting a price of around $600 to
$700 which does put it right in comparison pricing with a Mac Mini M4 um
considering it has 10 gig the Mac Mini M4 with 10 gig is $700 so if they get
closer to 600 you actually could justify a 256 gig SSD and 16 gigs of RAM and be
the same price with way more expansion
way faster speeds you don't have macOS but if you're a tinkerer or you need the
expansion seriously a freaking awesome
system now there are also going to
potentially be other models they're going to do like an SE with a lower-end
CPU maybe no 10 GB but it'll be quite a bit cheaper and then if AMD releases a
newer version of this CPU they'll probably do like a msa2 s or Pro or
something like that and if you happen to be deploying these as like uh mini
workstations on a fleet of systems it is
worth mentioning that the AMD CPU don't have Intel vpro which is like a Remote
Management setup um so do with that what
you will you might need kvms you might need to find a different way to manage it but godamn that performance but
that's not all they weren't done this is the N5 Pro which um I guess the name got
changed pretty recently cuz it was done in Sharpie but I like it honestly the
old name was a little bit too close to ms01 N5 Pro is a little bit better this
as you might guess is a normal hard drive n chassis
it's seemingly based primarily kind of
on the ms01 layout you have the RAM over here the CPU over here PC slot over here
very very similar there are a few differences the board is a little bit
longer there is a connector here for power and SATA to the hard drives that
are inside but I mean other than that oh
it's like it's inverted right cuz these are usually over here on an ms01 it's
similar Vibe if you put it like this you almost couldn't even tell but it's a a
little bit different let's look at the actual machine though cuz I think that's
a little bit more important oh it is Hefty uh there is USB 4 on this one
which is nice because it uses a different CPU we'll get to that in a sec it's got an ocul link Port which is
always a nice touch that gives you a PCI gen 4x4 connection that you could use
with an egpu or something of the like it's got HDMI 2.0 5 gig USB type a 10
gig Ethernet 5 gig Ethernet and USB 2.0
that's a mouthful but it's a lot of IO I'm not complaining
we also have fans up here which is obviously different it's a little bit
taller than an ms01 but as you probably guessed with the motherboard I've shown
you before it comes out that's sick you can get a better
idea of what it looks like when it's all filled up here this is a gen 4x4 PC
connection now instead uh the CPU that they use in this which is a ryzen ai9 HX
370 has a little bit less PCI lanes and
because of the hard drives and stuff they kind of have to allocate it differently so this only has buy four
and then on the back this is what I want
in the MSA 2 two u.2 drives oh my God
this is the best thing ever so you can have
five big hard drives I guess you could put 24 terab drives in you put 32 terab
drives in there if you wanted and then you can also have two ud2 drives that
means I mean combined what are we talking like 30 like 160 terab of hard
drive and then like man they make 60 terb U2 drives so you could have like
almost 300 tab of storage in this little machine that's kind of crazy so the u2s
one of them is Gen 4x1 and the other one is Gen 4x2 and then this guy up here is
also gen 4x1 so you're going to lose some Peak Performance especially if you
were to put like gen 3 drives in here um but it is kind of a limitation of the
platform itself and there's not a ton they can do about that it's still
awesome I mean if you think about it you're going to be limited by your network throughput on a device like this
even if you were to put like a dual 25 gig network card in here it's going to
be hard to push ssds faster than gen 4x1
or gen 4x2 but it's a sick little cartridge I
want to like let's check out the hard drives on the bottom we can get a quick
look at how this mounts there's usually two little screws that hold the tray in
place um but I took those out ahead of time on the front we've got USB 4 which
is do Thunderbolt if you want 40 gbit there and then a 10 gig type A and and
here is our hard drives oh oh my god
oh that feels amazing it's so crunchy
wow okay let's you got to give it a good
tug but there you go look at that it's just a 2 terb
Barracuda uh oh here look they tooless that's nice I just pulls off there boom
Oh it even has little rubber mounts nice anti vibration baby and if you don't you
don't want it to be tooless you can still just screw them in they also
support 2.5 in ssds with these holes here so you could have like an all solid
state Nas If you want we've got it booted up with proxmox now but that's
something we should probably talk about they don't exactly know what operating
system they're going to ship these machines with if you aren't buying the barebones uh we'll get into the pricing
in a sec um this is going to be like a
second half of 2025 release date for this product um so they are reaching out
to certain Nas operating system companies to try to sort something out
but um if you buy Bare Bones like I would install trass or hexos the company
lus invested in either way we can at least get a look at the CPU that's in
this one it is an AI 9 HX Pro 370 from
AMD this CPU not quite as powerful as
the one in the MSA 2 but it does have a way beefier GPU this is more of like a
gaming console kind of chip which for an ass you might think is a little weird
but consider you might use this as a Plex server in which case having a GPU
for Trans coating is awesome it's a 12 core chip four of which are full fat Zen
5 CPU cores and then the remaining eight are Zen 5c CPUs AMD doesn't really call
them efficiency cores like Intel because it's still technically like the same
core just with a little bit less cash and kind of shrunk down um but it is
lower frequency so I mean let's be honest they're basically efficiency
cores that is another reason this doesn't have like a 7945 HX it's a Nas
you don't really want it to be crazy on the power draw situation uh out of the
box this is going to be configured probably around 45 Watts uh but it is a
28 watt stock TDP chip it has that 16
compute unit rdna 3 plus GPU that will
definitely rip and it even has AMD's xdna npu as part of the CPU but it's not
enabled yet and it very well might not be by the time it comes out now as a Nas
some of you might be wondering what kind of memory is it it's ddr5 sodum just
like the MS series I showed you it's right there but because it's AMD's pro
series of Chip it technically supports unbuffered ECC and if we look on the
system here in our prox MOX we can see boom multi-bit
ECC so it supports it I have heard some
like weird things about these chips and the ECC being funky um you guys should
probably look into that but in theory according to AMD un buffer DCC it's on
it's working I pulled out the extra empty
Drive slot so we can get a look inside of here you can actually see the back
plane inside of there it's not using a SATA controller on the CPU I don't even
know if these modern laptop CPUs even have them maybe and if they do it's
probably like one instead they're using two PCI gen 3 Lanes from the CPU
connected to a j Micron SATA controller
so that is taking the PC connections making SATA connections out of it and
you should be able to get full speed out of all five drives I guess that just
just leaves us to talk about the price now this is a very competitive space you
can get 2 3 4 maybe even five bay Nas units in the realm of two three 400
bucks us um this is going to be probably
around 800 but it does come with a lot
more than units like that do you have a PCIe slot you can use which some of the
other ones do has a way faster CPU a lot of GPU horsepower it's way more
expandable with dual U2 and or technically 3M do2s depending on how you
want to configure it overall pretty cool machine it could be a little bit on the
high end of price for what your average home user wants out of a machine like
this but if you're a bit more of a nerd and you want more expansion there's not
a ton of other options in the space I've even seen people start using like MSO
1's with a external SATA controller like connected to a jbod which is
crazy but it's cool to see mini form expanding into a new space and I can't
wait to try it once it's actually out who knows I wonder what OS they're going
to put on this thing hopefully not Windows don't put Windows on it she's
shaking her head no Windows so thanks for watching guys if you like this video
hit the like button make sure you comment down below to tell minis for
that the msa2 should have a new version that fits to .2 ssds thank you
appreciate it let's see what they got next year