MINISFORUM MS-01 Mini Workstation Intel Core i9-13900H (vPro

Previously I’ve built my homelab around Optiplex’s with i9-10900’s.. I held off upgrading to anything newer as the mix of “efficient” and “performance” cores causes problems with ESXi, and if you can’t use the full potential, then why upgrade?

But I’m now focusing on containers, so I’ve now taken the plunge as, and purchased 3 of these… they’re honestly perfectly designed for a home-server.

I’m a bit confused on the MS-A1 models, as they’re basically dropped everything that make the design perfect for servers… I just hope Minisforums and other vendors take notice of how successful the MS-01 model has been – and include SFP+ and TB4 in future models.

Updated – So I’ve now had 3 of these running for a few weeks, using Proxmox and CEPH.. The boxes have been rocksolid, and performance is through the roof. Best of all, they have great WAF (Wife Approval Factor) they are silent, and energy wise, they’re using less than the Optiplex that I used to use.

I only have 2 minor complants, first the rear ports receased, which makes it incredibly difficult to the RJ45 release clips, and I’m having to use a screwer-driver to apply pressure to the clip. The only other issue is the number of screws and types of screws, use to hold in the drive-fan FAN and the RAM-cover…

These are are by far the most accessed ports and components, yet, these have also been made the most difficult to access and manage… But saying that, these are still the best priced and most flexibility home-lab devices on the market.

Miniforums have recently released the AMD version of this, which you may be interested at looking into, but they have removed the features that make these boxed so desirable, i.e. the 10GbE NICs and the PCIe interface… Yes, this could probably be addreessed using USB4 NICs, but that is additional expense, and they chew up a lot of desk space.