For $600 the Minisforum MS-R1 gives you 64GB DDR5 ECC, 12 cores, dual 10GbE, a real PCIe 4.0 x8 slot, M.2 NVMe, Pi-compatible 40-pin GPIO, and actual UEFI boot. It runs Debian and Proxmox/KVM.
I’ve read that the CPU is trash compared to intel/amd in performance and in TDP, but you can’t build a mini pc/server on intel/amd right now for thaf price with that amount of RAM.
Even just buying the 64GB ddr5 RAM as sticks will be like over 800$…
In the low budget range you can go with a Pi 5 16GB which is now ~$300. Add PSU, case, NVMe HAT, PCIe HAT and you’re at $500+. It’s way too expensive for what you get, compared to spending a bit more and going with minisforum.
Yeah you can get old used boxes with that amount of RAM for maybe the same price, but they’ll such 200W and electricity is expensive where I live.
My current pine64 soquartz cluster over the past 5 years has been dying node by node and I can’t run anything more demanding on it (like game servers or local AI). It cost me about 600$ back then with 5x blade + nvme + soquartz module, a poe switch and a case with fans. Kinda seems like a bad deal now, I’m stuck with all the docker swarm issues and the bad cpu cores and max 8gb ram per node. Oh and it draws 52W. If the minisforum 12W TDP is correct, I will save over 100$ per year on electricity costs alone.
Maybe i’m biased and trying to justify my own purchase … let me know if I’m wrong about it being good value.
In the space of mini PCs/NUCs, this does seem comparable. But bear in mind that the entire space of “home server” is a lot bigger than NUCs. After all, not everyone just wants to host an NVMe drive or two; they might want to fit some cheaper SATA SSDs or even spinning rust, as part of a cascade of stroage, with caching on SSDs and other nice things.
Likewise, the dual LAN ports with 802.3bz support is nice, but the reality is that most networks are only 1 Gbps with some devices supporting 2.5 Gbps. Quite frankly, for server use that actually needs one or both port’s bandwidth, the link would likely be better served with SFP+ slots, because of better compatibility with cheap enterprise switches available online, and because SFP+ transceivers run less hot than their twisted pair counterparts at 10 Gbps. Heck, you could even use a 40 Gbps QSFP+ NIC, which only requires a x8 or X4 PCIe slot (depending on PCIe generation of the NIC). On that note, a single PCIe slot is nice, but it does preclude the use of a double-wide GPU for transcoding use.
I would sum all this up as lacking expandability. Yes, it can be expanded somewhat. But for folks that want the capacity of an ATX-based build, this ain’t it. And for folks with abundant solar power, electricity consumption for older gen chips isn’t as much of a dealbreaker. It certainly checks off a lot of people’s boxes, yours included, but that doesn’t mean that people are “sleeping on” this, because at the end of the day, if it doesn’t serve their purposes, it’s not the right box for them. In terms of price, never underestimate the cost of $0.00 that is an old, unused laptop; they make remarkably decent servers for light loads.
Also, as of this writing, only the 32 GB RAM variant is available on the USA website.