Minisforum Stuffs Entire Arm Homelab in the MS-R1

Summary

The Minisforum MS-R1 uses the same Cix CD8180 Arm SoC as the Orion O6 I reviewed earlier this year. But everything else about this thing is different. What this thing should be, is a box that runs Linux and can compete with at least an Apple M1 Mac mini, or a mid-range Mini PC. But what we got... is something different. Video Hate reading? I also published a video on the MS-R1 on my YouTube channel. Watch it here, or scroll on past. Hardware overview Let's get started with the hardware. At first glance, it looks great! You have a 12 core Arm CPU with a Mali G720 iGPU. There's a full-size PCIe slot, NVMe storage, WiFi 6E, and a ton of ports on the front and back. You have a grand total of 9 USB ports, with 2 of them Type C with DisplayPort 1.4. There's HDMI, dual 10 Gbps NICs (Realtek RTL8127), and even an old fashioned audio combo jack, so you can plug in a headset. It looks great on my desk, it's quiet, it uses a 19V 180W power adapter (which is a bit chunky, but par for the course with Minisforum PCs), and overall, the hardware is some of the nicest of any Arm system, outside Apple's walled garden. And the way you get inside is simple: press a little button and slide the chassis out of the shell (see photo above). It came with adapters for a U.2 drive (see above) or a second M.2 drive, which replace the built-in Mediatek WiFi card. And yes, the unit I'm testing is a review unit sent by Minisforum. They did not pay me to test the machine, write this blog post, nor did they have any input into its contents. Cix SoC - iGPU and a Big/Medium/Little Arm CPU Now, let's dive into why this machine puzzles me, starting with the iGPU. Using Minisforum's default Debian 12 install, I could run glmark2, and it performed well, scoring 6322, far above something like a Raspberry Pi 5 (which got 1935). But Vulkan support was iffy. vulkaninfo Segfaulted, and vkmark wouldn't run at all. But GravityMark did. And while the G720 won't bring home any awards, it's about on par with the Ad...