ARM-ed to the Teeth, But Is It Any Good?

Have you got a new PC on your Christmas list this year to round out your homelab setup? If so, you'll want to hear what Jeff Geerling has to say about the new Minisforum MS-R1 mini workstation. It is an entire homelab in a box with some fairly eye-popping specs, and it is powered by an Arm processor, so you can expect it to be energy efficient as well. But is the Minisforum MS-R1 really all it's cracked up to be?

On paper you can’t go wrong. It is equipped with a 12-core Arm CPU running at 2.6GHz, 64GB of RAM, and a whopping one terabyte SSD. You also get Wi-Fi 6E connectivity, and just about every port you might need. There is a built-in Mali GPU as well, but with a full-size PCIe slot available, there is also room for an upgrade. All of this comes in a cute little case that can be tucked away anywhere.

But when Geerling got just beneath the surface, things didn’t look quite so good. He noted that in real-world use, the machine was pretty snappy, and that the computer spanked a Raspberry Pi 5 in most benchmarks. However, the benchmarks were unexpectedly inconsistent. In some cases, the Minisforum MS-R1 underperformed an older model with a 6-core CPU. Power consumption was also way higher than expected for an Arm machine.

While it is speculation, Geerling’s opinion is that the system’s processor has a strange core layout. He believes this is causing latency in communication between the cores, hurting overall performance in some cases. He suspects that this is also the reason for increased power consumption. It may be that additional power has to be supplied to combat the problems associated with the awkward core layout.

In any case, Geerling wanted to see how useful the machine could be for experimentation, so he fired up a locally-running large language model. The performance was underwhelming again, but there is a spare PCIe slot, so he installed an NVIDIA RTX A2000 for acceleration. Unfortunately, no matter what he tried, he could not get the NVIDIA driver to install on the machine. An attempt to install an Intel Arc A310 ECO GPU was also met with problems.

He suspected these problems were due to the custom operating system installed on the machine, so he installed a vanilla Ubuntu image. This worked without any problems, and the NVIDIA GPU even worked, so it definitely seemed like an upgrade.

Perhaps replacing the operating system can solve many of this machine’s problems, but it did not change the performance. For the price, you can likely do better. As Geerling reminds us, specs aren’t everything. You have to dig deeper if you want to know how a computer will really perform.