Minisforum MS-01 review: this mini PC proves desktops don’t have to be big to be powerful

Did you ever install a CD-ROM drive in a graphic design computer? These disc readers come in a standardised form that slides neatly into a slot in the case, a particular width and length, and the Minisforum MS-01 mini workstation is a very similar size. There's no slot or tray in the front, of course, such things having been consigned to the past, but you do get a power button that’s in exactly the same place as a CD-ROM’s eject switch.

This means it’s a black cuboid, just over an inch thick and ready to melt into the space below your monitors and basically become invisible once installed. It’s got loads of connectivity, plenty of processor oomph, and quite a reasonable price.

Minisforum MS-01 review: Key specifications

The processor in the MS-01 is a 13th-gen ‘Raptor Lake’ Intel Core i9, the kind of chip that’s been in the news recently for a persistent crashing issue. The i9-1300H is a laptop chip, which pulls less power than the overclockable desktop chips like the i9-13900K, so this may have an effect on its stability. At the time of writing this is an ongoing situation that has neither a solid cause nor a fix in place. We didn’t see any of the crashing behaviour during our testing, which works the processor hard in bursts as we run benchmarks, but if you’re at all worried there's a very similar MS-A1 desktop available from the same company that uses an AMD processor.

Design & build

The case consists of a metal outer part with a plastic centre, and has been designed to be unobtrusive as well as easy to access. Some of the ports at the back can be a little hard to get cables out of if their neighbours are populated - especially the HDMI, which needs a cable with slim ends - but for a compact PC it’s all rather nicely laid out. Having ports at the front for accessibility is a nice touch, though you’ll need to reach around the back to get to the USB 4 sockets.

There are vents on the front, back, bottom and top, so you’ll need to find a place to put it where only the sides are covered, but it looks very smart underneath a monitor, and it’s dwarfed by something like a 32-inch screen. 

Mini PCs generally don’t come with much potential for upgrades beyond an extra stick of RAM or two, but the MS-01 has extra M.2 slots for you to insert new SSDs, and even a PCIE 4 x16 interface into which you can put a small range of small form factor graphics cards (up to an Nvidia RTX A2000 GPU) though you don’t seem to be able to buy a card that will fit from Minisforum themselves. 

The case is easy to open thanks to a simple button on the rear that allows you to slide the chassis out, and there's plenty of space inside despite the fact it’s all so small. Compared to something like the Xulu XR1 Max this is a reasonably big unit, about the same size as a Mac Mini, and runs using laptop parts to keep the size and power consumption (and therefore heat) down. Cooling occurs via a fan and duct arrangement that vents most of the heat out of the back of the casing. We tested the MS-01 on one of the hottest days of the year, with office fans running, and didn’t notice the PC making much noise. The fan is audible, but blends in with the background, even when running video encoding tasks.

Features

The Minisforum MS-01 might be marketed as a compact workstation, but the back of the machine reveals a networking monster that could be pressed into service as a server. Alongside a pair of 2.5Gbps Ethernet ports, already more than you’d find on most machines, there are two 10Gbps SFP+ slots, into which you can fit modules to connect to things like fibre-optic networks. There's Wi-Fi 6 too, but if you need seriously fast networking the wired options here are the way to go.

It’s also got excellent connectivity outside of networking. Having two USB 4 ports might almost feel like enough for a desktop PC - you can hang an adapter on the back and that’s probably all you need - but Minisforum goes further with a pair of USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports and a HDMI. At the front, there's a USB 3.2 Gen 1 and two USB 2, for your mouse and keyboard dongle, and maybe a flash drive. Power comes in the form of an external brick, and it’s quite a large one, which helps to keep the overall size of the unit down. It plugs in neatly at the back, and there was a three-pin British power lead included in our review unit, along with an HDMI cable and a U.2 to M.2 adapter for using enterprise-class SSDs.

Performance

In our tests with the Geekbench 6 benchmark software, the i9-13900H (a processor with six performance cores and eight efficiency cores, for a total of 20 simultaneous software threads at a maximum boost speed of 5.4GHz) comes in at around the same level as the M2 Pro chip in the current (at the time of writing) Mac Mini - the desktop PC most comparable to the Minisforum workstation in size and expected workload. That Mac is behind the times, and an M4-equipped version is not only imminent, but likely to take the lead over the i9. It’s worth noting, however, that the Minisforum PC is much cheaper than the M2 Pro Mac Mini. 

Still, it’s a pretty good showing from something so compact, and the integrated Iris Xe GPU is no slouch either, though it’s slightly slower in OpenCL than the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050Ti, another last-gen chip and the bare minimum anyone should be considering in an external GPU. For an integrated graphics chip this is an excellent showing, though it’s well behind the M2 Pro’s GPU. It’s not a great gaming chip, jerking through 3D Mark’s Time Spy DirectX 12 graphics demo at around 12FPS when running in 1440p, but did better in Fire Strike (1080p, DirectX 11) and in the integrated graphics-friendly Night Raid (1080p, DX12), clocking up around 28fps in the former and over 100fps in the latter. It’s definitely good enough for some rounds of Counter-Strike 2, and there's enough GPU here to accelerate creative applications too, but it’s a score that’s beaten by even the weakest Nvidia card.

Price

The MS-01 is available in its i9/32GB/1TB configuration for $1,049/£899 before discounts, slightly more than the M2/8GB/512GB version of the Mac Mini. Spec the Mac up so that it more closely matches the MS-01’s specs, and you’re looking at £1,999 for M2 Pro/32GB/1TB. Compared to the Mac, this is a lot of computer for the price, but there's always a premium to pay for Apple devices. Elsewhere, HP’s Z2 G9 Mini Workstation, which has a 14th-gen i9, 32GB of RAM, a 2TB SSD and (crucially) an Nvidia RTX A2000 GPU like the one you can add to the MS-01, sells for £2,195.99, making the MS-01 look very reasonable by comparison.

Who is it for?

In the form we’ve reviewed here, the MS-01 would make a good daily driver for anyone working with InDesign or Photoshop. It whips through design tasks and can deal with video competently too. Those with larger rendering or CAD needs might want to investigate populating the PCIe slot with a suitable GPU, though they can be hard to get hold of, as the integrated graphics aren’t going to perform anywhere near as well as a separate card. 

Buy it if:

• There's space in your studio for a small, powerful workstation
• You can’t stretch to the Mac Mini’s cost
• You want to turn it into a network server

Don't buy it if:

• Intel’s processor woes put you off
• Your GPU needs are greater

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