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 is this Needed be, is a box that runs Linux and can compete with at least the Apple M1 Mac mini, or a mid-range mini PC. but what can we do get…something is different.
Video
Hate reading? I also published a video on MS-R1 on my YouTube channel. Check it out here, or scroll past.
hardware overview
Let’s start with the hardware. At first glance, it looks great!
You have a 12 core Arm CPU with Mali G720 iGPU. It has a full-sized PCIe slot, NVMe storage, WiFi 6E, and plenty of ports on the front and back.
you have a lot of total 9 USB ports, 2 of them are Type C with DisplayPort 1.4.
is hdmi, dual 10Gbps NIC (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 little thick, but on par with MinisForum PCs), and overall, the hardware is the best of any Arm system outside Apple’s walls.
And the way you get inside is simple: Press a small button and slide the chassis out of the shell (see photo above).
It came with an adapter for a U.2 drive (see above) or a second M.2 drive, replacing 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 content.
Cix SoC – iGPU and a large/medium/small Arm CPU
Now, starting with the iGPU, let’s look at why this machine is a puzzle to me. Using the default Debian 12 install of Miniforum, I can run glmark2And it performed well, scoring 6322, which is much higher than the Raspberry Pi 5 (which got 1935).
But Vulkan support was iffy. vulkaninfo segfaulted, and vkmark It won’t work at all.
But GravityMark did. And while the G720 won’t bring any awards, it is on par with the Adreno 750 in Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 cx Gen 3.
This is the chip that Microsoft has used in its ‘Project Volterra’ 2023 Windows Arm dev kit.
And this is not the only similarity between the two.
The Geekbench 6 scores were also very close, coming in at 1336 single core and 6773 multicore.
It outperforms SBCs like the Pi 5 or Rockchip. but it’s still Well Under Apple’s four-year-old M1.
This is present everywhere in other benchmarks. I have two theories about this that I will consider.
But in real world usage, it happens feel Fast. At least, faster than any Arm SBC. You can actually watch 4K video on YouTube while doing other tasks, which is a novelty on anything that isn’t Qualcomm or Apple.
However, further testing revealed some quirks.
Consider my Top500 High Performance Linpack benchmarks. This is a massive CPU stress test, which is also great for testing memory access.
I played with 4 cores, 8 cores, all 12 cores, and even limited the amount of RAM I was testing, because the results I was getting were confusing.
Finally, after some help from GitHub user @volyrique, we found that the Cix P1 SoC is affected by the same BLIS problem as other chips like the Nvidia GB10 ‘Superchip’ and cloud chips using Neoverse N2 CPU cores: poor DGEMM performance for Arms builds on Neoverse N2.
We’re diving a little deeper here, but with the new SVE technology (vs. Arm’s more traditional NEON 128 bit SIMD), chips can use arbitrary vector lengths. BLIS library optimizes new chips armsve Configuration, which assumes 256+ bit vector lengths, and is not at all optimized for 128-bit vector lengths (used by the Six P1 in the Orion O6 and the MiniForum MS-R1).
That’s all out of the wayI’ve removed the section of the video embedded above covering HPL in its entirety, and updated my benchmark graph below:
The MS-R1 with 64GB of RAM outperforms my Orion O6 (I have the 16GB model…), although it has less than half the performance of the M4 Mac mini.
Not bad performance overall, and after adjusting the HPL configuration to account for the instruction set mismatch, I was able to get almost three times the score of the fastest small arm SBC.
However, energy efficiency is a step down—it’s not the worst, and of course, under loadThis is better than most Intel/AMD systems:
But it’s a story of efficiency excess Worse considering idle power draw:
Unless you’re constantly running large workloads, this machine will use far more energy than other Arm solutions (especially Apple’s M-series Macs), due to the higher idle power.
But Why is it so high?This is a graph of core to core memory latency, which shows how fast it is for different CPU cores to share memory on the system. Honestly, it’s not TerrifyingEspecially when I combine this with raw memory access speed:
The MS-R1’s RAM is quite fast (though noticeably slower than the O6, which directly impacts performance with tasks like AI inference).
But I think the weird CPU core layout is causing the power problem; Both Radxa and MinisForum tell me that Six is working on power draw, and enabling features like ASPM.
It seems that for the sake of stability, and to keep memory access running from core to core with the large.medium.small CPU core layout, Six wants to keep the chip powered much higher. 14 to 17 watt idle is beyond even modern Intel and AMD!
For networking, the onboard NIC provides a full 10 gigabytes, and the built-in WiFi 6E was good for a gigabit on my network.
And with 64 GHz of RAM, the one thing this box can excel at compared to the SBC is local AI, even if it’s just on the CPU.
I ran a bunch of different models that would fit in memory, and these are the results:
This is a place where it’s really performs poorly Older Orion O6 with the same CPU, which is directly related to the slower RAM speed.
Capacity
Inconsistency in performance is annoying, but power consumption really hurts the most – this is the area in which Arm should shine. But it shows you that CPU core architecture and even process nodes aren’t everything when it comes to efficiency. Design matters.
Apple’s M-series puts everything else to shame, but even taking it out of the mix, it’s not exactly what I’d expect from a 2025 Arm CPU design.
despite this That’s all, it’s quiet and the fans keep it cool. The Performance profile turns the fans up to 100%, but it doesn’t make much of a difference in real-world performance, except to make it about 50 dBA from a foot away instead of 40 dBA in the normal profile.
dedicated gpu upgrade
If you’re looking to load AI models or do casual gaming, a dedicated GPU will take you much further than an iGPU.
Minisforum has added ventilation holes throughout the top, so a modded GPU like the Abovetop RTX A2000 with 8 gigabytes of VRAM will fit and get adequate cooling. Similar to the older MS-** MinisForum Workstations, this machine only fits half-height single-slot PCI Express cards, and those aren’t very tall.
Installation is easy, although difficult due to tight spaces. You pop out a small retention clip, remove the slot cover and fit the new card. It rests on a small foam spacer to separate the card from the motherboard.
Booting the computer back up, I saw the card using lspciSo that Linux can see it. But I was not able to install the drivers on the Debian 12 OS image that shipped with the machine. I also tried the Intel Arc A310 ECO, which was a lower-specification and smaller single-slot card, but it wasn’t recognized when I powered it up. lspci,
For Intel cards, this is probably just a signaling issue, though—I wouldn’t hold it against the MS-R1 as I’ve had problems with the A310 ECO on other systems.
BIOS affair
I’ll come back to A2000 testing, but these experiments made me take a detour into the BIOS.
It has settings for USB, RAM, power on behavior, and more. It’s pretty much complete, but I still see a lot of things labeled ‘beta’, so keep that in mind if you buy any of these things.
One thing I tested that didn’t work is the AC power loss setting. You should be able to tell it to turn on when power is restored – this is great for something like a homelab. But the BIOS setting did nothing. However, I remember seeing a hardware switch on the board, and sure enough! you are like this In fact Control AC power loss setting.
switching to ubuntu
Coming back to the A2000, I decided to switch gears and try out Ubuntu from an Arm ISO install via USB flash drive. The process was easy enough (I didn’t need to change anything in the BIOS), and Ubuntu installed without a hitch.
The A2000’s drivers installed automatically, and I was off to the races.
The AI is clearly faster on the GPU (total system power draw was about 94W):
And GravityMark, a good proxy for how a game will run on a given GPU, also ran smoothly, increasing the score from 3,037 to 16,679 on the iGPU.
conclusion
Here is the full PCI Express slot Is Good. With additional included U.2 and M.2 adapters, it’s clear that MinisForum thinks of this thing as a good homelab box. They also published guides for installing Proxmox (a community-driven version) and Jellyfin with iGPU acceleration. Considering expansion-options-per-cubic meter, it beats all other Arm machines, including the Mac Mini.
To be honest, it works great as an Arm desktop, certainly better than any SBC. But Intel and AMD exist, and in this case Apple exists too, and that makes it a poor value where it stands. TodayIn the $500-600 range. Unless you’re an Arm enthusiast, you should save some money and get a separate mini PC – even one of MinisForum’s other MS-series desktops. Or if you can afford $600 Rs., Buy the best value Arm desktop in the market, M4 Mac Mini. Of course, that thing can’t run bare metal Linux, so keep that in mind.
I love that it exists. And I like that Six and MinisForum are trying to shake up the Arm desktop market a bit. But this is still half-baked:
- Can performance and power issues be fixed in firmware?
- Will they mainline all the drivers so that all features work in every Linux distro?
- Windows can run here, but will Nvidia ever release a GPU driver for Windows on Arm?
I am not sure. But I will try to do gaming and some other testing here in Linux soon. So make sure you follow this blog’s RSS feed or subscribe on YouTube if you want to follow along!
You can purchase the Miniforum MS-R1 from Miniforum’s online store, with prices starting at around $500 at the time of this writing.