The M4 Mac Mini is dead to me - Minisforum at CES 2025

I don't care if you hate me because of the title, but it's the truth. In my mind, the Mac Mini M4, it might be small, but it's dead. I don't care anymore. Because even though they already had tough competition with computers like the MS-01 with a 13900H CPU, it's not even a competition anymore. Because for pretty much close to the same amount of money, you can now get the MS-A2. This is just like the MS-01, a small form-factor computer with a ton of expandability, except it has a CPU that is damn near twice as fast. That's right, everyone. We finally have an AMD-powered version of the MS-01. I have been asking for this since it came out, and they finally did it, so let's check it out. We'll get to the performance in a little bit. That's what I'm most excited about, but first, let's take a look at the computer itself. We've got a combo audio jack here, power button, two USB 5 gig Type-A ports, and then a USB 2.0. And then on the back, we've got basically the same IO as the MS-01, which is great. That means we still have dual 10 gigabit SFP Plus ports here. Thank God they're also still Intel chipset powered, which means that they're not like jank at Quancha, NICs. You're going to get reliable performance out of them. We've got two 2.5 gig RJ45s, and then it gets a little bit complicated. Because it's now an AMD CPU, there isn't native USB 4 support, and these two ports are actually just 10 gig Type-C, despite the label saying USB 4. And then we've got HDMI 2.0, which might also be 2.1, she wasn't sure. 10 gig Type-A, 5 gig Type-A, and the power jack. Because it has 10 gig, that means I get to compare it to the 10 gig Mac Mini, which is $700 US. And we'll get to the price of this one in a minute, but I think you're going to like it. Now, aside from the GPU, putting the original MS01 and the new MSA2 with AMD power, they look very similar. There are a few differences for the Kenai amongst you. You might notice the fan is a little bit different. Apparently, they had some problems with this one. And if you look really closely, like on the edge here, you can actually see the heat sink under here is copper instead of aluminum, which is an upgrade you might expect, given that this system, on average, draws around 20 watts more than the Intel one. More power, but also 1.9, two times the performance. Not really complaining. Got my precision screwdriver kit here, lttstore.com, perfect for disassembling and reassembling small computers like these Minis for. I want to see if the heat sink looks any different. It definitely is a different color. That's a copper heat sink if I've ever seen one. Other than that, the internal layout, and to be honest, a lot of the components are basically identical. We still have the memory slots here. So you've got two DDR5 SODIMM slots, not ECC supported, and they still have the same PCIe slot, which looks like a x16 one, but is electrically x8. It is Gen 4, though, so you've got a ton of bandwidth there still. Enough bandwidth and power that you can actually put a GPU in here, which is a really awesome use case, like this one, which is kind of a weird GPU. It's an RTX 4060, but the laptop chip put into a half-height, single-slot card. Although it's made by a Chinese company, and they don't really sell them in North America, I think you can find them on AliExpress or Taobao. But if you're not into that, you can also put an RTX 2000 ADA in here, and I've even actually seen an aftermarket RTX 4000 ADA cooler that makes it a single-slot card. It probably overheats, but still kind of cool. It definitely looks like a beefier fan. It's not like a liquid metal, crazy thermal solution like you would see on a UM790. They have a little more space here, so it's not necessary, but you could probably upgrade the thermal paste yourself if you wanted to do that. I know on ours, we actually put PTM7950 in there. On the backside, it looks pretty much the same. You can see that the bracket for the back of the CPU is a little different. There is still the same amount of M.2 slots, but there are a few small changes. Namely, there's no longer a switch to go between M.2 and U.2, because Minisform includes a little U.2 SSD adapter for these machines. Sometimes people wouldn't switch the switch, and then you can... Would it damage the motherboard or just the SSD? It sounds like just the SSD, but even then, it probably would have been fine unless it's like a SATA one. Even then, it doesn't really matter anymore because they fixed the problem. Instead of having a little switch where you could screw it up, you can't screw it up anymore. Instead, when you use the U.2 adapter board, there's just a little connector for power just for the U.2. No way to screw that up. And we do still have three M.2 slots, but even better is that we have more PCIe lanes. Instead of just being Gen 4x4, Gen 3x4, and Gen 3x2, it's now 4x4, 4x4, 3x4. So there's a lot more PCIe back here, which means your SSD is going to run faster. I ask them, please God, can we have a version that has two U.2 SSDs? Please post in the comments if you want that. That would make this the craziest machine ever. You could put like 60 terabytes of Kioxia SSDs in here. Just tell them below, Mini's Forum, MSA2 with two U.2 SSDs, please. Thank you. We've still got Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.2 over here. I think that's all for this. Oh, the fan bracket. They don't have it here because this is still kind of an early unit, although it does work. But there will be a newer fan bracket that works a little bit better in this area. We just will have to wait and see what that looks like. It's very similar. It's almost the same damn machine, but I guess that means we get to see how fast it goes. Hey, it's working. Just like our sponsor, dbrand, who sponsored our entire CES 2025 show coverage with their new Ghost 2.0 case. I've been running it on my iPhone 15 Pro Max here, and it is, it's an excellent case. Actually, I'm kind of shocked, dbrand. You might've saw that the Ghost V1 had some issues, but dbrand made it right and actually shipped out the Ghost V2 to everyone. I've been running it for a couple of months now, and it is, it is genuinely way more scratch resistant, really nice looking. And I don't know, this isn't in the talking points, but the magnets on this case are so strong. Like I used to have, you know, shifted in my car that my phone would go flying off. I gotta like rip it off. The magnets are so strong. It has a lifetime no yellowing guarantee, so if you have a problem, you can get it replaced. So get yours at dbrand.com slash ghost. And right now you can get $10 off, no code required. Get your Ghost V2 now. Look, I don't even care. See you later, phone. Imagine if it cracked. It didn't. I've been teasing you about the performance of this machine, but it is genuinely really awesome. It's equipped with a Ryzen 9 7945HX, which is a 16 core, 32 thread monster of a mobile chip. It has a 55 watt TDP stock, but Miniswarm actually cranks it up to 85 watts in the performance profile. And then they also have two other profiles, balanced and silent, which are 75 watt and 60 watt respectively, at least for now. They said these numbers could change, but regardless, you can adjust it in the BIOS to change between them. And at least according to like Passmark synthetic benchmark numbers, it's around 1.9 times faster, multi-threaded. It's genuinely just kind of a monster of a CPU. Now it's worth mentioning if you use your MS01 or MSA2 without a graphics card, the AMD chip actually has quite a bit worse integrated graphics. You can, of course, add a GPU, and if you need to do graphics related stuff, you should probably just add a GPU, but it is worth noting. And I think with that, we should try a Cinebench, right? I was hoping to have the MS01 running side by side so we could drag race them, but the one that they brought to the show got damaged in shipping, and unfortunately it got a seriously hefty bump. Look at that though, a hundred watts. It does have two power limits, so it will boost up to a hundred watts for a short amount of time, and then it drops down to like 80, 85. Let's see what it pulls off. I mean, you could, in theory, customize it in the BIOS if you put like some beefier thermal paste. Look at that, 31,000, and that's with HWinfo running. This is a pre-production like prototype system. They're not expecting to have this out until like around April timeframe, so these numbers might change a little bit, but ballpark 30,000 plus Cinebench score, that's almost double the previous and quite a bit faster than a base Mac Mini M4. This thing fricking rips. I mean, look at that. It's pretty much the same speed, if not a little bit faster than a 32 core second gen Threadripper. It's crazy how far we've come. Now at launch, they're targeting a price of around 600 to 700 US dollars, which does put it right in comparison pricing with a Mac Mini M4. Considering it has 10 gig, the Mac Mini M4 with 10 gig is 700 US dollars, so if they get closer to 600, you actually could justify a 256 gig SSD and 16 gigs of RAM and be the same price with way more expansion, way faster speeds. You don't have Mac OS, but if you're a tinkerer or you need the expansion, seriously, a fricking awesome system. Now, there are also going to potentially be other models that are going to do an SE with a lower end CPU, maybe no 10 gigabit, but it'll be quite a bit cheaper. And then if AMD releases a newer version of this CPU, they'll probably do a MSA2-S or Pro or something like that. And if you happen to be deploying these as mini workstations on a fleet of systems, it is worth mentioning that the AMD CPUs don't have Intel vPro, which is a remote management setup. So, deal with that what you will. You might need KVMs, you might need to find a different way to manage it, but goddamn that performance. But that's not all. They weren't done. This is the N5 Pro, which I guess the name got changed pretty recently because it was done in Sharpie, but I like it. Honestly, the old name was a little bit too close to MS01, N5 Pro is a little bit better. This, as you might guess, is a normal hard drive NAS chassis. It's seemingly based primarily kind of on the MS01 layout. You have the RAM over here, the CPU over here, PCIe slot over here, very, very similar. There are a few differences. The board is a little bit longer. There is a connector here for power and SATA to the hard drives that are inside. But I mean, other than that, it looks like it's inverted, right? Because these are usually over here on an MS01. It's similar vibe. If you put it like this, you almost couldn't even tell, but it's a little bit different. Let's look at the actual machine though, because I think that's a little bit more important. Oh, it is hefty. There is USB 4 on this one, which is nice because it uses a different CPU. We'll get to that in a sec. It's got an OcuLink port, which is always a nice touch. That gives you a PCIe Gen 4x4 connection that you could use with an eGPU or something of the like. It's got HDMI 2.0, 5 gig USB Type-A, 10 gig Ethernet, 5 gig Ethernet, and USB 2.0. That's a mouthful, but it's a lot of IO. I'm not complaining. We also have fans up here, which is obviously different. It's a little bit taller than an MS01. But as you probably guessed with the motherboard I was showing you before, it comes out. That's sick. You can get a better idea of what it looks like when it's all filled up here. This is a Gen 4x4 PCIe connection now instead. The CPU that they use in this, which is a Ryzen AI9 HX370, has a little bit less PCIe lanes. And because of the hard drives and stuff, they kind of have to allocate it differently. So this only has x4. And then on the back, this is what I want in the MSA2. Two U.2 drives. Oh my god. This is the best thing ever. So you can have five big hard drives, I guess. You could put 24 terabyte drives in there. You can put 32 terabyte drives in there if you wanted. And then you can also have two U.2 drives. That means, I mean combined, what are we talking, like 30, like 160 terabytes of hard drive? And then like, man, they make 60 terabyte U.2 drives. So you could have like almost 300 terabytes of storage in this little machine. That's kind of crazy. So the U.2s, one of them is Gen 4x1, and the other one is Gen 4x2, and then this guy up here is also Gen 4x1. So you're going to lose some peak performance, especially if you were to put like Gen 3 drives in here. But it is kind of a limitation of the platform itself, and there's not a ton they can do about that. It's still awesome. I mean, if you think about it, you're going to be limited by your network throughput on a device like this. Even if you were to put like a dual 25 gig network card in here, it's going to be hard to push SSDs faster than Gen 4x1 or Gen 4x2. But it's a sick little cartridge. I want to like, let's check out the hard drives. On the bottom, we can get a quick look at how this mounts. There's usually two little screws that hold the tray in place, but I took those out ahead of time. On the front, we've got USB 4, which is do Thunderbolt if you want, 40 gigabit there, and then a 10 gig type A, and then here is our hard drives. Oh, oh my God. Oh, that feels amazing. It's so crunchy. Wow. Okay, let's, you got to give it a good tug, but there you go. Look at that. It's just a two terabyte Barracuda. Oh, here, look, they're tool-less. That's nice. I just pulls off there. Boom. Oh, and it even has little rubber mounts. Nice. Anti-vibration, baby. And if you don't want it to be tool-less, you can still just screw them in. They also support 2.5 inch SSDs with these holes here. So you could have like an all solid state NAS if you want. We've got it booted up with Proxmox now, but that's something we should probably talk about. They don't exactly know what operating system they're going to ship these machines with. If you aren't buying the bare bones, we'll get into the pricing in a sec. This is going to be like a second half of 2025 release date for this product. So they are reaching out to certain NAS operating system companies to try to sort something out. But if you buy bare bones like I would, install TrueNAS or XOS, the company Linus invested in. Either way, we can at least get a look at the CPU that's in this one. It is an AI9-HX Pro 370 from AMD. This CPU, not quite as powerful as the one in the MSA2, but it does have a way beefier GPU. This is more of like a gaming console kind of chip, which for a NAS, you might think is a little weird. But consider you might use this as a Plex server, in which case having a GPU for transcoding is awesome. It's a 12 core chip, four of which are full fat Zen 5 CPU cores, and then the remaining eight are Zen 5C CPUs. AMD doesn't really call them efficiency cores like Intel because it's still technically like the same core, just with a little bit less cache and kind of shrunk down. But it is lower frequency. So I mean, let's be honest, they're basically efficiency cores. That is another reason this doesn't have like a 7945-HX. It's a NAS. You don't really want it to be crazy on the power draw situation. Out of the box, this is going to be configured probably around 45 watts, but it is a 28-watt stock TDP chip. It has that 16 compute unit RDNA 3 plus GPU that will definitely rip. And it even has AMD's XDNA NPU as part of the CPU, but it's not enabled yet and it very well might not be by the time it comes out. Now, as a NAS, some of you might be wondering, what kind of memory is it? It's DDR5 SODIMM, just like the MS series I showed you, it's right there. But because it's AMD's pro series of chip, it technically supports unbuffered ECC. And if we look on the system here in our Proxmox, we can see, boom, multi-bit ECC. So it supports it. I have heard some like weird things about these chips and the ECC being funky. You guys should probably look into that. But in theory, according to AMD, unbuffered ECC. It's on, it's working. I pulled out the extra empty drive slot so we can get a look inside of here. You can actually see the backplane inside of there. It's not using a SATA controller on the CPU. I don't even know if these modern laptop CPUs even have them, and if they do, it's probably like one. Instead, they're using two PCIe Gen 3 lanes from the CPU connected to a Jmicron SATA controller. So that is taking the PCIe connections, making SATA connections out of it, and you should be able to get full speed out of all five drives. I guess that just leaves us to talk about the price. Now, this is a very competitive space. You can get two, three, four, maybe even five bay NAS units in the realm of two, three, four hundred bucks US. This is going to be probably around $800, but it does come with a lot more than units like that do. You have a PCIe slot you can use, which some of the other ones do. It has a way faster CPU, a lot of GPU horsepower. It's way more expandable with dual U.2 and technically three M.2s, depending on how you want to configure it. Overall, pretty cool machine. It could be a little bit on the high end of price for what your average home user wants out of a machine like this. But if you're a bit more of a nerd and you want more expansion, there's not a ton of other options in the space. I've even seen people start using MS01s with an external SATA controller, like connected to a JBOD, which is crazy. But it's cool to see Minisform expanding into a new space, and I can't wait to try it once it's actually out. Who knows? I wonder what OS they're going to put on this thing. Hopefully not Windows. Don't put Windows on it. She's shaking her head. No Windows. So thanks for watching, guys. If you liked this video, hit the like button. Make sure you comment down below to tell Minisform that the MSA2 should have a new version that fits two U.2 SSDs. Thank you. Appreciate it. Let's see what they got next year.