Friday, December 13th 2024
Minisforum MS-A1 Mini PC Finally Gets The 16-Core Ryzen 9 9950X Treatment
Minisforum is an easily recognizable brand that is well-regarded for its lineup of mini PCs. The MS-A1 is one such mid-range offering that boasts an AM5 socket, and the product is now available to configure with the 16-core Ryzen 9 9950X with a 100 W TDP, which happens to be an absolute monstrosity of a desktop CPU with hefty cooling requirements.
The system was already available with a Ryzen 7 8700G, which was most likely performant enough for most people. The MS-A1 does not feature dedicated graphics, which is why the Ryzen 7 8700G was a great choice thanks to its relatively potent iGPU. However, it is no surprise that there are many workloads that demand raw CPU power over anything else, and the MS-A1 with the Ryzen 9 9950X will be an excellent option for such demanding scenarios. That said, since the system does not feature discrete graphics, the Radeon 610M iGPU found in the 9950X will simply not be able to keep up with any GPU-intensive workloads.
While the mini PC itself is rather compact, it features a dual-fan cooling setup with four heat pipes that sounds great on paper and should be sufficient to handle the limited 100 W TDP of the Ryzen 9 9950X. Since there is no dedicated GPU, thermal management should not be much of a hassle. The system features a whopping four M.2 PCIe 4.0 slots, and plenty of ports including OCuLink for speedy eGPU connections, dual 2.5 G RJ45 ports, DP 2.0, and HDMI 2.1. A USB 3 Type-C port is also present, which, unfortunately, loses out on USB4 support due to the Ryzen 9000 CPU.
As for pricing, the MS-A1 sure does command a pretty buck. The barebones variant costs $259, while the Ryzen 9 9950X variant starts at $919, although customers will have to supply RAM and storage on their own. Finally, the fully configured variant with a Ryzen 9 9950X, 32 GB RAM, and a 2 TB SSD costs $1,199.
Source:
Notebookcheck
The system was already available with a Ryzen 7 8700G, which was most likely performant enough for most people. The MS-A1 does not feature dedicated graphics, which is why the Ryzen 7 8700G was a great choice thanks to its relatively potent iGPU. However, it is no surprise that there are many workloads that demand raw CPU power over anything else, and the MS-A1 with the Ryzen 9 9950X will be an excellent option for such demanding scenarios. That said, since the system does not feature discrete graphics, the Radeon 610M iGPU found in the 9950X will simply not be able to keep up with any GPU-intensive workloads.
As for pricing, the MS-A1 sure does command a pretty buck. The barebones variant costs $259, while the Ryzen 9 9950X variant starts at $919, although customers will have to supply RAM and storage on their own. Finally, the fully configured variant with a Ryzen 9 9950X, 32 GB RAM, and a 2 TB SSD costs $1,199.
12 Comments on Minisforum MS-A1 Mini PC Finally Gets The 16-Core Ryzen 9 9950X Treatment
However....
It doesn't say how many lanes they can dedicate to NVMe drives, but I'm assuming they went with 4 lanes per drive, so that's 16 lanes out of 24 (28 total, but 4 are for CPU-chipset communication), leaving 8 that we don't know what they're doing with?:laugh:
9950X:
8700G/8600G:
If you hook up 8600G or 8700G in the same MS-A1 chassis, that USB-C port in the back turns into a USB4v1 port, hence the second marketing slide.This is more or less correct. No space (e.g. lanes for a dGPU) to fit a USB4v1 controller. 8000-series was able to do this because it only had 8x PCI-E 4.0 lanes and a chunk of it dedicated to 780M.
As for the other 8 lanes, I would think some would be needed for the iGPU, as well as the networking chips and such, but I could be wrong since I'm certainly no expert in pcie or mobo engineering :D
In the 8700G spec image I posted above, it has a total of 20 PCI-E 4.0 lanes, but 16 are usable. This is because 4 of those lanes are dedicated to the 780M iGPU. Same as with the 9950X's 24 out of 28, because 4 are dedicated to the iGPU.
In the case of the 8700F, its still stuck at 16/20 because I believe the iGPU was fused-off due to being defective (or is just absent on the die, so empty space perhaps?). Older AMD CPUs without iGPUs like the 5950X have full 24 out of 24 lanes to use.