this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2026
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I feel like people are sleeping on the Minisforum MS-R1 as a good value home server PC (lemy.lol)
submitted 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago) by HelloRoot@lemy.lol to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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For $600 the Minisforum MS-R1 gives you 64GB DDR5 ECC, 12 cores, dual 10GbE, a real PCIe 4.0 x8 slot, M.2 NVMe, Pi-compatible 40-pin GPIO, and actual UEFI boot. It runs Debian and Proxmox/KVM.

I've read that the CPU is trash compared to intel/amd in performance and in TDP, but you can't build a mini pc/server on intel/amd right now for thaf price with that amount of RAM.

Even just buying the 64GB ddr5 RAM as sticks will be like over 800$...

In the low budget range you can go with a Pi 5 16GB which is now ~$300. Add PSU, case, NVMe HAT, PCIe HAT and you're at $500+. It's way too expensive for what you get, compared to spending a bit more and going with minisforum.

Yeah you can get old used boxes with that amount of RAM for maybe the same price, but they'll such 200W and electricity is expensive where I live.

My current pine64 soquartz cluster over the past 5 years has been dying node by node and I can't run anything more demanding on it (like game servers or local AI). It cost me about 600$ back then with 5x blade + nvme + soquartz module, a poe switch and a case with fans. Kinda seems like a bad deal now, I'm stuck with all the docker swarm issues and the bad cpu cores and max 8gb ram per node. Oh and it draws 52W. If the minisforum 12W TDP is correct, I will save over 100$ per year on electricity costs alone.

Maybe i'm biased and trying to justify my own purchase ... let me know if I'm wrong about it being good value.

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[–] yuman@programming.dev 8 points 9 hours ago (2 children)

I've downgraded my server from 1st gen i7 10 GB RAM (don't ask) to Core 2 Duo 4 GB with the same load and barely felt it. my entire infra including desktop, laptopS, tablet, phoneS, etc costs like a third of this "missed value".

not shitting on your choices, but positing that the price-gouging retail market is all there is, kinda disingenuous; there's sooo much stuff being discarded although perfectly usable.

like, I couldn't bear the super-expensive raspberries while they were in the $50 range, let alone now. marketplaces are awash in busted laptops, with way better value and performance. discarded corpo desktops can house cheap HDD and run 24/7 for eons. etc.

[–] nutbutter@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

10 GB RAM (don't ask)

I wanna know

[–] yuman@programming.dev 3 points 7 hours ago

lol fine - 3x 2 GB 1333 modules out of a busted 1366 motherboard I found and one 4 GB 1866 module I couldn't pair with anything, worked fine for years. the i7 got upgraded to workstation and a C2D i found by the dumpster took the server role. same drives, same debian, same docker-compose files - all good so far.

[–] HelloRoot@lemy.lol 1 points 9 hours ago

I tried selfhosting a game server and it was laggy as hell on 8GB RAM. Then I ran it on my laptop that has 32GB and it ran fine and all friends were able to play. Was consuming aboyt 25GB (but still may run with less)

But I'm not gonna run my laptop as a server because it is fully glued and I can't take out the battery without destroying it.

Another tool I looked into requires at least 16GB RAM.

So maybe for your usecase it's fine. But for me, I can't do half the stuff I want cause my cluster server has low RAM nodes. Even though it has 32GB in total (4x8)