I tested the Minisforum MS-R1 — the world's first ARM mini workstation with proper UEFI support. It promises to fill the gap between a Raspberry Pi and expensive enterprise ARM servers at around $500–600. In this video I break down the hardware specs, real-world performance, power consumption, and give my honest recommendation for homelab use.

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Timestamps:

00:00 Introduction
00:56 Hardware Overview & Specs
03:56 Form Factor & Chassis
04:30 Performance & Power Efficiency
07:27 Final Thoughts & Recommendation

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Christian Lempa

The Minisforum MS-R1 is the world's first ARM mini workstation with UEFI boot support, powered by the Chinese CIX CP8180 SoC (12 cores, 28W TDP). It features 32/64GB LPDDR5 ECC RAM, dual M.2 NVMe slots, dual 10GbE ports, and a PCIe 4.0 x16 slot — all in a compact, well-built chassis priced around $500–600. Geekbench scores (1,326 single-core / 6,510 multi-core) place it between a Raspberry Pi 5 and Apple M1 Mac Mini. The main disappointment is idle power consumption at ~19W (improvable to ~14W via firmware update), which is significantly higher than comparable x86 mini PCs like AMD Ryzen-based systems that idle at ~7W. For general home lab use, x86 alternatives offer better performance, compatibility, and efficiency. However, for ARM-specific development and testing where something more powerful than a Raspberry Pi is needed without enterprise-grade costs, it fills a genuine gap in the market.

Minisforum MS-R1 Review: The World's First ARM Mini Workstation