Minisforum MS-01 PCIe Card and RAM Compatibility Thread

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BlueChris

Active Member
Jul 18, 2021
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Athens-Greece
Tested and stressed with s-tui on my proxmox-system.
CPU is a i9-12900h

View attachment 38845

Before Thermal Grizzly PhaseSheet PMT pad
After Thermal Grizzly PhaseSheet PMT pad
View attachment 38846View attachment 38847
View attachment 38848View attachment 38849
Why your Cpu MhZ are so low? you have the defaults in the bios as matter CPU voltages right?
Anyway, i had delete the voltage numbers in the bios as a person suggested in this thread in the early days and have no problem reaching average 3642mhz from all cores of my 12900h with 96gb, Bios 1.17 and most cores under 80c. The above with PTM7950 that i went to it lately. Before i had Thermal Grizzly Conductonaut Extreme were after 2-3 months the temperatures raised at 90c+.
Ambient is at 28c atm and s-tui is running more than 10mins.
MS-01PTM7950.jpg
 
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BlueChris

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Jul 18, 2021
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I forgot to mention that the Thermal Grizzly Conductonaut Extreme did something in both the cpu and the heatsink... both lost their shining which is not big but shows that liquid metal did something bad.

20240830_113723.jpg
P.S. Ignore the white dust, i cleaned it after i took the photo but you see the problem, is like a mountain in both chips
 

h0schi

Member
Oct 24, 2020
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I just used the stock voltage-settings and a edited fan-curve in bios.
the power-governor „powersave“ is set on proxmox.

i deactivated the turboboost-mode, that should the reason why the cpu are running at 2500 Mhz max.

i hope the PTM can „hold“ the temperatures and it will be maintenance-free.
 

BlueChris

Active Member
Jul 18, 2021
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Athens-Greece
I just used the stock voltage-settings and a edited fan-curve in bios.
the power-governor „powersave“ is set on proxmox.

i deactivated the turboboost-mode, that should the reason why the cpu are running at 2500 Mhz max.

i hope the PTM can „hold“ the temperatures and it will be maintenance-free.
If you dont need the extra speed then you are fine. I also use powersave governor but with the script that after some time of pushing it changes to performance and vise versa if the load is off.
Either way, the box needs extra cooling for pushing, is well documented here.1 have 2 x 120mm fans one on top and one on the bottom to have this temperatures.
 

anewsome

Active Member
Mar 15, 2024
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What hardware specs are you running? I've been through several forums looking at these issues and still considering purchasing. Are you running 96gb or 64gb of ram, and which kit? 12900H or 13900H ? I plan on buying a couple of these to replace my aging Dell R620's running ESXi and figured i'd get some MS-01's and run Proxmox due to Broadcom F'ing everything up for home users ;)
That was exactly my plan. Replacing loud, hot, power hungry R720s. My config for the 5 nodes:

Code:
Model: MS01 Barebones
CPU: i9-13900H
RAM: 96GB Crucial SO-DIMM kit 5600MHz(speed reduced in BIOS)
Storage: 3x Crucial T500 2TB NVME
 

Maunose

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Feb 29, 2024
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My MS-01 suddenly stop responding today, when I went to check it, I couldn't turn it on and the light on the power supply was blinking. When I unplugged the power supply from the pc, the light was solid green. Has anyone have this issue before?

I'm thinking it may be the power supply that went bad, but I'm afraid something might have fried on the pc itself.
 
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PigLover

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Jan 26, 2011
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My MS-01 suddenly stop responding today, when I went to check it, I couldn't turn it on and the light on the power supply was blinking. When I unplugged the power supply from the pc, the light was solid green. Has anyone have this issue before?

I'm thinking it may be the power supply that went bad, but I'm afraid something might have fried on the pc itself.
Exactly the same symptoms I had. Your power brick is OK. The flashing green light is its over-current protect. Something has failed in the MS-01 unit. Good news is Minisforum is pretty good about Return and Replace.
 

foggierlucky

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Sep 10, 2024
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I can add a few Mellanox cards to the compatibility list. I have the 13900H Minisforum MS 01

1. MCX4121A-ACAT Mellanox ConnectX-4 25GbE Dual-Port SFP28
  • Fits physically: YES
  • Gets full speed: YES (25 Gbe)
2. Dell ConnectX-5 CX555A Single-Port 100 Gbe (*WARNING*)
  • Fits physically: YES
  • Gets full speed: NO (Limited to 40 Gbe). The MS 01 has a PCIe 4.0x16 PHYSICAL slot, but only runs at PCIe 4.0x8 electrically. This means that the NIC (PCIe 3.0x16) cannot get full bandwidth and the 100 Gbe card is limited to 40 Gbe speeds.
    • Note: I should have re-read the spec on the MS 01 page a second time before buying these.
I am replacing the Dell 100 Gbe ConnectX-5 with the Mellannox CX516A Connectx-5 MCX516A-CDAT 100GB. This specific card (the CDAT) runs at PCIe 4.0x16, which means that in the MS 01 it should run at PCIe 4.0x8 speeds, and that SHOULD get me full 100 Gbps speeds.
 
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m3rl1n

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Aug 23, 2024
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1x KALEA-INFORMATIQUE M.2 NGFF Riser Extension for Mounting a PCIe M Key AHCI or NVMe M2 SSD to an M2 E A Key Port with 20cm Wide Flexible Ribbon Cable
For anyone looking in the german Amazon store:

Thank you so much for this! Confirmed working for me too - cheap and easy solution to add a 4th NVMe Drive to the MS-01 without using the PCIe-Port for this. It's only PCIe 3.0 x1 then of course, but I think that's enough for a boot-drive, if you don't need the WIFI-Card anyway. In my case a rather cheap Patriot P300.
I could even add a small heatsink on that NVMe in the Riser Extension and mounted it with the screws to fix the Fan. So that's how my temps look according to CrystalDiskInfo in idle mode: (Disk 0: Crucial T500 2TB, vanilla heatsink; Disk 1: Samsung 980 Pro 2TB; Disk 2: Lexar NM790 2TB)

1726014423013.png

I think about removing the vanilla installed vent on top of the NVMe's, since the temperature difference is almost constantly ~5-7 degrees compared to the drives with no heatsink (due to the lack of space). I'd probably add a heatsink to those too and apply an external fan below the device, to get still some airflow. That then also easens up the fiddling with the riser cable and get everything mounted without moving parts.

EDIT: Tested exactly that, removing the vanilla NVMe fan, applied heatsinks to the other two NVMe's so now all of the drives now have heatsinks. Without "external airflow", temperatures were almost the same as above in idle. With airflow, temps went down for the boot drive and the 1st (PCIe 4x4) drive to around 30°C while the others stayed at ~40°C. So I guess I'll have to further pay attention on temps and also try to swich drive slots to see if it's just the last two drives getting hotter by their attributes. This also might change while drives are under heavy load, of course.

1726021256776.png
 
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manofoz

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Mar 25, 2024
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Hey,

I've been following along here and purchased a lot that I saw other people have success with. I recently put an RTX A2000 in my MS-01 and it caused instability in the SPF+ NICs when under load. I'm not sure if this was because I overloaded the device or accidently bifurcated lanes going to SFP+ but any time they were under load I'd see something like this:

Code:
Sep 12 03:14:50 pve04 kernel: i40e 0000:03:00.0 enp3s0f0np0: NIC Link is Down
Sep 12 03:14:50 pve04 kernel: vmbr0: port 1(enp3s0f0np0) entered disabled state
Sep 12 03:14:50 pve04 kernel: i40e 0000:03:00.1 enp3s0f1np1: NIC Link is Down
Sep 12 03:14:51 pve04 kernel: vmbr1: port 1(enp3s0f1np1) entered disabled state
Maybe this MS-01 is faulty, or maybe it's because I also added 3 M.2 NVMEs (a T500 for the OS, 2x PM983a for Ceph) and 96 Gbe of RAM (Crucial 5600MHz) and pushed it over what it's capable of. Would love to hear if anyone has tried to load one up this much.

For the symptom I noticed right after installing the A2000 the device would be unreachable on the network but still pulling power. When looking at the logs I saw it was exactly when it started backing up to PBS overnight. The network traffic to PBS overloaded it or something.
 

Prognosis5101

New Member
Aug 31, 2024
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I have been a few hours trying to get Windows loaded so I can flash this damn bios. I keep getting "A media driver your computer needs is missing"
I have tried Windows 11, and Windows 10. I have moved the USB, I have used diskpart to create a partition, volume as NTFS, and a drive letter as C.
I do NOT have the wireless card installed. I have reset the bios to factory defaults....

Getting frustrated!

Edit: The UEFI CLI doesn't seem to work on this box
Edit2: Never mind, the UEFI flash works fine. I was battling a worn out flash drive.
 
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bbusse

New Member
Sep 7, 2024
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Doesn't recognize lexar ssd ares M.2 4tb drive what to do?
I don't have an MS-01 yet, but in the bios is the drive configured for RAID? In the past i've seen something like this when set to RAID instead of AHCI, though that was typically with SATA drives. RAID has always been a known issue where you need to provide drivers. That says Server, what Windows Server OS are you installing ?

RAID Driver might work if you put it on a flash drive:
 

Prognosis5101

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Aug 31, 2024
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I don't have an MS-01 yet, but in the bios is the drive configured for RAID? In the past i've seen something like this when set to RAID instead of AHCI, though that was typically with SATA drives. RAID has always been a known issue where you need to provide drivers. That says Server, what Windows Server OS are you installing ?

RAID Driver might work if you put it on a flash drive:
For me, I changed the thumb drive to a different one and the problem went away
 

yann9680

New Member
Sep 14, 2024
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Another point on these boards is that they are not built in house by minis forum,


@JaxJiang or @Patrick Please do jump back on board on and lets us know how the WiFi lanes are wired, @MetalPhreak has a really good use case with that coral accelerator, makes this device even more better for simulating some network edge based sceanarios.

On a personal note, I would like to see a print out of the IOMMU groups if possible:

iommu.sh

Code:
#!/usr/bin/env bash

shopt -s nullglob
lastgroup=""
for g in `find /sys/kernel/iommu_groups/* -maxdepth 0 -type d | sort -V`; do
    for d in $g/devices/*; do
        if [ "${g##*/}" != "$lastgroup" ]; then
            echo -en "Group ${g##*/}:\t"
        else
            echo -en "\t\t"
        fi
        lastgroup=${g##*/}
        lspci -nms ${d##*/} | awk -F'"' '{printf "[%s:%s]", $4, $6}'
        if [[ -e "$d"/reset ]]; then echo -en " [R] "; else echo -en "     "; fi

        lspci -mms ${d##*/} | awk -F'"' '{printf "%s %-40s %s\n", $1, $2, $6}'
        for u in ${d}/usb*/; do
            bus=$(cat "${u}/busnum")
            lsusb -s $bus: | \
                awk '{gsub(/:/,"",$4); printf "%s|%s %s %s %s|", $6, $1, $2, $3, $4; for(i=7;i<=NF;i++){printf "%s ", $i}; printf "\n"}' | \
                awk -F'|' '{printf "USB:\t\t[%s]\t\t %-40s %s\n", $1, $2, $3}'
        done
    done
done
You might already have the answer, but here it is:
Code:
Group 0:        [8086:4626] [R] 00:02.0  VGA compatible controller                Alder Lake-P Integrated Graphics Controller
Group 1:        [8086:4621]     00:00.0  Host bridge                              Device 4621
Group 2:        [8086:464d] [R] 00:06.0  PCI bridge                               12th Gen Core Processor PCI Express x4 Controller #0
Group 3:        [8086:463d] [R] 00:06.2  PCI bridge                               12th Gen Core Processor PCI Express x4 Controller #2
Group 4:        [8086:466e] [R] 00:07.0  PCI bridge                               Alder Lake-P Thunderbolt 4 PCI Express Root Port #0
Group 5:        [8086:462f] [R] 00:07.2  PCI bridge                               Alder Lake-P Thunderbolt 4 PCI Express Root Port #2
Group 6:        [8086:461e]     00:0d.0  USB controller                           Alder Lake-P Thunderbolt 4 USB Controller
USB:            [1d6b:0002]              Bus 003 Device 001                       Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub 
USB:            [1d6b:0003]              Bus 004 Device 001                       Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub 
                [8086:463e]     00:0d.2  USB controller                           Alder Lake-P Thunderbolt 4 NHI #0
                [8086:466d]     00:0d.3  USB controller                           Alder Lake-P Thunderbolt 4 NHI #1
Group 7:        [8086:51ed]     00:14.0  USB controller                           Alder Lake PCH USB 3.2 xHCI Host Controller
USB:            [0e8d:c616]              Bus 001 Device 002                       MediaTek Inc. Wireless_Device 
USB:            [1d6b:0002]              Bus 001 Device 001                       Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub 
USB:            [1d6b:0003]              Bus 002 Device 001                       Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub 
                [8086:51ef]     00:14.2  RAM memory                               Alder Lake PCH Shared SRAM
Group 8:        [8086:51e0]     00:16.0  Communication controller                 Alder Lake PCH HECI Controller
                [8086:51e3]     00:16.3  Serial controller                        Alder Lake AMT SOL Redirection
Group 9:        [8086:51bb] [R] 00:1c.0  PCI bridge                               Alder Lake-P PCH PCIe Root Port
Group 10:       [8086:51bc] [R] 00:1c.4  PCI bridge                               Device 51bc
Group 11:       [8086:51b0] [R] 00:1d.0  PCI bridge                               Alder Lake PCI Express Root Port
Group 12:       [8086:51b2] [R] 00:1d.2  PCI bridge                               Device 51b2
Group 13:       [8086:51b3] [R] 00:1d.3  PCI bridge                               Device 51b3
Group 14:       [8086:5182]     00:1f.0  ISA bridge                               Alder Lake PCH eSPI Controller
                [8086:51c8]     00:1f.3  Audio device                             Alder Lake PCH-P High Definition Audio Controller
                [8086:51a3]     00:1f.4  SMBus                                    Alder Lake PCH-P SMBus Host Controller
                [8086:51a4]     00:1f.5  Serial bus controller                    Alder Lake-P PCH SPI Controller
Group 15:       [1d97:1602] [R] 01:00.0  Non-Volatile memory controller           Lexar NM790 NVME SSD (DRAM-less)
Group 16:       [8086:1572] [R] 02:00.0  Ethernet controller                      Ethernet Controller X710 for 10GbE SFP+
Group 17:       [8086:1572] [R] 02:00.1  Ethernet controller                      Ethernet Controller X710 for 10GbE SFP+
Group 18:       [8086:125c] [R] 57:00.0  Ethernet controller                      Ethernet Controller I226-V
Group 19:       [15b7:5025] [R] 58:00.0  Non-Volatile memory controller           WD Blue SN570 NVMe SSD 2TB
Group 20:       [15b7:5025] [R] 59:00.0  Non-Volatile memory controller           WD Blue SN570 NVMe SSD 2TB
Group 21:       [8086:125b] [R] 5a:00.0  Ethernet controller                      Ethernet Controller I226-LM
Group 22:       [14c3:0616] [R] 5b:00.0  Network controller                       MT7922 802.11ax PCI Express Wireless Network Adapter
 

yann9680

New Member
Sep 14, 2024
2
0
1

Looks like A+E key wifi card in there, so the single coral should work. Looks like the slot is E-key. I have no need for wifi so I'll be putting my spare coral card in.

Whether it has 2 lanes or not, will have to check. E-key spec says x2 lanes.
It looks like it is 1x lane. At least that's how the original WIFI adapter is recognizing it:
Code:
user@MS01~# lspci | grep MT7922
5b:00.0 Network controller: MEDIATEK Corp. MT7922 802.11ax PCI Express Wireless Network Adapter
user@MS01:~# lspci -vv -s 5b:00.0 | grep "LnkSta:" 
                LnkSta: Speed 5GT/s, Width x1
 

Prognosis5101

New Member
Aug 31, 2024
5
3
3
I have updated my BIOS to 1.24. The PL1/2 power limit didn't seem to make a difference for me. However, on 1.24, I left it in there, because I want to limit the power draw anyway. I settled on 45000 PL1 and 60000 PL2.
I did set the memory to (hopefully safe) 4400, and turned turned off ASPM to the copper NICs.

I did find that the startup "Max turbo" setting was making the box slam to 85 degrees in the BIOS, so I set it to "Max Non Turbo" so the BIOS didn't try to overheat the box. With that setting the box settles to 45 degrees while in the BIOS.

I was up to needing to power cycle 3 times a day. The only setting being tested above is the memory speed set to 4400. Every thing else has had no effect on stability. I have turned off my cron shutdown jobs, and have disabled the smart plug from power cycling. We will see how long the box goes before crashing.

Edit to note:
13900H Standard PL1 = 45000
13900H Standard PL2 = 115000
Minisforum MS-01 BIOS defaults are higher than spec.

Edit uptime update
4d 19h 54m @ 4:42pm 9/19/24
 
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biacsid

New Member
Dec 9, 2016
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I got this thing: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005006957238570.html

It is very hot, the connection starts cutting out unless I point a fan directly at it.

I would recommend using SFP+ at both ends if you can, unless you only plan to only connect temporarily for specific tasks.

I've ordered one of these so I can go SFP+ to SFP+ from my MS-01 and RJ45 to RJ45 from my desk: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005006222506874.html

It has an internal heatsink on the 10Gb RJ45 so hopefully it'll be okay.

--------

Heat has been a bit of an issue for me because I'm allergic to noise. It's mostly the NVMe fan on the bottom. It sounds like a mosquito and I can hear it through the cupboard door.

I've removed the NVMe fan now and put heatsinks on my drives. The whole unit is sitting on a 140mm Noctua fan on a ventilated rack shelf, so it can draw air in from underneath. It's actually running cooler now.

Someone on Reddit made and shared this 3D model of a bottom plate that fits a 140mm fan. I'm getting one printed so I can connect the fan permanently: Printables

View attachment 37862

(edit - tidied the Ali Express link)
Hi daylightroberty, I see you are using different screws than the black original ones to mount the 3D-printed custom plate to the MS-01, I assume, as the plate is thicker than the original metal frame. Would you please share specs (Amazon link) of the screws? Thank you very much!