Return MS-A2 for MS-O1? Jellyfin, NAS, OPNsense, K3s.

[J4ckl0ck]

Hi guys, I have just purchased an MS-A2 barebone (Ryzen 7945HX) for £449. The majority of the MS-O1 (i9 12th gen) in the UK is out of stock or higher in price, so I was happy to get this one. My intial plan was

• Proxmox booting from a 1TB NVMe
• 1 VM for OPNsense (for LAN/WAN separation)
• 1 VM for TrueNAS (2×2TB NVMe in RAID1 for storage)
• A K3s cluster (5 VMs) running:
  • Jellyfin + Arr stack
  • Postgres + Next.js + .Net personal projects
  • Immich, Pi-hole, Traefik, Paperless, etc.
• Stream 4K/HEVC content to iPhone & TV

The reason I am having second thoughts,

• One of the RJ45 ports is Realtek, which may not play nice with OPNsense (heard of stability issues).
• No Thunderbolt, so future expansion (like clustering with 2 more identical box and Ceph) becomes trickier.
• No Intel iGPU, which might limit Jellyfin transcoding, especially for mobile clients.

So still considering, MS-O1 (i9-12900H):

• Slightly less raw CPU power, but think that is okay.
• Has Thunderbolt, Intel NICs, and QuickSync.
• Arguably better for media workloads and networking.
• lower idle power draw as well.

I'm just starting out my homelab journey my goal is to create a good foundation that I can add to in the future. Ideally, I'd like to add in to a small 3-node cluster, maybe with Ceph, and learn things like Kubernetes and Ansible along the way.

What do you think?
Should I keep the MS-A2 or return it and hold out for an MS-O1, maybe wait for N5 PRO with an arc gpu maybe (or something similar with Intel iGPU, TB, and Intel NICs)?

 

[pimposh]

Why to build hypervisor based on hardware known to fail and overheat ? That is question you should ask yourself.

 

[J4ckl0ck]

Why to build hypervisor based on hardware known to fail and overheat ? That is question you should ask yourself.

I guess I am just drawn to the small form factor, but I’m definitely open to better suggestions. Thanks.

 

[PigLover]

The Realtek NIC isn't much of an issue for OPNsense since release of the 14.1 FreeBSD kernel. Lots of legacy hate from earlier versions but 14.1 incorporated the good drivers natively.

MS-02 presents a much bigger issue for OPNsense if you want to pass through one of the 10gbe NICs. There is no native FreeBSD driver for the ACQ113 NIC. Several proposed drivers exist if you want to play with dev versions but nothing yet in the mainline builds.

 

[WANg]

Hi guys, I have just purchased an MS-A2 barebone (Ryzen 7945HX) for £449. The majority of the MS-O1 (i9 12th gen) in the UK is out of stock or higher in price, so I was happy to get this one. My intial plan was

• Proxmox booting from a 1TB NVMe
• 1 VM for OPNsense (for LAN/WAN separation)
• 1 VM for TrueNAS (2×2TB NVMe in RAID1 for storage)
• A K3s cluster (5 VMs)running:
  • Jellyfin + Arr stack
  • Postgres + Next.js + .Net personal projects
  • Immich, Pi-hole, Traefik, Paperless, etc.
• Stream 4K/HEVC content to iPhone & TV

The reason I am having second thoughts,

• One of the RJ45 ports is Realtek, which may not play nice with OPNsense (heard of stability issues).
• No Thunderbolt, so future expansion (like clustering with 2 more identical box and Ceph) becomes trickier.
• No Intel iGPU, which might limit Jellyfin transcoding, especially for mobile clients.

So still considering, MS-O1 (i9-12900H):

• Slightly less raw CPU power, but think that is okay.
• Has Thunderbolt, Intel NICs, and QuickSync.
• Arguably better for media workloads and networking.
• lower idle power draw as well.

I'm just starting out my homelab journey my goal is to create a good foundation that I can add to in the future. Ideally, I'd like to add in to a small 3-node cluster, maybe with Ceph, and learn things like Kubernetes and Ansible along the way.

What do you think?
Should I keep the MS-A2 or return it and hold out for an MS-O1, maybe wait for N5 PRO with an arc gpu maybe (or something similar with Intel iGPU, TB, and Intel NICs)?

So, a few things:

a) I would not use either the Minisforum MS-01 or the MS-A2 for jellyfin GPU based encoding.

Well, I mean, in theory, for both you can do GPU transcoding using it, but thats assuming that you don't plan to do the next gen video codecs like AV1 or H266 (VVC). Neither the Intel Alder/Raptor Lake MS01 or the AMD Dragon Range MS-A2 supports AV1 or H266 encoding, and exposing Quicksync or VCN3 transcoding acceleration on their GPUs (XeLP 96 or Radeon 610M) to a VM/container needs more work than you might think.

For media transcoding and jukebox duties I would buy a base model M4 Mac Mini (discounted down to 450 USD stateside) and run Jellyfin on it - Apple's video toolbox ASIC actually run better than Quicksync on my Alder Lake i5-1240p or vceenec on my Ryzen 7 7840U Phoenix machine transcoding h264/HEVC (no support for AV1 but who know if Apple has the hardware already in place waiting for MacOS26 to add support). I am sure plex, vlc or whatever runs fine natively on Apple Silicon.

b) eeeeeeeeeh, the non-SFP+ NICs on the MS-01 are i226 based, which has its own headaches - the SFP+ ones are X710, which are reliable but a bit old. The Realteks works just fine on Opnsense - I had one running at my office on the ol' HP t730 for the past year or so. As for TB3/USB4, that's a nce-to-have, but the MS01 has a reputation here for overheating and dying prematurely, so I would not touch it.

 

[freegate]

Waiting for the N5 pro to come out is the right thing to do in my opinion.

 

[jsmith20]

I'm in a similar boat. Just purchased the MS-A2 barebone (Ryzen 7945HX) (not delivered yet) with Crucial 96GB RAM (CT2K48G56C46S5) and 2 x Crucial P310 2TB 2280 PCIe Gen4 (CT2000P310SSD801). I already have a Synology so not considering the N5 series. I also have a Beelink N100 that has served me well and can either be a 2nd node or OPNsense dedicated (it has 2 x 2.5gb intel NICs).

I have a similar usecase and am also have second thoughts.

• Should I return the MS-A2 for an MS-01 12600/12900?
• Perhaps go with a custom build? (parts suggestion please as I've never built a pc before)

My budget is ~$1500 CAD all in (already spent $500 on RAM and M.2s)

 

[WANg]

Waiting for the N5 pro to come out is the right thing to do in my opinion.

Kinda - although I would be a bit wary of Minisforum potentially doing a little bit of rug-pulling here - if I look at their ad copy on the N5 pro they claim ECC support on the box (which is supposed to have a Ryzen AI 9 HX 370..which is a laptop chip also found on the current generation top-end Framework 13 AMD version) - although if you look at AMD's own spec sheets, the APU doesn't support ECC.

 

[PigLover]

Kinda - although I would be a bit wary of Minisforum potentially doing a little bit of rug-pulling here - if I look at their ad copy on the N5 pro they claim ECC support on the box (which is supposed to have a Ryzen AI 9 HX 370..which is a laptop chip also found on the current generation top-end Framework 13 AMD version) - although if you look at AMD's own spec sheets, the APU doesn't support ECC.

There is no ecc "support" in the N5. However, ecc so-dimms are "supported" (in the sense that the N5 will operate with them installed). See the various early product reviews for confirmation. Don't know why anyone would pay the premium required to do this, but it does appear to work.

 

[WANg]

There is no ecc "support" in the N5. However, ecc so-dimms are "supported" (in the sense that the N5 will operate with them installed). See the various early product reviews for confirmation. Don't know why anyone would pay the premium required to do this, but it does appear to work.

Yeah, but then every single Ryzen will work with ECC SODIMMs, it's just that the ECC functionality is not enabled...which makes the callout on their ad copy either disingenuous...or sloppy. Also, nothing currently in the market with HX370 will do ECC, and even AMD does not list ECC as an option on their own datasheets...

Actually, doesn't DDR5 have some ECC functionality built-into the SODIMM, but it does not cover errors in-flight from the SODIMM to the APU, making it kinda pointless?

 

[freegate]

According to the miniforums documentation, the N5 doesn't support ECC RAM, unlike the N5 Pro.

It seems that Ryzen 7 CPUs support EC RAM without actually supporting it. To get to the bottom of this, we'd need to know if the N5 Pro's motherboard supports ECC RAM.