The Minisforum MS-S1 Max has been showcased at IFA 2025. It’s a new AMD Strix Halo mini PC that features the Ryzen AI Max+ 395, which packs the Radeon 8060S iGPU. The system also has two 80 Gbps USB4 v2 ports and dual 10G LAN. The company also notes that the MS-S1 Max has two 40 Gbps USB4 ports and supports dGPU through the internal PCIe x16 slot. Of course, the discrete desktop GPU needs to be of SFF size, as there’s a limited amount of space available inside the chassis (Asus SFF-ready RTX 5070
My understanding is that the Strix Halo chip itself only has 16 lanes of PCIe total so unless doing some fancy routing, the PCIe slot is unlikely to be x16 electrically.
From some recent discussion on r/LocalLlama: Reddit - The heart of the internet
2 Likes
Yeah, that’s kind of what I was asking here. I guess it depends on southbridge chip choices for the USB but the dGPU x 16 is a big ??? Also the internal PSU looks a bit ??? too
This one with Oculink delivering TB5 when partnered with the eGPU enclosure is also a bit of a ???
This is an soc, there is no “southbridge” and the “chipset” is part of the chip, you get as many pcie lanes as you get and I doubt they are using all 16 for the gpu slot leaving nothing for networking (wifi, ethernet), storage, occulink and the tb5 controller. Unless they use a very expensive pcie switch which I highly doubt.
You can wire up a physical 16x slot for as many or few lanes as you want. In this case it’s probably 4x or at most 8x.
2 Likes
Ah, right!
EDIT: Forget what I was writing below. It is 16 lanes in total, not 20.
According to above scheme, there are actually 20 PCIe 4.0 lanes. However, 2 are reserved for network and 2 are reserved for SATA. 3x4 lanes state “NvMe/GPP”. If that means one could combine 16 lanes to a GPU slot, I can’t say. I am pretty sure though that this won’t be done as the chances Minisforum going for zero M.2 sockets is basically zero.
How do you get to 20? As far as I can count it is 16 including the “reserved” for network and the ones that could also be used as sata.
My bad. I can’t count.
So there are only 12 lanes left for Nvme/PGG.
You could go all in on pcie and get a single 16 lane but then you’d have to do everything else over usb (including main storage) so I doubt that would be done.
I suspect we’ll find out the early Chinese language marketing material was incorrect and it’s merely a physical x16 slot but only electrically x8. That would match what Minisforum offers with the MS-A2. For the MS-A2 Minisforum says:
“Physical PCIe x16, bandwidth PCIe 4.0 x8, supports split into 2*PCIe 4.0 x4 for graphics cards or network cards.”
So, it doesn’t look like they have any display ports. And it sounds like one of the NVMe is Gen 4 x 1 (1900 MB/s)
Re Soc: doesn’t there still have to be a USB4 V2 controller? Mux? Chipset? How else could it be implimented? @Adrian_Joachim ?
1 Like
Found one source online suggesting that it will only be x4 electrical / x16 physical due to M.2s and the way Strix Halo allocates lanes…
If they actually do have usb4v2 that controller would very likely eat 4 lanes, now another 8 lanes are gone for the claimed 8x pcie slot, dual 10gbit ethernet is another 2 lanes gone, that would leave 1 for wifi and 1 for an ssd.
It is possible they are going with 4x for the pcie slot and add more ssds or they are using usb for the wifi and use the pcie lane for another ssd or something.
Ultimately speculation only gets us so far let’s wait and see.
1 Like
This appears to be confirmed by their newly updated product page.
It looks like the slot is half height, short length, so maybe appropriate for a PCIe 4.0 x4 based 25gbE SFP28 network adapter or something? In fact you could just about do dual SFP28 with the PCIe bandwidth available either to aggregate together or to split between failover switches.
It looks compelling to me and could give Framework a lot to think about on a Desktop 1.1 revision or something perhaps. The issue with Beelink, Minisforum, GMKtec or any of the others is typically that you simply can’t get repair parts for them. This is the whole reason Framework exists, of course.
1 Like
I’m very curious about the USB4 V2.0 chipset / controller and throughput. That said, I’ve ordered a FW Desktop as I think it’ll be a more reliable journey
3 Likes
It had been released
MINISFORUM MS-S1 Max
0 reviews
Sale price$2,299.00Regular price$2,879.00
Save $580.00
-
AMD Ryzen™ AI Max+ 395 & Radeon 8060S
-
Up to 126 TOPS AI Compute
-
128GB LPDDR5x Unified Memory
-
PCIe 4.0 x16 Expansion
-
Dual Fans, 320W PSU
For bulk discount inquiries, please contact us at elsa@minisforum.com
Pre-sale note: Estimated shipping time is end-October.
You mean they are taking orders? I see it won’t ship until end of next month …
Yes, I checked their website because I was curious and you can order it already
I was actually interested in this one as well, specifically because of dGPU support, but it seems that the PCIe slot is just PCIe x4 but in x16 size…? It’s not really true x16 slot. Still nice to have this slot size, wish Framework has done it.
It does not, it’s advertised slightly misleading as PCIe x16 and in the details it’s PCIe x16 (physically) and PCIe 4.0 x4.
But they support the dGPU use case from the start in their case.
They also seem to offer 2x10GbE (something people asked repeatedly about here)
And their specs claim all 4 USB4 have alt-DP. (Not sure if they claim that their box supports up to 5 displays directly)
And it’s cough, at least in the pre-order phase significantly cheaper than the framework desktop. The price that they advertise as their target price is actually slightly higher than a similar equipped fraework desktop DIY kit.
1 Like