This looks like an amazing little box that can do almost anything. I’m wondering how people feel about the pricepoint
$679 early bird
$839 msrp
I’d love to grab one to use as a router/firewall, plus run any homelabbing containers I have on my NAS.
How’s the value proposition stack up? Price looks great to me considering the cpu and connectivity it offers.
Edit: Additional info
serve the home sponsored video sponsored but still really really informative. There’s a section near the end going through a tons of ideas of how to utilize the pci slot, including epanding nvme storage, external sas, extra networking etc. seems you can get over 40gb extra throughput from that port.
I think $700-800 for a server with SFP ports sounds like good value in terms of price relative to capability, but the absolute price and capability are probably overkill for a residential use-case (even a homelab one). It’s a no-brainer if you’re the Other Linus (the Tech Tips one) and have unlimited budget for all the latest electro-bling in your house, but if you’re any sort of normal person you don’t need 10 gig networking yet.
Does Minisforum make anything with 4 ethernet ports and a <100W TDP in the <$300 range? If so, get that instead.
If this can handle routing 10g this is a great choice to use as a router. It’s actually quite difficult to find a gateway that’s around this price and ISPs (at least here in Canada, or my part of Canada) are offering internet over 1Gbps at the same price as gigabit, but their routers are awful.
I use 10g between my main pc and my nas. It’s amazing. I use nvmes for triple a, intensive type games, and almost everything else gets installed on the nas. There’s great use cases for 10g.
I have a similar setup. Even for hard drives and slower SSDs on a NAS, 10g has been beneficial. 2.5 gig would probably be sufficient for most of what I do, but even a few years ago when I bought my used mellanox sfp+ cards on eBay it was basically just as cheap to go full 10g (although 2.5 gig Ethernet ports are a bit more common to find built-in these days, so depending on your hardware, that might be a cheaper place to start). But even from a network congestion standpoint, having my own private link to my NAS is really nice.
Also for media creation, using my main pc and nvme as a staging area and moving finished work and archived projects to my NAS is really helped along by the 10g connection I have. Easily saturates it with 6x7200rpm exos drives.