Photos Latest Purchases Thread: v2.0

Already ordered a dual m 2 card for that slot. Although, the weird bifurcation on the slot makes it hard to know if it'll work until I plug it in.

 

Have a look at a PEX88024 (4 nvme) or PEX88048 ( 8 nvme, 8 might be too deep for that case) cards from your favorite Chinese online vendor all the NVMe you want in what ever slot you like, loads of variants, obvs bandwidth limited by the lane config you put it in but no bifurcation needed, the switch sorts it out whether in x2/x4/x8/x16

I use these in my NAS(x570) and desktop (x870), no faffing with bifurcation. only gen 4 mind.

Obviously a bit pricer than a straight M2 card without MUX but great for expanding storage when you do the device hand me downs/upgrades and as I can only get on/off NAS at 20Gb max, SSD bandwidth is not I priority, but I could run 8 NVMe in an x2 slot, still faster than a Sata SSD

 

The third pcie slot is a physical x16 but it's actually 12 lanes divided 4x5.0 + 4x4.0 + 4x4.0. Hence the weirdness.

I'll take a look at the card you mentioned though, cheers.

 

That's unconventional but then it is minisforum and their specs for things are whacky and a little bit light on the truth if the USB4V2 stuff on Strix Halo is anything to go by. where they technically had the ports from the controller but not the lane bandwidth to back it up.

Looking on the site, the MS 02 Ultra looks like a lovely unit, Specs suggest it is gen4 slot @ x4x4x4 and gen 5 is x16

 

Yeah, I see the confusion from the review I read:
The first x4 lanes are pcie 4.0 but fed from the pcie 5.0 on the CPU. The other two x4 groups are fed by the pch.

 

275 or 235?

 

Just the 235HX. It was another £200 for the 275HX and I think that kills some of the value of the platform. My wish list was something like this machine - 2.5 and 10GbE, USB4 and USB v2, extra PCIE expansion (I do plan to try out one of those funky little 90 degree PCIE to M.2 adapters in the x4 slot, underneath the GPU shroud) for the additional m.2 or network bandwidth (or both). Plus, integrated PSU - the power bricks for my mini PCs easily add 1 litre+ to the overall volume. Also, room for RAM expansion - I don't have to swap out my existing RAM to increase capacity.

 

I think the 235HX version is a solid choice. I’d been considering one myself as that and the B50 Pro would be a cracking SFF machine. And the 4 RAM slots is a definite win.

 

Yeah, It's at least on par with my 14600, but more efficient and it eats my 13500T. I'll be selling my newly acquired Dell 3280 and dropping the RTX Pro 2000 in the MS-02. It will **just** fit in the 10" rack too. I might drop the 13500T into the Dell and sell the 14600 with my Z790 mATX board. My big rig will be all AMD: 7600X and 9070XT, the MS-02 is Intel/Nvidia and my 8700G powered MS-A1 will be my sandbox, if I keep it. Everything else is going. I have too many spares, backups and just-in-cases.

 

A "CANVAS" upgrade kit to turn my Elegoo Centauri Carbon 1 into a 2, for only £38!


(Yes, major printer surgery is required )
https://uk.elegoo.com/products/canvas-for-centauri-carbon

 

£38? Um, wut? What happened to £189?

Nevermind. £50 shipped is worth it, even if I just keep it until some community mods come out to make it a feasible solution for me.

 

The datamined page from last week showed a "placeholder price", I guess.
The one thing it doesn't include is the plastic bucket from the top of the CC2, so buyers will have to get creative with pound shop storage crates.

In other news, I also ordered another Gerry Anderson tech manual:-

 

Oooo I think I'm going to have to do this.

 

Really interested to see how you get on with the Ultra.

 

It isn't going to be an AI platform, mate. I bought this as a daily driver because it meets a shedload of my criteria:

• It supports the fastest small form factor GPUs
• the IO and expansion is kind of insane and perfect for my envisioned wants/needs.
• It (just) fits inside my 10" rack, which frees up desk space.
  
• Oh, and it was crazy good value for the model I bought - £560 retail but I stacked a couple of Minisforum vouchers and got £40 off.

 

Sadly, the first 2 batches have "sold out". Order books will hopefully re-open once shipping begins.

 

Still interested. I think I've sorted my AI requirements now since qwen3.6:27b was released. Happily runs on my 3090 without needed system RAM.

 

It's running two 16GB sticks of DDR5 5600, although I think it caps at 4800. There's a option in the bios to set the RAM higher but it locked up at boot and I had to hit the CMOS reset - might need to play around a little more to figure that out. I plan to add another two sticks of 5600, but that'll have to wait a wee while. I have 6 TB of storage in there with a plan to add more when I get my dual m.2 card in the slot reserved for the 25gig NIC on the big boy spec. The 235HX seems plenty powerful for my needs and, because the cooler is the same on all three MS-02 specs, I haven't seen any throttling when stressing it. I will play with the PL1 and PL2 power levels to max out the performance and make the most of that cooling overhead.

The GPU is the 16GB RTX Pro 2000 Blackwell, which is around 10% slower than the full fat 4000 sff model in everyday/gaming use. Obvs, the extra 8GB VRM and cores make the 4000 a lot more powerful for AI/compute tasks but that isn't my focus. In synthetic tests, it's about 15-20% faster than my 4060 LP was but the 16GB VRAM really helps when gaming at 1440p. I think I likened it to a 16GB 5060, which makes it hideously expensive and a really poor value proposition but, again, not my focus.

The fast USB4 v2 ports are really showing up my poor selection of Type C cables though, when transferring data via portable SSDs. It's really triggering me, and it's completely irrational, so you just know I'm going to lean into researching some stupidly inappropriate and silly expensive cables.

The PC itself looks sweet AF, aesthetically, with the same quality alu shell we've seen on their other MS series PCs and they even included an adjustment for the power LED brightness in the BIOS, which is just one of my buttons on most things; literally to the point of me usually just unplugging/disabling or taping over LEDs on most devices I own. I really don't like lights in or on my PCs and don't get me started on RGB.

TLDR - I'm loving it, so far.

 

I know he's marmite and for good reasons, but I do need to watch the LTT video about the well specced/tested/labelled USB C cables they have have sourced and are selling.
It seems such sense to label the speed and power carrying ability on cables that are used for a multitude of various jobs but have the same plug.

If nothing else, maybe it will push some of the mainstream brands to follow suit?

Having adjustable brightness on the power LED is very thoughtful, and shows they have good attention to detail.

In other news diametrically opposed to your preferences, I have acquired a Lian Li 'wireless' RGB LCD fan and associated hub. I wired it up, loaded the software and found that the lights and LCD work - it shows the CPU temperature nicely in the hub display and lights up in a million different ways, or (thankfully) not. Ironically, the fan does not spin, and I may be missing a 3rd cable for it which picks up SATA power.
It already uses a USB mobo header and a fan header plus the largeish wireless USB hub like an oversized WiFi stick. I'm glad it was very cheap.
I may split it down and just use the hub mounted LCD, or sell it all!

 

I don't see any LTT content on my feeds - I have them all blacklisted. I love marmite, but he's an asshat IMO. I will concede that properly speccing cables is a great thing though.

I doubt it'll become an industry standard though - there are far too many bad actors on AliExpress, Amazon, Ebay etc... who are completely happy with the current practise of listing BS specs and shipping out dogshit products. It's not helped by the fact that most cables rated for really high wattage are typically terrible for data transfer speeds.