MINISFORUMMotherboard BD795i SE Mini ITX NAS Motherboard, AMD Ryzen 9 7945HX, 16 C/32 T,PCIe 5.0 x16 Slot, Dual PCIe4.0 M.2 Support, DDR5,8K Triple Output(HDMI/DP/USB-C), RJ45 2.5G, USB 3.2

This is an amazing board and CPU. I installed 96g of RAM and a 2tb nvme drive. Installed Ubuntu 24.04 server, running docker. Spun up an ollama module in docker, then loaded gemma3. It was delivering 19 tokens/sec for output. That's only with the onboard GPU.

I’m sure minisforum is a great company, I just happened to receive an entirely different product or a tampered packaged.Edit: Minisforum and I are working on a resolution for this issues. The communication and clarity so far has been outstanding.

As the subject says, these have been operating for over a month now with a fairly heavy workload. Not a single hiccup or crash, just flawless operation. My config includes 3x of these motherboards, all with 128GB Crucial DDR5 SO-DIMM RAM (2x64GB, and yes it works fine). 2x Crucial T500 NVME M.2 SSD. Corsair SFX PSU for each motherboard. OS is Proxmox 8.x. On all units the PCI-e x16 is bifurcated to x8x8 and a slot expander on each has an NVIDIA RTX 4060ti 16GB and a Silicom Power quad 10g SFP+ card. The VMs on each system are doing various GPU stuff. One has Ollama serving LLMs, another running ComfyUI for image/video generation, ACE-STEP for generating music. All are doing audio transcription, PDF OCR, RAG data classification and so on.Over the last month these systems have been under extreme loads. Just the podcast audio transcription alone was over 50,000 files and took weeks with 100% system utilization. These systems all performed flawlessly, stayed cool and used on tiny amounts of power at the wall, which is VERY impressive.I do have a few gripes with the motherboard though, as it could be better. Those are:* System REFUSES to re-boot (warm boot) from USB. Cold booting from USB works fine, power it on and it boots from USB with no problems. Doing a reboot from within a running OS and the system will fail to boot from USB. Super annoying. My recommendation is, if you need to reliably boot (and reboot) from USB, this is not the system for you. You've been warned.* Idiotic Secure Boot Management in the BIOS - If you're installing any operating other than Windows, you'll need to disable Secure Boot. In my case, all fresh system booting is done via PXE, which doesn't support Secure Boot. Minisforum has made it unnecessarily difficult to disable secure boot, so much so, I've called it idiotic. Seriously, search how to disable Secure Boot on this motherboard.* No way enforce "Last Power State" after power outage in ACPI settings. This one is damn near a game changer. If I had known about the lack of this super basic feature, I'd never have invested in 3 of these motherboards. The only correct way for a PC/server to operate is such that after a power outage, the power state of the system must return to whatever it was before the outage occurred. Powered off systems stay off, powered on systems should turn themselves back on. Seems only logical. You can't do that with this board and it's a darn shame that such a basic feature is missing.* Memory speed is not adjustable. Many systems in the range allow manually overriding the memory speed. This one doesn't.Those are some real annoyances and my justification of why this board gets a 4 instead of 5 star.

Pros:* Cheap* Powerful hardware (16c/32t)* Great sound quality on it's amp/dac (if anyone cares about that anymore)* Built-in intel wifi 6 card* Great support for linux out of the box.* Decent BIOS options* Incredible power efficiency compared to a full desktop chip (60w on desktop/330w while gaming)Cons:* No SATA ports* Only 1 usb header* No usb-c headers* Non-standard fan mount for board fan (uses m2.5 threads when most fans are mounted with m3)* Wireless antenna included is bulky and the pins are non-standard (they protrude from the antenna side going into the case, whereas other antennas expect the pin to protrude from the case) so you can't simply replace it with a small form factor antennaExtremely happy with this board! Very innovative and cost competitive. Literally wouldn't be able to build a mini itx in this price range.For context: I'm upgrading from an i7-5930k 6c 12t processor. This was a huge step up in performance and although there are some caveats (only 1 USB header, 2 m.2, no sata) these can all strategically be worked around in your build (use one m.2 slot for sata or buy 2 large m.2 drives, get a USB header splitter)I'm running on Linux exclusively and everything just works, and works well (USB c for display/USB is working with graphics offloading to a dedicated GPU). There are ways you can control the fans by installing custom firmware on Linux, I haven't done it yet. The fan curves are rough out of the box but they get the job done and I'm hoping to smooth them out.I have this paired with an hdplex 500w DC power supply and a 330w 20v dell power adapter. At the wall it measures 40-60w on the desktop and with my GPU (AMD 5700XT) set to a maximum of 180w, I am measuring 330w max while gaming with nothing getting too hot. This things a monster.

The hardware is pretty amazing for a homelab/proxmox build. Most of the negative reviews I've seen are mostly ram related and not correctly trouble shot.