MINISFORUM MS-02 Ultra (285HX)

What owners say

At 4.8 litres and 3.4 kg this has stopped being a mini PC in the usual sense, and reviewers point out it now competes with ordinary small towers. What justifies it is the networking: two 25GbE ports as standard on an Intel E810, sitting in a semi-proprietary x16 slot that is really wired as three x4, with two extra M.2 sockets on the same card that default to Gen3 for stability. Idle noise is the real complaint and it does not come from the heatsink but from the internal power-supply fan, whose speed cannot be adjusted; one lab measured 38 dB(A) permanently at idle and the manufacturer promised customer units would be corrected, while a second lab measured 35 dB(A) on the same model and called it discreet. Two independent measurements that disagree means noise is a unit-by-unit lottery today, not a settled fact. The four-core Arrow Lake integrated graphics are token — Cyberpunk 2077 averages under 13 FPS at 1080p Ultra — so a discrete card is not optional here. And there is a catch few mention: fitting that card makes the BIOS drop the processor from 100/140 W to 90/110 W, so the use case that justifies the machine is the one that clips its CPU.

For whom

A home lab that wants 25GbE, a real PCIe slot and 24 threads in a box you can carry, and is willing to add a graphics card.

Not for

Anyone who needs it silent at idle, anyone counting on the integrated graphics, and anyone who wants the memory to run at the speed Intel validates: Minisforum caps it at DDR5-4800, and at 4400 with two modules per channel.

Our own summary of 6 published sources, reviewed Sep 17, 2026. We have not tested this Mini PC ourselves; the sources are listed under About this data.