Minisforum MS-A2: a mini PC with 10GbE and a real PCIe slot

If your photo library lives on a NAS, most mini PCs quietly fail you. They ship with a single 2.5Gb Ethernet port, which is fine for browsing and hopeless for editing 4K video off networked storage. The Minisforum MS-A2 is one of the few compact machines that solves that properly, with both 10 Gigabit and 2.5 Gigabit networking built in — and a PCIe slot for good measure. Details are on Minisforum’s store. It is worth being clear about what this machine is, because the naming invites confusion with the MS-S1 Max we have covered previously. The MS-A2 is a different proposition: rather than AMD’s Strix Halo chip with integrated Radeon 8060S graphics, it uses a desktop-class Ryzen 9 9955HX from the Fire Range family. That means more conventional CPU muscle and less emphasis on integrated graphics or on-device AI. Why the networking matters Ten Gigabit Ethernet is the difference...