Minisforum HX90 Conclusion

In order to conclude the saga that was the Minisforum HX90, I ended up trying out Pop! OS 21.04 from System76. At first, the results looked promising because I was able to install Steam, VirtualBox, and import all of my VMs, and got them up and running. Never got around to testing the games in Steam though.

Unfortunately though, what appeared, initially to be a success eventually still ended up in a failure.

The system did freeze, eventually, at least once; at which point, it was clear and obvious that there is something either wrong with the system, the hardware, the engineering, compatibility issues, and/or a problem with software running on it.

I don't have the tools to be able to diagnose the root cause of the issue, even when I had Pop! OS installed on the NVMe SSD. Therefore; as such, I have sent the SODIMM RAM back for a RMA already, and I am currently in the process of trying to do the same with the HX90 itself as well.

This is a bummer/shame because I was really hoping that said HX90 would have been able to take the place of my former Intel NUC, be more performant, and not have the same kind of thermal throttling issues that's wayyy too common in my Intel NUCs.

Sadly, that just didn't turn out to be the case.

So now I have my old Intel Core i7-6700K taking on the duties that were originally designated for the HX90 and I have bought two sets of 2x 16 GB DDR4-3200 Kingston HyperX Fury RAM modules (4 DIMMs total, 64 GB total), in the hopes that I would be able to upgrade the RAM in the 6700K system, and make that take on those duties instead.

We shall see how that goes.

Still working on the Minisforum HX90

 About two weeks ago, my Minisforum HX90 finally arrived and I was able to get the system up and going.

So far, it's been a bit of a mixed bag.

The system is actually VERY performant and I don't have any really complaints in regards to that However, the way that I had it set up where the system was hosting 9 VMs, it started freezing daily; which necessitated a hard power cycle before it would freeze again the next day, and the next, etc.

So between last night and this morning, I was trying to alternative operating systems to see if I would be able to get said Minisforum HX90 to be stable.

Proxmox VE 7.1.2 would install and it would pick up on the onboard Intel I225-V 2.5 GbE NIC, but then after the system has rebooted, post-install; said NIC WASN'T available and I couldn't quickly discern why nor the root cause of that issue. Tried installing it again. Same problem.

So Proxmox was a bust.

Next I tried Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. It installed, but then I wasn't able to install Oracle VirtualBox 5.2 in a way where said Oracle VirtualBox 5.2 was working the way that it is supposed to, so that failed.

Then I tried downgrading to Ubuntu 18.04 LTS figure "okay, at least I should be able to get Oracle VirtualBox 5.2 installed." Well, that part was true, except that Ubuntu 18.04 was too old and didn't recognise the integrated Radeon GPU that is on the AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX processor that is in the HX90. The maximum resolution that it would display was 800x600. So, then after getting Oracle VirtualBox 5.2 installed, I figured "okay, maybe I can upgrade the system from here and that should give my the proper resolution back".

Nope.

I updated and upgraded to Ubuntu 20.04 from 18.04 and not only did I NOT get the proper screen resolution back, I also lost connectivity to the 2.5 GbE NIC which was, ironically, working in 18.04 before.

So, let's say just say - trying to get and make the system stable has been a complete and utter nightmare.

I've got a fresh install of Windows 10 21H2 now (well...I think that the installer was actually 20H2, but then I was able to run Windows update to update it to 21H2), so hopefully, that will be able to help stabilise the system, but we shall see. I'm in the middle of re-installing all of my Windows applications along with re-importing the Oracle VirtualBox VMs back into VirtualBox.

And if that doesn't work, it would be such a pity because the system has a LOT of potential, but if it doesn't work, I'll likely end up RMAing the system back to Minisforum, and then just buying 4x 16 GB of DDR4-whatever RAM (whatever is the most cost efficient, which, perhaps ironically, might be DDR4-3200), install that back into my Intel Core i7-6700K system, and use that system to host all of the VMs once again instead.

It won't be as fast as the AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX, but hopefully, at least it'll work and it won't freeze on my daily.

Hopefully.