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.