I've been casually browsing for a home lab refresh, for a long time.

I currently got an old i7 Lenovo w520 laptop with 32GB of RAM, 2 smallish SSDs and a hard disk.

This has been great as hypervisor, but it's getting old and would like more power/capacity/capability etc to run as a 24x7 system at home with a relatively low TDP

Recently I came across a compact system (Minisforum MS-01), which seems to have a ton of features that is more like a powerful workstation than a micro system.

Core i9 13th gen CPU - 14 Core (6P+8E)

2 DDR5 SODIMM slots (people have demonstrated with 2 x 48GB DIMMs)

2 x 10Gbit SFP ports & 2 x 2.5GBit RJ45 ports

2 x 40Gbit USB4 ports

3 x M.2 slots (one can be used for U.2)

1 x half height PCI 8x slot (actually 16x, but will only run at 8x)

And the usual complement of USB ports/HDMI etc

The only downside (for me) of the compact size you can't fit regular hard disks inside, so it's self-contained NAS capability is lacking (attach a JBOD to the USB4 ports and it should work nicely ... at a cost)

It comes out to about $1200   (plus RAM/storage)

For it's capability and performance, is there anything you can compare it to?