Is this puny Arm-powered PC with a desktop graphics card slot a glimpse of the future of gaming?
The demise of traditional x86 PC processors in favour of leaner, more efficient Arm chips has been predicted since, well, it seems like forever. For that notion to gain any traction for PC gaming, however, support for discrete graphics cards is needed. Say hello, then, to the Minisforum MS-R1 (via PC Watch), a compact PC with an Arm chip and a full-sized x16 PCIe graphics slot.
Game over for x86? Not so fast. For starters, the Minisforum MS-R1 runs a Cixin P1 CPU. It's a Chinese made chip built on 6 nm technology and configured with eight Cortex A720 performance and four Cortex A520 efficiency cores.
In other words, we're talking off-the-shelf Arm cores first introduced in 2023 and part of Arm's mid-range Cortex A700 range, which is more about efficient mobility than outright performance. Arm's Cortex X900 series and, soon, the C1 Ultra, represent Arm's most performant cores of the moment.
This is also a compact machine. So, even with that full physical x16 graphics slot, you're not going to be fitting an RTX 5090. Even a mid-range GPU probably won't fit.
The slot is also limited to eight PCIe Gen 4 lanes, electrically, which is arguably suboptimal, even if, in reality, that's unlikely to be the bottleneck when it comes to the bandwidth needed for good gaming performance.
Then there's the not-so-minor matter of software support. Gaming on Arm is certainly progressing, at least in part thanks to the arrival of Qualcomm on the scene with its Snapdragon X CPUs for PCs.
But as far as we are aware, neither Nvidia nor AMD make available GPU drivers for Windows on Arm. So, that makes Windows gaming a total nonstarter, for now.
Nvidia definitely provides drivers for the Linux OS running on Arm chips, but any support AMD provides currently looks limited at best. So, right now, you could install an Nvidia GPU and maybe try to run games via a compatibility layer like WINE. And good luck with that.
If and when Nvidia and AMD make Arm drivers available for Windows, you'd then have the option of running games via Windows for Arm's built-in Prism compatibility layer.
As it happens, there's every reason to think Nvidia will soon release Arm drivers for Windows. Nvidia has publicly stated that it is working on its own Arm chip for PCs, known as the N1, and you'd have to assume it will support Windows on Arm.
In theory, those Arm drivers could be used with any Arm CPU in Windows. Of course, this is Nvidia, so it perhaps wouldn't be a huge surprise if the company somehow locked their GPUs down to those upcoming Nvidia Arm chips.
For now, it's all speculation. The Minisforum MS-R1 itself clearly does not have the makings of a gaming PC. But if I'm sitting here in five years or so, fragging away on an Arm PC, this little box will certainly have been a harbinger of things to come.
Pricing and the question of availability outside of Japan is unclear. But if you're super interested, the Minisforum MS-R1 supports up to 64 GB of RAM and M.2 SSDs, and has two USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C ports, two USB 3.2 Gen 2 connectors, a further two USB 2.0 sockets, dual 10 Gb Ethernet, HDMI 2.0, Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth.