BH
Ridiculously capable little machine — especially for local AI experimentation
I bought the MS-S1 because I wanted a compact machine that could do more than the normal mini-PC stuff. I specifically wanted something I could use as a serious local AI lab — running large models, experimenting with agents, vector databases, observability tooling, Docker, Linux, and development workloads — without building a giant desktop tower. It is a very capable little machine. I’m running Ubuntu on it with ROCm, Ollama, llama.cpp, Open WebUI, Qdrant, Langfuse, Docker, and a bunch of supporting services. I’ve been able to run models that would have sounded absurd on a small PC not that long ago, including a 27B dense model and much larger mixture-of-experts models. The unified memory architecture is the real story here. Having 128 GB available changes what is practical locally in a pretty fundamental way. Performance has also been genuinely good. The bigger coding model I’ve been testing can generate at roughly 50 tokens/sec in my setup, which is fast enough that it feels interactive rather than like an experiment you tolerate because it is local. I also really like the flexibility of the machine. I have it dual booting Windows and Ubuntu, with a large shared partition for AI models and other assets. Linux has become my primary environment for the AI work, but I can still boot back into Windows when I want LM Studio or other Windows tooling. There are some caveats. This is still fairly new hardware, so if you are doing more unusual Linux/ROCm work, expect to learn a few things and occasionally troubleshoot. It is not quite the frictionless experience of buying a conventional NVIDIA desktop and following years of existing tutorials. But for me that has actually been part of the appeal — I wanted a machine I could learn on. What has surprised me most is that the MS-S1 doesn’t really feel like a “mini PC” once you start using it. It feels more like a compact workstation that happens to be sitting quietly on the desk. If your goal is web browsing and Office, this i