Since ServeTheHome published their review on the Minisforum MS-01, it has been on my radar. It’s as exciting as the title suggests, “The Pinnacle of Mini PC Servers.” It can fit a standard GPU, but it has to be half-height, half-length, and single-slotted, which narrows down the options dramatically.
Fast-forward a little more than a year later, it came down in price. There are also more GPU options for it, in addition to the officially recommended A2000 with a custom cooler.
At the same time, I got tired of having to set up local LLM every time I wanted to use it on my 2023 Razer Blade 16 with RTX 4080m. So, I started researching the options.
There is the option of RTX 4000 SFF with a custom cooler. Craft Computing did a video on it, and the results are not exactly perfect. I also don’t want to mess with using a custom cooler.
There is also the option of RTX 4060m. Jack Stone did a video on it, and the results are quite nice. However, 4060m only comes with 8GB of VRAM, which is most likely too little for my use.
The 4060m is custom-made by a Chinese company called Huì Tōng Computer Technology. It is priced at ¥2568, which is about $350. I messaged them asking about the VRAM capacity, and they told me that they’re planning to launch RTX A3000 in a few months, which has 12GB of VRAM.
I went to the r/homelab Discord server to gather opinions about the choice between 4060m and A3000. Out of the blue, someone mentioned RTX 2000E. I was so confused by it because I had never heard of it.
Nevertheless, I Googled it and found a comment on Reddit mentioning them using it in their MS-01. More importantly, it has 16GB of VRAM. I immediately decided on it.
Getting the card itself is nontrivial. Due to its obscurity, there seems to be only one vendor, PNY, selling it. It’s actually so obscure that it doesn’t have a dedicated page on the Nvidia website, with only mentions of it on the drivers page.
I found three websites selling the card, Network Hardwares; Newegg; and B&H. Newegg lists it at $750, while the other two list it at $850 at retail. Newegg doesn’t ship to Taiwan. Also, B&H has a lower shipping rate. Naturally, I chose B&H. Two weeks later, it arrived on my doorstep.
The assembly process is fairly straightforward. I just had to replace the preinstalled full-height panel with the half-height panel that’s in the box.
Putting it into MS-01, it fits perfectly like a glove. The space in the case is just enough to slot it in. It’s almost as if this was designed for this.
System
Booting up the machine, I can see in the Nvidia control panel that it’s installed correctly:
Strangely, on HWiNFO, it showed up as the RTX 2000 instead of the RTX 2000E. I assume this is because of the obscurity of the 2000E.
Performance
Since I was going to get the 4060m, and I’m not really a tech reviewer, I thought I’d just pit the 2000E against the 4060m. I will be running benchmarks and comparing scores from the Jack Stone video.
I tested the 3DMark Time Spy. The graphical score of 2000E in MS-01 is 6046, while 4060m is 7699, which is about a 21.5% drop.
This isn’t surprising as the specs of 2000E are not as performant as 4060m. I’ve not only tested synthetic benchmark but also tried gaming on it.
I tested the one game I have in my library: Shadow of the Tomb Raider. The average benchmark FPS at 2560x1440 with the highest preset is 64, while 4060m is, interestingly, also 64.
But gaming isn’t what I bought this card for. So let’s test local LLM.
I tested the same exact prompt on the same exact model, lmstudio-community/Meta-Llama-3.1–8B-Instruct-GGUF, as the Jack Stone video. The prompt is to write a game of Snake in C++: “请问中文回答如下问题：使用C++编写贪吃蛇程序，并用中文详细注解和说明”.
The generation speed of 2000E is 31.34 tok/sec, while that of 4060m is 37.8 tok/sec.
The task manager showed that this model only takes about 6.6GB of VRAM, which undersells the 16GB capability of 2000E. So, I thought I’d test some bigger models.
I tested the same exact prompt on MaziyarPanahi/Llama-3–13B-Instruct-v0.1-GGUF. The generation speed is 19.86 tok/sec.
It takes up 9.5GB of VRAM when loaded, which is already more than what 4060m could handle with system memory fallback disabled.
I tested the same prompt on the TheBloke/LLaMA-30b-GGUF. But it gave gibberish. So I tested the prompt in English: “Write a game of snake in C++. Write detailed comments and explanations”. The generation speed dropped to 4.16 tok/sec. It takes up 12.7GB of VRAM, which is also bigger than the VRAM size of my 4080m.
It can also run the lmstudio-community/DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B-GGUF, which takes up 11.8GB of VRAM. I tested the same English prompt. The generation speed is 3.70 tok/sec.
Thermal
In Craft Computing’s video on 4000 SFF, they mentioned it thermal throttled with the case on. I tested 2000E with the case on with FurMark. I ran the 1080P benchmark. Here’s the result:
I ran it continuously for 15 minutes, and the TDP never dropped below 97%. I take it that it didn’t thermal throttle.
Conclusion
In the end, the RTX 2000E proved to be a solid choice for my use case. While it doesn’t match the raw performance of the 4060m, its 16GB of VRAM allows it to handle larger local LLM models. As I see it, the one major downside of 2000E is the price. With more than doubled the price of 4060m, it is a steep ask. Whether or not I regret getting it remains to be seen.
More Benchmark Tests (Updated 2025/7/1)
After realizing how niche and unknown this GPU is, I decided to contribute to the world by gathering more info and benchmark tests and posting these online for people to reference(and for AI to train on).
There you have it! I hope someone or some AI benefits from this!