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The MS-03 is a compact mini workstation built around Intel Core Ultra 9 386H or Ultra 5 336H processors with vPro remote management. Its standout feature is networking: two 10GbE SFP+ ports plus a 10GbE RJ45 port on one board, so copper and fiber 10-gigabit links work without external transceivers, unlike the MS-01 and MS-A2. It also offers two PCIe 5.0 M.2 slots, a half-height PCIe expansion slot, dual DDR5 SO-DIMMs up to 128GB, and a 50 TOPS NPU on the 386H. It suits homelab and virtualization users, network engineers, and small offices that want server-class I/O in a 1.4 kg box. Rivals in this size class rarely combine fiber and copper 10GbE with PCIe 5.0 storage and a PCIe slot, though the single PCIe 4.0 x1 M.2 slot and 240W external brick are trade-offs.
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Lowest price we've seen: $759.00 on Nov 9 at Best Buy. Tracked across 4 stores since Nov 9.
The MINISFORUM MS-03 is a mini workstation available in two configurations: the MS-03-S386H with an Intel Core Ultra 9 386H providing 16 cores and 16 threads at 1.6 to 4.9 GHz with PL1 at 70W and PL2 at 80W in Balance mode, and the MS-03-S336H with an Intel Core Ultra 5 336H providing 12 cores and 12 threads at 1.5 to 4.6 GHz at 65W. Both processors carry Intel vPro for BIOS-level remote management. The MS-03 combines four network interfaces including two 10 Gigabit SFP+ ports and one 10 Gigabit RJ45 port, PCIe 5.0 storage, a half-height PCIe expansion slot, and a 50 TOPS NPU on the 386H, in a 196 × 189 × 48 mm chassis weighing 1.4 kg. It is the first MINISFORUM workstation in this form factor to carry both copper and fibre 10 Gigabit networking on the same board, which removes the transceiver requirement that applies to the MS-01 and MS-A2.
The MS-03 uses two DDR5 SO-DIMM slots supporting up to 128GB of memory, with factory configurations at 32GB and 64GB and supported speeds of 5600, 6400, and 7200 MT/s. Storage is where the MS-03 differs most from earlier models sharing this chassis: two of its M.2 slots run at PCIe 5.0 x4 rather than PCIe 4.0, supporting drives up to 8TB each, with one accepting 2280 drives and one accepting 2280 or 22110 lengths. A third M.2 2280 or 22110 slot runs at PCIe 4.0 x1, also supporting up to 8TB. U.2 enterprise SSDs up to 15TB are supported through an adapter. PCIe 5.0 doubles the per-drive bandwidth ceiling over PCIe 4.0, which matters for storage arrays, database workloads, and video ingest where a single NVMe drive would otherwise become the bottleneck before the network or the CPU does. The 22110 slot length also accommodates the longer enterprise drives that many datacentre NVMe models ship in.
The MS-03 carries four network interfaces: one 10 Gigabit RJ45 port using a Realtek RTL8127 controller, one 2.5 Gigabit RJ45 port using an Intel i226-LM controller with vPro support, and two 10 Gigabit SFP+ ports using an Intel X710 controller. Having both copper 10GBASE-T and SFP+ on the same system means it can connect directly to a copper 10GbE switch with no transceiver while still supporting fibre or DAC connections to a separate storage network, a combination the MS-01 and MS-A2 do not offer and which removes a common reason to add a PCIe network card. A half-height PCIe x16 slot with PCIe 4.0 x4 bandwidth accepts cards up to 170 mm long and 20 mm thick, leaving that slot free for a storage controller or accelerator instead. Wireless is Wi-Fi 7 via an Intel BE211 module with Bluetooth 6, and vPro on the 2.5GbE interface allows out-of-band management even when the operating system is unresponsive.
Graphics on the MS-03-S386H run at 2.5 GHz and deliver 40 TOPS Int8, with a separate NPU rated at 50 TOPS Int8; the MS-03-S336H runs at 2.3 GHz with 37 TOPS on the GPU and 47 TOPS on the NPU. Both configurations exceed the 40 TOPS Copilot+ threshold on the NPU alone, which is unusual for a system in the homelab and networking category and means local AI inference can run alongside the machine's primary workload. The front panel carries one USB 3.2 Gen2 Type-A port, two USB 2.0 Type-A ports, and a 3.5mm combo jack. The rear adds two USB 3.2 Gen2 Type-A ports, two USB4 Type-C ports at 40Gbps with DisplayPort 2.1 Alt Mode, one HDMI 2.1 port at 4K 120Hz, and all four network ports. Cooling uses dual heat pipes, phase change material, and an 83 × 18 mm turbo fan running at up to 5100 RPM. Power comes from a 240W external adapter at 19V/12.63A, and the system ships with Windows 11 Pro.
Common use cases for the MINISFORUM MS-03 include Proxmox and Linux virtualization nodes with vPro remote management, pfSense and OPNsense firewall appliances using four segmented network interfaces, TrueNAS and Ceph storage nodes where PCIe 5.0 NVMe and dual 10GbE SFP+ remove the usual bottlenecks, mixed-network deployments needing both copper 10GBASE-T and fibre on one device, Kubernetes lab clusters, Plex and Jellyfin media servers with hardware transcoding, and edge nodes running local AI inference on the 50 TOPS NPU alongside their primary workload. Buyers typically choose the MS-03 over the MS-01 for PCIe 5.0 storage, a copper 10GbE port in addition to the SFP+ pair, Wi-Fi 7, and a Copilot+ class NPU, accepting 16 threads against the MS-01's 20. Buyers needing more than two memory slots, ECC support, 25 Gigabit networking, or a full-length discrete GPU should look at the MS-02 Ultra instead, which trades this chassis size for far greater expansion.
