Four Ethernet ports, including dual 10 Gigabit SFP+ fiber connections driven by an Intel X710 adapter, made the original Minisforum MS-01 a fixture in homelab racks running Proxmox and TrueNAS. The MS-03 keeps that networking formula intact and pushes everything else forward: Intel Panther Lake-H processors at a 70 W TDP, up to 128 GB of DDR5 at 7,200 MT/s, three M.2 2280 NVMe slots upgraded to PCIe 5.0, a physical PCIe x16 slot for low-profile expansion cards, dual USB4, and WiFi 7. The chassis measures 195 x 195 x 42.5 mm (7.7 x 7.7 x 1.7 in), roughly the same footprint as its predecessor, with a blower-style cooler and three heatpipes accessible through a tool-free slide-out tray.
Two Panther Lake SKUs appear on regional store pages: the Core Ultra 5 336H and the Core Ultra 9 386H, both built on the 4P+8E+4LPE core layout with four Xe3 graphics cores and an NPU rated at 50 TOPS. On the wired side, the MS-03 supplements its dual SFP+ ports with a 10 Gigabit and a 2.5 Gigabit RJ45 connection, giving builders plenty of room to segment management, storage, and VM traffic without an add-in card. For anyone running the box as a compact virtualization host or a local LLM inference node, the combination of high-bandwidth networking, triple NVMe, and a PCIe x16 slot is hard to match at this size.
Linux readiness for Panther Lake is in solid shape. The upstream kernel has been absorbing Intel Xe3 graphics firmware, idle-state tuning, and platform driver patches for months, with Linux 7.1 enabling FRED by default on Panther Lake for lower-latency interrupt handling. Distros shipping a 7.0 or later kernel should handle the iGPU, power management, and audio out of the box, which matters for a machine likely to run headless under Proxmox or as a bare-metal Docker host. The 50 TOPS NPU is also reachable from Linux: on Minisforum's M2, another Panther Lake-H system already in users' hands, LinuxLinks documented the intel_vpu driver loading its firmware and OpenVINO reporting both CPU and NPU as available inference backends once the user-space stack is installed.
Minisforum has not confirmed pricing or a firm ship date, though the MS-03 was shown at Computex 2026 in June and regional store pages are live with a $50 (€46) coupon for early subscribers.
