A PCIe 5.0 x16 slot inside a 4.8-litre mini PC chassis opens the door to discrete GPU gaming, and the Minisforum MS-02 Ultra proves the concept works. YouTuber ETA Prime paired the Intel Core Ultra 9 285HX workstation with Vastarmor's low-profile Radeon RX 9060 XT 16 GB, a dual-slot card measuring just 17.2 cm (6.8 inches) long with a 140W TDP, and the results put it squarely in 1440p gaming territory.
The numbers hold up across modern titles. Forza Horizon 6 ran above 80 FPS at 1440p on "Extreme" settings with no FSR, and Doom: The Dark Ages matched that at "Ultra" without any image upscaling. Cyberpunk 2077 pushed past 130 FPS at 1440p "Ultra" with FSR Frame Generation enabled. More demanding titles like Crimson Desert needed FSR 4.1 "Quality" to maintain 60+ FPS at "Ultra," but that is still a playable result from a machine you could tuck on a bookshelf. Thermals stayed well-controlled throughout testing, with the GPU averaging 61°C (142°F) and the CPU averaging 63°C (145°F), peaking at 69°C (156°F) and 78°C (172°F) respectively.
The MS-02 Ultra is also a strong Linux candidate. Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and CachyOS both installed without issues on the 285HX configuration, with the Intel NPU kernel driver loading automatically and full hardware support out of the box. VT-d and Intel VMX virtualization are enabled at the firmware level, making it a natural fit for Proxmox or container-based home lab setups alongside its gaming role. The one manual step is disabling Secure Boot in BIOS before installing most distributions. One gap to know about: the mainline kernel still has no EDAC driver for the Arrow Lake-HX memory controller, so correctable and uncorrectable ECC error counts do not surface through the usual in-tree tooling. A community out-of-tree driver, edac-arl-hx, fills that hole and has been validated on 285HX systems. For Proxmox specifically, the community-maintained minisforum.ms-02-ultra project documents a PCIe fabric freeze that can occur when certain add-in cards reset mid-session, along with an LnkDisable workaround and boot-hardening scripts aimed at keeping an unattended host stable.
The MS-02 Ultra packs four DDR5 SO-DIMM slots supporting up to 256 GB with ECC, dual 25 GbE SFP+ networking, and an integrated 350W power supply into its compact aluminum chassis. Configurations with the Core Ultra 9 285HX start at $1,160 (€1,070), with a 32 GB RAM and 1 TB SSD bundle running $1,600 (€1,470). The low-profile RX 9060 XT from Vastarmor does not yet have official pricing outside China, though standard RX 9060 XT cards carry an MSRP of $350 (€320).
