[hedgehog]

Minisforum MS-S1 is the same chip but has a PCIe slot suitable for a network card.

[jsheard]

The Framework Desktop motherboard does actually have a PCIe x4 slot, their case just doesn't expose it for whatever reason. But you can buy the board separately and put it in your own choice of Mini-ITX case which does.

[gpff]

This case is cute and well built but it does have strange quirks, see also the noisy PSU [1]

[1] https://community.frame.work/t/noisy-psu-fan/74751

[organsnyder]

First I've heard of this thread (I haven't spent much time on the forums for a while), but my Framework Desktop definitely has the PSU noise issue, and it doesn't seem correlated to system load. Otherwise a really solid machine.

[AmVess]

That PCI slot has low power output, not suitable for what people would plug into it. Easier to cover it than run into support problems. It won't run a GPU directly. It will run an Oculink card which will allow use of an egpu.

[jsheard]

I can't imagine why you'd want to buy a beefy SOC with unified memory, only to have it host a discrete GPU through it's narrow PCIe x4 interface. You'd be better off with a traditional CPU that supports a proper x16 slot.

[coredog64]

If you want to try both "Team Red" and "Team Green" stuff without having 2 hosts to manage, the x4 interface is a reasonable tradeoff.

[hedgehog]

I saw that, it's pretty strange.

[tuukkah]

In their article, AMD chose to use the built-in 5Gbe NIC, but I read you could use the two USB4 @40Gbps ports as interconnects too (or for USB NICs).

[SkyMarshal]

Or a Beelink GTR9 Pro with same chip and memory, and two 10GbE LAN ports built in for clustering several together.

[hedgehog]

The MS-S1 also has 2x 10Gb Ethernet, the value of the slot is going to a card with more bandwidth + RDMA support.

[speed_spread]

You need five network cards per node to make proper hypercube. Don't settle for less!

[LargoLasskhyfv]

A really good switch will do, too.