Is This Puny Arm-powered PC With A Desktop Graphics Card Slot A...

The demise of traditional x86 PC processors in favour of leaner, more efficient Arm chips has been predicted since, well, it seems like forever. For that notion to gain any traction for PC gaming, however, support for discrete graphics cards is needed. Say hello, then, to the Minisforum MS-R1 (via PC Watch), a compact PC with an Arm chip and a full-sized x16 PCIe graphics slot.

Game over for x86? Not so fast. For starters, the Minisforum MS-R1 runs a Cixin P1 CPU. It's a Chinese made chip built on 6 nm technology and configured with eight Cortex A720 performance and four Cortex A520 efficiency cores.

In other words, we're talking off-the-shelf Arm cores first introduced in 2023 and part of Arm's mid-range Cortex A700 range, which is more about efficient mobility than outright performance. Arm's Cortex X900 series and, soon, the C1 Ultra, represent Arm's most performant cores of the moment.

This is also a compact machine. So, even with that full physical x16 graphics slot, you're not going to be fitting an RTX 5090. Even a mid-range GPU probably won't fit.

The slot is also limited to eight PCIe Gen 4 lanes, electrically, which is arguably suboptimal, even if, in reality, that's unlikely to be the bottleneck when it comes to the bandwidth needed for good gaming performance.

Then there's the not-so-minor matter of software support. Gaming on Arm is certainly progressing, at least in part thanks to the arrival of Qualcomm on the scene with its Snapdragon X CPUs for PCs.

But as far as we are aware, neither Nvidia nor AMD make available GPU drivers for Windows on Arm. So, that makes Windows gaming a total nonstarter, for now.

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Nvidia definitely provides drivers for the Linux OS running on Arm chips, but any support AMD provides currently looks limited at best. So, right now, you could install an Nvidia GPU and maybe try to run games via a compatibility layer like WINE. And good luck with that.

If and when Nvidia and AMD make Arm drivers available for Windows, you'd then have the option of running games via Windows for Arm's built-in Prism compatibility layer.

Source: PC Gamer