THE CRUNCH
Minisforum has opened pre-orders for the MS-S1 MAX-P495, a compact workstation built around AMD's Ryzen AI Max+ PRO 495 and pitched at running large AI models locally. The headline change over the earlier MS-S1 MAX is memory: unified memory rises from 128GB to 192GB, and the maximum allocatable VRAM from 96GB to 160GB, enlarging the shared CPU-GPU pool that determines how big a model one box can hold.
The Ryzen AI Max+ PRO 495 uses AMD's Zen 5 architecture with 16 cores, 32 threads, clocks up to 5.2GHz, integrated Radeon 8065S Graphics and a claimed 55 TOPS from its NPU, or 131 TOPS of total AI compute. In vendor testing, the company says a single unit ran the 284B-parameter DeepSeek V4 Flash model at Q4 quantisation at roughly 12 tokens per second.
Scaling beyond one machine is part of the pitch. Two units can be clustered to run Qwen3.5-397B locally at around 16 tok/s, and a four-system configuration reportedly ran DeepSeek-R1 671B in Q4, a model weighing about 380GB. Multiple units can also be linked in 2U rack deployment for enterprise or research setups.
The launch configuration pairs the 192GB of memory with a 2TB SSD and is priced at US$9,249, or US$7,399 with a 20% pre-order discount. Shipping is expected to begin in mid-October. Note that the performance figures come from Minisforum's own press material rather than independent testing.