Minisforum's MS-S1 MAX-P495 packs 192GB for local AI

Minisforum has opened pre-orders for the MS-S1 MAX-P495, a compact AI workstation built around AMD’s Ryzen AI Max+ PRO 495 and 192GB of unified memory.¹ The machine is listed at $7,399 and is expected to begin shipping in mid-October 2026.¹

The memory is the real upgrade

The workstation pairs 16 Zen 5 CPU cores and 32 threads with Radeon 8065S graphics, a 55 TOPS NPU and up to 160GB of its memory available to the GPU.¹² The official launch presentation also highlights two 10GbE ports, two 80Gbps USB4 v2 connections and Wi-Fi 7.²

Compared with the earlier MS-S1 MAX, the headline CPU changes are modest. The boost clock rises from 5.1GHz to 5.2GHz, while the GPU reaches 3.0GHz and the NPU moves from 50 TOPS to 55 TOPS.¹ The more meaningful change is the jump from 128GB to 192GB of LPDDR5X, with rated memory speed increasing from 8,000 to 8,533 MT/s.¹

That extra capacity is aimed squarely at local AI. Minisforum says one system ran DeepSeek V4 Flash, a 284-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts model, at about 12 tokens per second in Q4 quantisation. Two linked systems reportedly ran Qwen3.5-397B at roughly 16 tokens per second.¹

A costly niche

The MS-S1 MAX-P495 keeps the compact 3.5-litre chassis, 320W power supply, dual-blower cooling and 2U rack support of the previous machine.¹ The $7,399 pre-order price is presented as a discount from a $9,249 list price, putting the new model firmly in workstation territory rather than ordinary mini-PC buying.

The official launch video presents the P495 as a local AI machine for large language models and professional workloads.² That makes the extra memory more relevant than the small CPU uplift: models that simply did not fit in 128GB may now fit in one box, even if performance still depends on memory bandwidth and the number of active parameters.

Our opinion

Minisforum is selling capacity, not a dramatic generational leap. The P495’s appeal is easy to understand for developers and small teams that want to keep large models on-premises for privacy or latency reasons, but most buyers will not see $7,399 as a casual upgrade path.

The important question is whether a single 192GB machine replaces a more expensive multi-box setup. If it does, the P495 has a credible niche. If the workload fits comfortably inside the cheaper 128GB model, the extra memory becomes an expensive insurance policy. That makes this a specialist local-AI workstation, not a general-purpose performance bargain.

The official Minisforum launch video supplies the hero image used here; its thumbnail shows the MS-S1 MAX-P495 and labels it as an AI workstation.²