If it helps, over at the ServeTheHome forums there's a huge thread of people trying various PCIE cards and such. Not sure what's the policy here is for the links to other website, but if anyone wants to look for it, it's called "Minisforum MS-01 PCIe Card and RAM Compatibility Thread"
Waiting for my order, but those efficient-cores still confuse me. :-).
People running ESXi on it, do you run it with efficient cores enabled or disabled.ย Any crashes except for the expected psod when running it with those cores enabled?ย
Regarding the hybrid cores, Craft Computing released two videos about the subject. In the first video, performance was "mixed bag" but the second video was a more thorough deep dive and in a situation where your hypervisor supports it, performance is very promising.ย
The TL;DW observation: In his testing, Proxmox v8+ using the Linux v6.5+ kernel did an amazing job putting tasks onto cores suited for the workloads demanded by the VMs. He did tests between Bare metal, CPU affinity (pinning VMs to P-Cores and E-Cores) and fully automatic, letting Proxmox handle choosing the best core. Hands down, Proxmox handling them automatically was faster than disabling the E-Cores or attempting manual CPU affinity settings for a VM.ย
Personally, I see the Minisforum MS-01 as a great "tiny-mini-micro" with a lot more flexibility than some of the 1L PCs on the used market and a cheaper option than buying equivalent spec 1L PCs brand new.ย