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Every Mini PC & SFF Hardware Announced at CES 2026

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I always look forward to the annual announcements at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), with a specific eye toward new hardware platforms and innovations well suited for running VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) in a lab environment. This year is no exception, although acquiring affordable memory may require a few sacrifices given the skyrocketing prices driven by the insatiable demands of AI.

At CES 2026, Intel and AMD introduced their next generation consumer processors, Intel Core Ultra Series 3 (Panther Lake) and AMD Ryzen AI 400 Series (Gorgon Point), which will power many of the newly announced hardware platforms.

Most of the hardware vendors seem to have prioritized LPDDR5 (soldered memory), which offers higher bandwidth for AI workloads but it comes at a premium on top of the exploding prices. I was also hoping to see some announcements for systems supporting the new LPCAMM2 or SOCAMM2 memory standard, which could enable configurations with up to 256GB of memory. I suspect due to the supply chain constraint and overall costs, such platforms may only be reserved for AI focused systems in the future.

Whether you are refreshing a home lab, looking for an ideal AI platform for exploration, new gaming rig or general curiosity, I have compiled a comprehensive list of all the new Mini PCs and Small Form Factor (SFF) systems that should be arriving in 2026.

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Disable HTTP Range Requests on Synology WebStation, Apache or Nginx

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I use my Synology NAS to host a variety of services including a web server, file server and a backup system. As part of some testing that I had been performing, I needed to ensure that my web server does not respond to HTTP Range Requests, which allow clients to retrieve specific byte ranges rather than downloading an entire resource in a single transfer.

We can check whether a web server supports HTTP Range Requests by specifying a range of bytes as demonstrated in this cURL example below:

curl -H "Range: bytes=0-10" -I http://depot.vcf.lab/PROD/vsan/hcl/lastupdatedtime.json -u $CREDS


You should receive an HTTP 206 response which indicates HTTP Range Requests is supported by your web server, which my Synology supports by default.

Unlike a traditional web server where disabling HTTP Range Requests is pretty straightforward, modifying the default behavior for Synology WebStation is slightly more complicated. After some trial and error, I was able to successfully disable HTTP Range Requests on my Synology system, and for those with a similar requirement, the following sections outline the steps for several popular web server backends.

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Quick Tip - Improving thermals on Minisforum MS-A2

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If you own a Minisforums MS-A2, you may have noticed that the system can run quite warm under load. I certainly have been putting my MS-A2 to work by running VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 and I have been trying various experiments in seeing how I can reduce both the thermals and thus the fan noise, which can get quite loud.

Even after applying the latest 1.0.2 MS-A2 Firmware, which now allows users to control the fan speeds, it did not help as the system was still running too hot. With extensive searching online, I was about to throw in the towel and thats when I came across Chris West's wiki page regarding a temperature fix and his extensive research on his MS-A2 (9955HX).

While Chris's MS-A2 is using the newer AMD Zen 5 processor, I figured it probably would apply to my MS-A2 (7945HX), which has the older AMD Zen 4 processor. I have used the workaround provided by Chris, please see his blog post for full details but by modifying the the TjMAX value from 0 to 78 (Advanced->AMD CBS->SMU Common Options->TjMAX), I have found that my MS-A2 have not been as warm as they were in the beginning.

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