For sale: a Milk-V Pioneer Box — one of the most powerful RISC-V desktop machines you can buy. This is the unit I backed on Crowd Supply during the original crowdfunding campaign. It arrived in January 2024 and has been used very little since. No known issues; it works exactly as it should.

It is a complete, ready-to-use RISC-V PC in a standard mATX-class enclosure — not a single-board computer. If you want a real RISC-V workstation for native builds, distro porting, compiler and toolchain work, or CI, this is the machine.

Why it’s interesting

The Pioneer is built around the SOPHON SG2042, a 64-core RISC-V system chip. That makes it the most capable RISC-V desktop available, and a genuinely useful platform for working on the RISC-V ecosystem rather than just running it. It boots via UEFI and runs Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, openKylin and other RISC-V distributions.

The Milk-V Pioneer page has the full board documentation; the highlights below are what matter for a working machine.

The chip — SOPHON SG2042

  • 64 × T-Head C920 RISC-V cores, up to 2 GHz
  • RVV 0.71 vector extension
  • L1: 64 KB I + 64 KB D per core · L2: 1 MB per cluster · 64 MB system L3 cache
  • 4-channel DDR4-3200, ECC RDIMM / UDIMM / SODIMM
  • 2 × PCIe Gen4 x16 with CCIX support
  • Typical power consumption around 120 W (cooler rated to 160 W TDP)

What’s in the box

The Pioneer Box is the fully assembled, ready-to-run configuration:

Component Specification
Board Milk-V Pioneer (SOPHON SG2042), mATX
CPU 64-core RISC-V (C920), up to 2 GHz, RVV 0.71
Memory 128 GB DDR4-3200 (4 × DIMM)
Storage 1 TB PCIe 3.0 NVMe SSD
Networking 2 × 2.5 GbE on board + Intel X540-T2 (2 × 10 GbE) — 4 Ethernet ports total
Graphics AMD Radeon R5 230 (HDMI, DVI, VGA)
USB 9 × USB 3.0 Type-A (8 rear, 1 front)
Front panel Power button, USB 3.0, and a USB-C serial console for firmware/boot debugging
Expansion 5 × SATA, 2 × M.2 M-key, PCIe slots, microSD slot
Power MSI A350 350 W PSU
Cooling Tower cooler with PWM fan (up to 2300 RPM, 160 W TDP)
Case White compact Pioneer Box enclosure with a carry handle

A look at it

Pioneer Box Pioneer Box Pioneer Box Pioneer Box Pioneer Box Pioneer Box Pioneer Box Pioneer Box Pioneer Box Pioneer Box

Condition

Used, but barely. Backed through the Crowd Supply crowdfunding round, delivered January 2024, and hardly used since. No known faults — it boots and runs as expected. Currently installed OS is Fedora 38 Workstation.

The crowdfunding order

This unit was backed during the original Crowd Supply campaign. The order confirmation and shipping emails from the campaign are shown below.

Crowd Supply order confirmation email Crowd Supply shipping email Crowd Supply delivery email

Price & shipping

  • US$1,300 (≈ C$1,800) or nearest offer
  • PayPal G&S or cash on pickup
  • Vancouver, Canada — ships domestically or internationally at buyer’s cost, or local pickup

These are very rare. If you’re interested, or want more photos or a specific benchmark, get in touch.

Board documentation and full specifications: milkv.io/pioneer.