Minisforum N5 Pro hardware monitoring under Linux

[Enquiries]

Since there was a recent review of this hardware by NASCompares I am emailing you, to have some community exposure, and possibly some pressure put on Minisforum to update the BIOS (and/or provide specs) for this platform to help expose monitoring for the fans and temps under Linux.
My preliminary investigation involving Unraid and CachyOS, dumping the EC RAM and looking for values corresponding to temps and PWM values proved unsuccessful. All expected values seem to be zeroes.

The controller appears to be an ITE 5571.
Some efforts on this specific controller are tracked here:
https://github.com/frankcrawford/it87/issues/8
https://github.com/lm-sensors/lm-sensors/issues/400

[ed]

Thanks for reaching out and for sharing your findings. That’s a very relevant issue with the Minisforum N5 Pro, and you’re right — right now there’s no proper sensor exposure under Linux due to the closed nature of its embedded controller and missing EC mappings in the BIOS. Even though the fans and thermals are well managed at the firmware level, it’s frustrating that users can’t read those values from lm-sensors or similar tools.

Your notes on the ITE5571 controller and the linked GitHub threads are spot on. We’ve also seen similar reports from users running Unraid and Proxmox where all the thermal and PWM registers return zero. I’ll make sure to raise this with Minisforum’s product and engineering contacts since this clearly needs a BIOS update or at least a proper ACPI table description so Linux can read those values.

In the meantime, the only partial workaround is using sensors-detect in debug mode combined with direct ACPI probing, though results remain unreliable.