I bought 5 Minisforum Mini PCs (returned all of them, they were all bad) and this was the first Mini PC I got that I'm happy with! The quiet fan, the great temps, and the performance! Soooooooo great.
@@okitom it was the beelink mini s series. I only use a computer for email, movies, RU-vid and some retroarch. It was cheap it was super easy to get in and add a HDD. I've had zero issues. Came with win 11.
It's getting very close now for me being able to switch from a full PC build to one of these mini PC's. The next generation of on board graphics should do it. Would consider laptop if it weren't for the noise.
I badly want to because I like the idea of downsizing and I'm at a point in life where system building isn't as fun or appealing anymore. I'm just not ready to take the graphics and performance hit. Nobody talks about the tiny L3 cache on these chips and the GPU is unfeasible for me at 4k. I think it will actually take years to get anywhere close to acceptable for me around this price range.
Hey, I hardly ever comment here. But I've watched a number of 'here's a selection of emulation handhelds to pick from based on your needs.' I was wondering if there might be a similar video for these mini PCs or light PC gaming options, for better information on picking the right PC device for you. Similar to the spreadsheet, but a video format for covering the specifics?
Im liking the switch up of the mini pcs and the break from handhelds. I bought my first retro device because of you back in 2021. Now, you’ll prob convince me to purchase a mini pc haha Thanks for your dedication brother 😎.
I just bought one of these because of your review. Thanks Russ! I’m sure you have a few guides on your page which we’ll give me all I need to get it set up. You’re the best. Thanks for all you do for this community!
I have a different mini pc but with the same chipset. I decided to put batocera on it and love it. Now I'm waiting for a new generation of Mini PC's with radeon 890m (which is more or less like the mobile version of nvidia's 1070). This one has 780m which is something like 1650 or I've heard.
Not as powerful as a 1070 Mobile. Time spy scores are different. 890M = 4221 Points 1070 Mobile = 5707 Points Still a great result. It's better than a 1060 Mobile (3909 pts) and really close to a desktop 1060 (4355 pts)
I'd rather lose 1 usb4 port in exchange for an oculink port...I'm not sure why all these new pc's with newer chipsets refuse to include an oculink port. That should be standard these days...especially when more pc makers are making external gpu's to take advantage of it... I've been holding out in upgrading my beelink ser4 to see how many mini pc's come out with an oculink port included and so far I've only seen 2 in over a year...by the looks of it I'll be getting the minisforum um780 xtx which at this point I can get for less than $400. (Barebones)
Careful with Beelink. Had a few mini-pc's for an office that both quit working. When I went to troubleshooting I found out that each Beelink pc OS is a copied OS. A clone. Good luck getting it to work again if you have significant OS issues.
@commenter6441 I was sent a link to reinstall Windows OS from Beelink, and after installing and running into numerous failures and BSOD I quit trying. The Beelink tech team didn't even have any solid info to pass on.
Looks cool, i' be interested in such a small yet capable PC, but you got me even more curious about the...strickspoint PCs??? Never heard of those, can you share links so I may learn more? Thanks for vid!
Seems really nice. For the foreseeable future though, I'm sticking to cheap models like N100 or N97. Even at that budget level, it's still a significant upgrade from what I've been using.
It would be nice if they would use USB-C for powering such devices as you might be able to use monitors with USB-C A/V + PD like a Lenovo ThinkVision p27h, which you can even daisy-chain multiple ones together, making your setup look really clean. The Cinebench 2024 score is higher than that of Desktop Ryzen 7 5800X CPUs. That's crazy even though it doesn't mean that the mobile chip is faster in all scenarios. PS: You have been using the same piece of butter in all you videos? How gross, it must be really moldy and smelly by now! ;)
The HX99G is better performance by quite a bit thanks to its dedicated GPU, especially with PC games, provided you are good with its larger size and price!
God of War (2018) is poorly optimized for 60 fps. With my SER6, I can maintain 30 fps well with good settings. But I would have to make the game look like trash to target 60 fps. I am surprised they didn't patch in FSR frame generation. Spiderman on my SER6 looks and runs amazing in comparison.
When throwing to your buddy "The Phawx", instead of "if you get one and you wanna take it further" say "if you're interested in how far this thing can go". Make the call to action apply to everyone, not just buyers.
No company is perfect, but Beelink is a "Name Brand" in the world of mini PCs. I've got 2 old ones that are at least 6 years old. One I put Chrome OS on. The other I still use occasionaly with windows on it. For me, everything else compares to this brand because of their brand longevity as opposed to some fly by night.
Agreed fully. I have been using a Beelink U57 off-and-on since August 2020 along with an 2019 Alienware R8 and I have decided to go with a SER8 to replace both.
I have this on Pop!_OS running the COSMIC desktop with a 4K 144 Hz display next to a 4K 60 Hz display rotated vertically. This gets 500-600K PPD in Folding@Home. Either 500K PPD doing only CPU folding, or 350K + 250K when doing CPU + iGPU folding. In World Community Grid, this can complete 16 MCM work units every 1h13m. All while remaining silent and never exceeding 75C. Very good results for a 54W cTDP.
I bought one already and a intel ax210 WiFi card because I've seen a lot complaints about the WiFi performance. It costs about €460 in China for the 32G/1T version.
Crazy how small, quiet yet powerful those PCs got. If I had an external monitor I would consider one instead of changing my laptop ( integrated graphics, plays many games ).
Man I’m so used to play in 4K with my consoles that paying so much money to barely play in 1080p pc games is beyond me, I’ll do this for sure for retro games. Any advice on a mini pc that can handle all emulation at 4K? How about the Acemagic R7 8845HS? It was unfortunately not in your sheet.
Why is your performance so low with the 8845HS? Other reviewers are playing games like Cyberpunk at Medium settings 1080p. Are you doing an ETA Prime and running power on Balanced to make it look bad? Also calling GTA 5, GTA 3 is worthy of a smack
Bee link provides a pretty nice offering in a mini pc format. they'd be SOOOO much better if the price of DDR5 ram came down as it would be nice to have them ship with full 64gb of ram hopefully that happens this year, or next as whle 32gb is a lot windows and browswers are massive ram hogs if you use lots of tabs. I am hoping that access will stay stable to products coming from China. I am eagerly waiting to see if they have any offerings on black friday. The Ser7 Pro I got was enough to have a positive view of this brand as it is approaching a year now since I became interested in the minipcs. Only thing I wish I had the answer for was an easy way to get a firewire port or hub attached to it, or more PCIE slots ie easy cable way to hook up a few PCIE things. I think the second hardrive space can be used and maybe the usb4 slot but thereis only one of both so the io is rough if wanting to do stuff for music with it but with some hubs this thing is able to connect a lot to it. The other frustration is windows 11 efficiency mode which seems to engage due to microsoft trying to "save power" this is already like 40-60watt system so its sort of frustrating to have process suspended due to microsoft windows attempt to reducing energy consumption, its just a little silly on a low power system like the ser 7. The Ser 8 looks even better. I'm a little confused iwth the USB 2.0 ports though I thought all the ports were USB 3.1 or usb 4???? IMO this is one thing that makes it hard is if the usb ports are all non marked or differnetiated when you have a specific USB generation requirement it can be hard to find the port you are looking for unless you have a port diagram like at 4:20
see only 1 downside. I have a Beelink Ser5 and still working great but I want to upgrade it... thought about the beelink ser8... but... the downside is that I can't put a HDD, which I have in my Ser5. In the cover you were able to put in an extra 1TB or 2TB HDD harddrive, just for additional storage. I see that's not possible anymore. Only 2 SDDs
If you're not using your PC for intensive gaming, video editing, heavy software development, CAD, 3D animation, etc (at which point you probably know what you need) you can pick up old thin clients for very cheap. If you're going to use Windows, make sure the CPU supports Windows 11, and make sure it has a wifi chip if you need it. Some companies used ethernet exclusively so never ordered wifi. They can be like less than $100 for a 8GB ram (usually upgradable) quad core i5 cpu from like 4-5 years ago and 250GB SSD which is often upgradable. This is plenty for retro gaming, basic HTPC, or just allround family PC use. Also great as experimental home servers as they really do not use a lot of power. They would be experimental servers in the sense that they do not typically have server RAM or support RAID which you would want if you really really on uptime and improved reliability for a business, but I think they are plenty if you're just using it as a Plex server or even a home nas that you backup from time to time. Also some of these do not have HDMI, but they will have DisplayPort which you can convert to HDMI with a cheap converter.
Estoy entre estos dos minipc -Beelink SER8 AMD Ryzen™ 7 8845HS MINI PC 8 Cores/16 Threads Frequency up to 5.1GHz -Beelink SER7 7840HS AMD Ryzen™ 7 7840HS 65W TDP 8 Cores/16 Threads, 5.1GHz Cual me recomiendas actualmente por rendimiento y precio.
Is the cooling really great? Can't see much space for airflow to go from from the SSD/ram side to the underneath cpu side And power usage seems all over the place, PS2 GoW2 at 4x take > 40W?😂 Is there some driver/bios issue affecting the power management?
With any 780M chips. Run the games at 720p with lowest settings or mix and match. Call it a day. You'll have a great time with any game you throw at it.
@@bullymaguire243 Not if you have a highly quality display it isn't. Speak for yourself. I play at 720p on a 70 in. tv and looks clean and crispy. Maybe it's time you upgrade your monitor or something.
@unknown183 You mentioned that above, but 720p is 720p, unless upscaled. I run everything from old CRTs to new large flat panels. There's only so much any display can do with a 720p signal. I'm happy with 1080p 60 Hz streamed from the desktop, but many are not. What 70 is it?
29:32 Do not assume this. Amd mixes in older generation chips as well. AMD’s naming is awful, so it’s not your fault. Theirs cpus based of 3 generations old architecture (“ryzen +”2018 with much worse graphics processors ) in some yen 7000 chips. Specially the more budget based CPU’s. You may accidentally cause someone to buy some thing that’s a piece of crap, someone that doesn’t know better.
I'm wondering if this would run things like Teknoparrot... I'm currently trying to build an arcade racing rig, for classic games like Hydro Thunder, H2Overdrive, Mario Kart DX and so on... would it run those games at full beans?
