this here is the beelink ser4 this is a windows 11 pro mini pc powered by an amd apu it has the
ryzen 7 4 800 u it's an 8 core cpu with 16 threads maximum turbo is 4.2 gigahertz this configuration
that they sent out to me has an ample 32 gigabytes of ram 512 gigabytes of pcie 3.0 storage
and even though it is small you can install an additional 2.5 inch drive into this to expand upon
your storage it can run three 4k 60 monitors it has plenty of usb ports on it gigabit lan
and very fast wi-fi 6e included in the box with the ser4 we have a user manual a hdmi cable that's
a normal sized one a very short one for when you visa mount it on the back of a tv or a monitor
that's the bracket for that we have some screws for a 2.5 inch drive and the mounting bracket
and then our power supply now this is rated to 57 watts this mini pc has an excellent build quality
to it and it's very small and compact so we have alloy that is painted around the outside here
this front bit is a little bit reflective as you can see and that's made out of plastic so we've
got a power on button with status led a combo 3.5 millimeter headphone jack this type c port is usb
3.1 with display out so it's 4k 60 2 usb 3s and a clear cmos then the back of it well up the top
this is where the vent is so all the hot air is going to be pushed out the back of this so
important to not block that two hdmi 2.0 here so they are both 4k 60 a dc in there and another two
uh sorry one usb 3 and then one usb 2.0 port here and gigabit lan on the left and the right of
it we have this red vent then the top of the mini pc here so this is a mesh over the top the fan's
below so the fresh air is sucked in directly from here blowing out the back now there's a sticker
on here just to warn us that when you turn it on at first the fans will be at 100 rpm and that's
what it's meant to do then it slows right down see of course you do remove that which i will do now
and to gain access to the internals it's not that difficult you've got four screws to remove and
then you need to pry off this lid here now it was a bit difficult but a little tip here is use the
holes here put one of the screws for the mounting bracket into it and then use that to pull it out
and that worked for me but be careful there's a ribbon cable right here which i have already
undone that's where the sata 3 drive is this is the 2.5 inch bay on the back of it
and we have our ram so they've gone with crucial ram and we've got two sticks of 16 gigabytes
here so i have the 32 gigabyte version and the good news about it is it's crucial and we also
do have an intel ssd which is the 660p series below that is where you'll find the wi-fi card
where b links used a wi-fi 6e card which is very quick with bluetooth 5 and it is a mediatek it's
the rz 608 and note the huge thermal pad that's giving us contact with the controller on the ssd
to then the back where the 2.5 inch drive is so it's acting as a large passive heatsink to help
cool the ssd to stop it from throttling our bios and the available settings so this is very typical
of blink we have absolutely everything that you can think of that's unlocked to us which is great
that's why we have that clear cmos button on it in the front there just in case you mess up any
of these settings so you can set with the power options to have it power on automatically if it
loses the power state it'll detect that turn it on so you could run it as a server or on a switch
and we have ram disconfiguration which is handy if you want to set that up amd cbs so there are some
interesting options in here there's the ac power loss one that i just talked about and the cpu ones
where you can do a few little tweaks in here um but i'm not gonna mess with any of those there too
but it's under nbio common options where you will find one that's very interesting if you intend to
game quite a bit and that is this the graphics configuration you can set the igpu configuration
here onto this one which is game optimized now if you've got 32 gigabytes of ram which this
version does have it will then dedicate two gigabytes i believe or maybe four no it's two
to that vega 8 graphics to help improve the performance and it will up the power limit
too but i'm not going to mess with this i'm going to keep it all stock for my review but it's just
pointed out you can improve the performance if you want the version of windows 11 that it does run
is windows 11 pro and it is fully activated which is good now in the device manager you will notice
that we do have our cpu that is listed the ryzen 7 the u 16 times here because it has 16 threads
and eight cores maximum turbo is 4.2 gigahertz it's based off a seven nanometer process and the
wireless chip that i pointed out when we looked at the internals if you did skip over that well
it's a mediatek chip very fast wi-fi 6e so you won't be upgrading this anytime soon and it does
have maximum throughput that i can test it with my wi-fi 6 router about 1.3 gigabits per second
which is pretty standard there with the transfers so that drive that it does have the intel the
p660 isn't really that fast you can see the speeds that i got out of it with my benchmark
show me that for pcie 3.0 it's on the lower end there so if you want faster upgrade that of course
to something like a samsung 970 evo which would of course be perfect now the benchmark scores here
just run that because this is a low wattage chip even though it does have the 16 threads
the multi-core score here isn't as good as it good as it could be if this was an h part so if
it was the 35 watt or 45 watt part this would do a lot better here but still they're decent
scores here so good performance out of that ryzen 7 and i do have the benchmark here of geekbench
5 so single core score they're looking okay a little low because of that lower turbo there
and a multi-core score they're nearing up towards 6 000 points it's not bad but
everything i throw at it this mini pc does feel very quick so things like spreadsheets documents
all of that stuff is going to be very very quick on it and fast with no problems over office work
so what about demanding video files so this is a jellyfish file that i test out initially
does a few stutters which seems to happen on every single machine that i test out but once it's going
it's good it's not dropping any frames there so that's 4k he vc 140 megabits per second but
what about 4k 60 now so 4k 60 this is the sony demo file that i play and this one runs fine
okay that does not seem to drop any frames at all so the vega 8 graphics is doing well there
quick test now of 4k streaming performance now this is with youtube it's 4k 60
and occasionally it is dropping frames you can see
it's at 32 and just now and then there'll be one or two drop frames it doesn't really seem to
affect the experience of it like i'm not really detecting these drop frames at all because it's
just one or two a second not even that so it is i think adequate performance here streaming youtube
4k 60 frames per second and video editing now so the vega 8 graphics is really helping out
here and the performance of the timeline which i do have the playback resolution set to just
a quarter here with adobe premiere pro with these 4k files does seem to be alright it's occasionally
dropping a few frames but the overall performance isn't too bad now definitely that 32 gigabytes of
ram i do think is helping out here now this is a basic 4k edit so what i'll do now is export
one minute of footage at the 4k youtube preset we'll see how long it takes
and here we go it is finishing up so it's going to be under a minute so that's very good so you
can say approximately 48 seconds if you factor in my delay there with hitting start on this timer so
that's not a bad result so this is a basic 4k edit remember if you are grading and doing all of that
and effects then it will take longer now onto the gaming performance so it has the vega 8 graphics
and it's clocked at a 1725 but you see sometimes it scales down a little bit so it's not holding
unfortunately that constant 1750 megahertz on the vega 8 graphics so the performance could
actually be a little bit better here but still it is playable this is 1080p on normal settings
and i am getting here around 50 60 frames per second that's in the car so as soon as i get
out it'd be a little bit better and because it's night time here tends to take a little
bit more of a hit on the graphics so 70 frames per second it's not that bad considering it is
integrated graphics it's just that it could be a little bit better because of that gpu clock i
think it's being restricted there by the wattage that's what's happening can see it's hitting the
25 watts that's why the performance is not as good as it could be you see the frame rate's
not amazing so you probably actually don't want to run this game i would definitely be running it at
720p to help improve upon the frame rate there but it is playable it's looking reasonably good
as i expected and it is i think just like when i showed you with gta 5 that the vega graphics
could actually do a little bit better here but it's that 25 watt power limit that's really
restricting it restricting those clocks because it doesn't want to go over the 25 watts so it has to
clock itself down there's a bit of lag around that smoke quite a bit there thermals now so it doesn't
go over 80 degrees celsius which is very good however the result is the fan is a little bit loud
it tends to be quite aggressive the way it cycles up the rpm so if you do anything that's slightly
demanding straight away you'll hear it cycle those fans up and then they drop away as soon as you're
not doing anything demanding which is not too bad now power consumption i've seen over 54 watts
under peak load that's benchmarking just pushing it as hard as i possibly could i do have a couple
of things connected up to it mouse and keyboard two there as well idle it idles around 11 watts
sometimes about 8 watts it just bounces around a little bit so it's a low powered unit and it
does have some reasonable performance in it but it is of course a 25 watt chipset the apu that's in
this finally a look at linux this is a live boot image that i'm testing out here and i run into the
problem of the wi-fi drivers so it doesn't like that rz 608 from mediatek i need to hunt around
get those drivers and then linux should work fine on this particular mini pc all up this is a good
mini pc for basic computing so office documents spreadsheets media stuff like that is going to be
good even a little bit of light 4k video editing and light gaming as i showed you as long as you
use lower settings and lower resolutions so it does have 32 gigabytes of storage which
is ample 512 gigabytes of ssd storage which you could expand upon with a 2.5 inch drive
very easy to install that you just need to remove the rear off as i showed you and then you can
slot one in which is great so it can run three 4k monitors at 60 hertz which is good so what are the
cons of it then in my time testing it well it is expensive for the spec considering it's now two
generations old with the 4000 series and the fan the fan can be a little bit annoying in this that
it cycles on and off a lot well the thermals are excellent it just can be a little bit irritating
so thank you so much for watching my review here of the b-link surf for windows 11 pro mini pc