Chris here back with a a mini-pc review this is the Alpha wise T1 which
is really the Beelink S2, the boxes almost the same it doesn't say Beelink on
it it has the same exact contents and all this is it's just a rebranded Beelink
s2 so the Alpha wise t1 is powered by the Gemini Lake the M 4100 successor to
the M 3450 Apollo Lake that I looked at quite often in various many PCs tablets
and laptops now this one here has expandable storage 2.5 inch hard drive
bay as well as an M.2 Sata3 22 by 42 SSD can be placed in this although
you do need to remove the whole back of it off and I will show you how to do
that in this video here now I did check out first the Intel NUC's and this ones
here are based on the same architecture they really had the same chip just with
different clocks so this one's got a higher clock rate this one goes up to
2.5 gigahertz and it has a 10 watt TDP this on the other hand has only a 6 watt
TDP and 2.4 gigahertz as the Max tubro on this that's 200 megahertz higher than
the Apollo Lake and the thing is this is also passively cooled see if you don't
like fan noise then it's an interesting model to go for because it's gonna be a
hundred percent silent so inside the box we've got the mini PC of course branded
alpha wise but it is exactly the same as the Beeink s2 PC system activation
instructions and a quick little user manual here the EU power supply which is
rated to 12 volts 1.5 amps we have a short HDMI cable and then a slightly
longer meter HDMI cable and our visa mounting bracket on the front of the
Alpha wise t1 we have a microphone a USB 3 type C port two USB 3 ports micro SD
card slot status LED and then the red power button on the left you'll simply
find a vent on the back a 3.5 headphone jack with microphone support 2
USB 2 ports Gigabit LAN port there two HDMI 2.0 a speck outs so they support up
to 4k 60 Hertz is one of the changes with the Gemini Lake D/C in 12 volts there
of course the adapter I showed you and then a reset button which is good to
have and even a Kinsington lock slot then on the right a another vent here so
you could say it's probably just missing one thing but it's it's not essential
and that would be an IR receiver so you could use a remote with it if it came
with a remote but you can just buy one of those USB receivers and cheap remotes
for your media controls on the rear of the device we've got four rubber feet
these need to be removed in order to remove the whole back off but if you
just plan to put a 2.5 inch SSD in here or a hard drive it's very easy just to
screws this flap comes off and you can see I have already installed my samsung
500 gigabyte Drive SSD because it will be a lot faster than a spindle drive and
you probably would have noticed that there are these two little holes here
that's where you screw in the VESA mount if you wanted to mount this on the back
of your monitor or TV getting the back off was a bit of a mission I recommend
using some sort of pry tool to help you or long fingernails as well so I used a
card here I managed to pry and rip off the back but it is quite difficult to
first get it off and now I have to remove it looks like two or three screws
to then flip around the motherboard so be very careful when you flip around the
motherboard because they do have the wireless antennas there on the ceiling
or the top of the plastic case there and you can see the chipset right there so
it's not an upgradeable wireless card there unfortunately if they use one of
those tiny little mini PCI cards we could upgrade it there are some good
news here so we do have a course the m dot 2 slot they've got it positioned at
the 22:42 mark what you can do is actually remove this unscrew this right
here this comes right out screw that in and you'll be able to a mountain a full
sized 2280 SSD they're normally faster and they can
also be cheaper so we have a very large heatsink on here as you can see so it's
all passively cool have no little noisy fan whining away
inside the case and as I mentioned there is no upgradable RAM so that is one of
the downsides to this I would love to see a sodam slot on here but clearly
they wouldn't have had room for it with this size of heatsink just a really
quick size comparison so this one's 16 centimeters wide the Intel nuke that one
is a lot smaller I think it's about 1000 K it's about 11 centimeters wide there
this one's three point five centimeters high
five point five centimeters high and you cannot put a three point sorry 2.5 inch
hard drive in the Intel which is a little bit unfortunate it also has a fan
so it will keep itself probably a lot cooler than this one which is passively
cold so very similar models here but this one has a 10 watt TDP with that fan
so it will be able to work a lot high and it also has a higher clock rate this
one goes up to I think it is a 2.6 gigahertz where this one tops out at 2.4
gigahertz first up I will quickly show you the bias so we don't have any
advanced settings here it's very basic they don't want us messing around with
things like the power limits on this model so all you have really is just the
are obviously secure boot we can disable that we've got our boot order and that
is it so these are the set up languages that the Windows 10 image comes with
we've got English German Spanish French Italian and Russian now the system does
boot up quite quick I'm running it off the EMC for the process of this for a
few and it's not that bad it's like a Isetta a 2 SSD if you remember them from
way back and have a look at the speeds here I'm currently benchmarking that
I'll come back and show you that one that finishes up but the micro SD card
reader unfortunately it's limited there to
basically USB 2 speeds as as Howard is wired up which is unfortunate I would
like to see that at least with faster speeds it is a point out that the
microphone is working well for Cortana even though it's just their single mic
on there it's not dual array it is doing a decent job now if we have a look at
the wireless its Intel's wireless AC 31 65
wireless range and the speeds of it seemed good you can get up to about 400
380 megabits per second is the maximum I could with this particular chipset here
and the the current antennas it has on it so it's not the fastest if you want
faster of course then plug in a cable for the realtek go gigabit there that we
have the LAN port it's running a Sanders to that so there's 64 gigabytes of
storage is ETM MSB MNC spec 5.1 the SanDisk and there you can see my samsung
SSD the 850 Evo which is running at full speed as well so no problems with that
also to mention that the USB ports all of them are powering external 4 terabyte
hard drive that I have tested no problems
so it's supplying sufficient power there which is great one area where
performance may possibly be limited is this right here so the RAM speed that
you Brno Lake does support 2.4 gigahertz Ram and a lot of other tick the Jimin I
like that I've been reviewing for example in town nooks and they are
running it at a 2.4 so this is slightly slower so we may see a tiny little bit
of our performance loss out of that it is running at least in dual channel
which is good so 2 of 2 there you can see the way it's configured up and I
will show you that each MMC speeds here so these are really good for this type
of driving it's not super quick like a set of 3 SSD or of course your nvme but
it does the job and a lot better than the earlier emmc we saw like the 4.5
specs so 250 reads hundred fifty write sequential z' and decent for k's so the
system activates with Windows just find no problems there you can see that it is
the version 1709 but it's not the latest built here to be expected so this little
CPU is they do have their limit so when you start to do some really heavy
multitasking which I'm currently doing so I have steam I'm downloading and
installing 3dmark at the moment I have League of Legends going at the moment
and stalling I'm also trying to open up a very large word document so there's
taking some time so the performance has of course affected by this it's not
going to perform like a core i3 or a Core i5
it really does down in CPUs maxed out at 100 sin it's
playing catch-up here so even when you're just scrolling on for example my
website here that becomes quite choppy the performance there in crime so these
CPUs do have their limits don't expect it to be amazing when it comes to
multitasking very heavy multitasking letters so on to a synthetic benchmark
Geekbench 4 here this is where we see a nice increase over the Apollo Lake Intel
Celeron in 3450 now that one normally gets around 1404 the single core score
and about 4200 for multi-core score so single core performance is up
approximately 25% multi-core performance is up around another 20% so that is
really quite good graphics scores this is 3d marks cloud gate 1.1 this is about
300 to 350 points faster than the N 3450 Geekbench fors OpenCL graphics score
here this surprisingly should have done actually better I don't know what's up
with this but it is more or less the kind of score that you could still
probably get out of an in 3450 for some reason it's a little low so normal kind
of use for this particular hardware would be something like your Docs your
Excel your word I'm running OpenOffice here but with a rather large spreadsheet
here it really large ones will be a little bit slow if you're not running
off say an SSD so expect some slowdown there if you're running it off of course
a spindle harddrive then everything's going to be a little bit slower and I'll
just move over to a sample document here so editing moving things around and
doing all this that's perfectly fine there's how we can handle this great no
problems now I have a look here at Chrome too as well
very smooth scrolling no problems there and a YouTube clip so I just open up one
of my videos and run this in 4k and we'll see how many frames it's going to
drop because Chrome tends to drop a few frames here whereas edge will not so
it's just loading in there now I'll enable these steps for nerds and you can
see it's dropping well just at the beginning there are a few frames so
that's pretty good okay one more extra there but overall good performance here
for 4k YouTube streaming video playback performance so obviously it does have 60
Hertz output 4k this is really good if you've got a 4k TV or monitor because
before with the Apollo Lakes we were limited to only a 30 Hertz so desktop
was a little bit laggy in choppy and it was fine for video playback and things
right here I've got an ATV C codec encoded file here so this is another 4k
clip this is 1080p and this I'm going to run here with VLC media player the
reason is it doesn't have that codec support with Windows so clicking on it
it would just would not run that so you can see it's taken a little while to
load up considering that that's coming off the emmc and actually quite slow
there but this is normally just in the beginning and you can see some stutters
but once it gets going this should smooth out remember this is a very
demanding bit rate to 140 okay now it's looking fine
a little stutter II just skip ahead again and you can see there that that is
alright now so it's gonna be ideal connect it up to your 4k TV for playing
back high quality 4k clips like this one for example okay so I'm testing now in
Kodi with the same file so I started out with the 60 megabits per second one this
is running off the micro SD card that I have installed by the way so that's
actually doing alright so that's fine as expected so 4k 60 meters per second what
happens now if we play 240 again will it run it faster than VLC that is actually
a lot better skipping ahead there - okay there is a little bit of slowdown there
but that's running it better than I expected it would okay there we go a
little slow there when you're seeking and searching around on the clip there
but doing well of course this is a native decoding it can handle vp9 and of
course H dot 264 just like the Apollo 8 now on to testing
out a few games so this is League of Legends and the settings I was running
on the at ins on the Apollo Lake so very low I'm testing 1080p here
and you can see it's gonna be playable frame rate hovering around the mid to
lower 40s here so it's not exactly wonderful and definitely not as fast as
the Pentium silver the J 5005 I tested in the internal nuke now that one has a
10 watt TDP the power limit this only has six so that is it's restricting the
GPU basically so this is why we can't really get any better performance so I
really wanted to show you counter-strike like they have on all the other many PCs
and show how it performs but unfortunately for some reason on
this hardware I don't know what is going on but it just keeps locking up on
sending client info here for me it want to go past this this is my third attempt
and I'm giving up and when this tool games like Asheville
extreme kid can see it is running fine 1080p it's not the most boot I have
actually seen surely some of the Apollo later these
will be something out for the graphics performance perhaps is because the
drivers haven't matured enough I don't really know maybe because of the ram the
ram speeding slightly slower there are some stutters as you can see not perfect
now onto thermals and power consumptions so I start off with the power
consumption here maximum you're looking at 13 watts here according to HW info so
from the socket it's probably about 15 you're always add normally about 1 to 2
watts more and it works out as an as an approximate there so 15 watts maximum
idle around 2 to 3 watts so very low power consumption of course this
Hardware thermals it does get up to 85 degrees which is getting high but of
course it's passively cooled there is no fan in here so the heatsink is doing the
job because it's not running into any thermal throttling this is after almost
three hours and during those 3 hours I have been pushing this system very hard
so that's good touching it it is slightly warm to the touch and I did
check with my thermal probe it's getting up to 39 40 degrees to the touch so it
will get warm but it will not go above that which is great I'm gonna boot into
Linux man Jerry we'll see how that runs set it do so gone into the BIOS and into
the save and exit menu boot override and simply select it right here
and nothing to report here that Linux is running perfectly fine as you can see
wireless is working everything that I can tell is working Bluetooth as well
display resolution everything no issues as I mentioned at the start of the video
we do have a handicap with this model that it's kept the RAM 4 gigabytes
double data rate for that is unfortunate and that is probably the real weakness
of this system and the only real weakness that it does have apart from
the fact that yes this is a low powered PC so no 4k video editing really can be
done on us although I did do it with the Intel's right here I test it out on one
of these but I had 16 gigabytes of RAM installed so that's where it comes backs
to the to the weakness there double data rate for not running at 2.4 gigahertz
but only 2.1 3 3 means we miss out on a little bit of performance but as you saw
from the results of Geekbench at least synthetic benchmarks that it is faster
than the old Apollo 1834 50 as expected so 25% faster single core performance
and approximately nineteen twenty percent with the
multi-core so that's a good step up so this is an ideal system I believe for
people that just want a passively called fanless zero noise Media PC for your 4k
TV you want around maybe two monitors it can do it but light tasks so just light
document work Excel spreadsheets web browsing downloading a file server
perhaps this would be good also as a media PC too so playing back those 4k
videos as long as you don't go too crazy with the bitrate it really I feel the
maximum bitrate you should be using with these for playback I be a hundred
megabits per second anything over there then you start to see performance issues
so it handles that well film was really good ok it does get up to 85 degrees but
why is it really good well it doesn't go beyond that even after three hours of
pushing it non-stop and it reaches a plateau there it will not get any hotter
so I could keep going for 10 hours with the test it will not get any warm on
that surface temperatures it does get warm you touch it and go oh yeah that's
warm but it's not over 39 degrees Celsius so that's perfectly fine you can
sit in a TV cabinet and I'll be happy there all day all night 24/7 I don't see
it having any problems now runs Linux fine as well one thing that it is
missing though it doesn't have a advanced BIOS settings so you can have
it Auto power on as soon as it's turned on or plugged in that some people like
to have that option so what the Intel's you can do that you've got more advanced
settings you have the calling so where it comes down to that floor with the RAM
is where I would say go for one of these now they are cheaper but then there are
more expensive so to buy the base model it's bare-bones it is cheaper of the
Intel's but then you need to add your own RAM you need to add your own SSD you
can start out with this PC with nothing you buy it you plug it in you've got
windows you've got the RAM you've got the storage and that's one of the good
things about this its retailing for about 200 or so us and I feel for that
price it is good I would not be looking at the Apollo Lake Mini pcs anymore
something like this does a better job I feel and really I do actually quite like
it I just wish there was an eight gigabyte model of this I do believe
under the the original brand the beelink the s2
there is then an 8 gigabyte option and that'll be the one to go for as well I
feel over this model thank you so much for watching this review and I do hope
to see you back in the channel soon and as I mentioned check out my reviews of
the two Intel Gemini lake Intel NUC's their little mini pcs