Beelink SER6 Pro Mini PC Review

After more than ten years of development, mini-computer mainframes have already completed the transition from an initial light office tool to a productivity tool. In the past two years, mid-to-high-end small mainframes can largely replace desktops and become our main computers. This year, the introduction of RDNA2 nuclear display has made up for the last performance shortcoming of this type of product. The latest Beelink SER6 Pro is equipped with AMD Ryzen7-6800H eight-core processor, Radeon 680M core graphics card, and the memory and hard disk are upgraded to DDR5-4800MHz and PCIe4.0x4 specifications respectively, and a full-featured USB4 interface is also added. In this article, We will share with you some real test data and my experience of using it as the main computer for two weeks, hoping to provide some reference for your purchase.

Specification

Packaging

The packaging box of Beelink SER6 Pro is made of red, and there is a large number "8" in the middle of the front of the box, mainly to emphasize that it uses an eight-core CPU. As for whether the packaging is good-looking or not, it is a matter of opinion. We has never liked too bright colors. Sorry! The random accessories include a power adapter, two HDMI cables, one long and one short, a VESA Mount bracket, and an instruction manual , a pack of screws and a replacement top cover.

The standard power adapter is manufactured by HuntKey, with a power of 120W, and the size is really not small. Beelink promises to replace the portable adapter for free for all users who bought this console early next year, so it doesn't matter if we use it first.

Appearance

Beelink has been improving the appearance design of its Mini PCs in the past two years. The body of the SER6 Pro adopts a four-sided breathable magnesium-aluminum alloy shell, and the dark green matte spray color makes it look low-key and chic. Put together with the other two Mini PCs that use i5-1240P and i7-1195G7 respectively, SER6 Pro is undoubtedly the one with the most design sense.

The top cover of the fuselage is covered by a patented fabric fabric that does not impede the circulation of air, but prevents the penetration of water droplets to a certain extent. In the lower right corner, you can vaguely see the English trademark of Beelink and the model logo of SER6.

The top cover of the SER6 Pro can be easily replaced, but the top cover that comes with it is red... But We really accepts the less conspicuous red and green color combination, and quickly changed it back after taking pictures.

A lot of cooling holes can be seen under the top cover, as well as a large-diameter system cooling fan.

The interface configuration of SER6 Pro is rich and reasonable. On the front, there are 2 USB3.2 Gen2 (10 Gbps) Type-A interfaces, 1 full-featured USB4 interface, and 1 3.5mm audio interface. In addition, a CMOS clear jack is also configured here, which is convenient for users to reset CMOS settings.

The back of the fuselage is equipped with 1 USB3.2 Gen2 Type-A, 1 USB2.0, 2 HDMI2.0, 1 2.5G network port, and 1 DC power adapter interface. This Mini PC does not have a memory card slot, which is not particularly convenient for creators who often need to copy photos and videos. Fortunately, many Type-C docking stations have integrated card reader functions, and the USB-A card readers on the market are not expensive.

Beelink officially claims that the front USB4 interface has a specification of 20Gbps, but the actual data transmission speed tested by We using a USB4 NVMe mobile hard disk has exceeded the theoretical upper limit of 20Gbps bandwidth. This USB4 interface also supports 4K/60Hz video output and PD3.1 power supply.

However, the BIOS of the engineering machine that We currently has has not yet released support for PD3.1, so the actual measurement cannot use the 140W portable charger of Greenlink to light up the power button. If I can get the retail version of the machine later, I will do this test again for everyone.

The top, back, and left and right sides of the fuselage are equipped with large-area cooling holes, so that the built-in cooling fan can discharge hot air in a timely manner.

The bottom plate of the Mini PC is marked with shortcut keys for entering the BIOS and boot menu, in case of emergency. Compared with the previous generation of Mini PCs, the internal structure of SER6 Pro has also ushered in a major upgrade. A one-piece metal bracket is added between the bottom plate and the main board, and a small 3505 fan is arranged on it, which is specially used for active cooling of the solid-state drive. The panel next to it has also been treated in a comb-like shape, which increases the area of passive heat dissipation. From these details, we can see the care of Beelink in product design. At the same time, a 2.5-inch hard drive installation slot is reserved on this bracket.

The motherboard of SER6 Pro includes 2 SO-DIMM memory slots, 1 M.2 2280 solid-state drive interface, which can be expanded up to 64GB of memory, and 4TB of built-in storage. The 32GB/512GB retail version of SER6 Pro has been pre-installed with two 16GB Crucial DDR5-4800MHz memory sticks and a 512GB Crucial PCIe4.0*4 NVMe SSD.

The wireless network card is an M.2 2230 specification, and it also supports later upgrades. However, the pre-installed Intel AX200 already supports WiFi 6 and Bluetooth 5.2, so there is no need to replace it.

Judging from the official explosion diagram, the CPU and the main cooling fan are installed on the other side of the motherboard. Because there is no interface or space for upgrading on this side, we don't need to be brave enough to remove more screws by ourselves.

In terms of workmanship, SER6 Pro has maintained a high level of zero time. The metal shell adopts CNC one-piece cutting process without any ugly mold lines. The layout of each internal component is neat and compact, and the wiring is quite regular.

System: Genuine Windows 11 Pro

The retail version of SER6 Pro including memory and hard disk has been pre-installed with the genuine Windows 11 Pro operating system before leaving the factory, which is very worry-free. The upgrades brought by Win11 include a more beautiful UI, stronger multi-user desktop support, and better security performance. In addition, the Microsoft XBOX game platform is also built in the Microsoft store, and the SER6 Pro can be transformed into an XBOX game console in seconds without running an emulator.

Compared with the Windows 11 Home Edition, which is common on laptops, the professional edition system running on SER6 Pro adds remote desktop, Hyper-V virtualization technology, BitLocker encryption, group policy, and mobile device management, which are often used by experienced digital players. to the function. Of course, in addition to Windows, SER6 Pro is also compatible with any X86 platform operating system, including Ubuntu, Debian, Mint, Android X86, etc. Because this host supports dual hard disks, we can easily install dual systems.

Performance

Compared with the iterative upgrade of Intel Core 11th to 12th generation, the progress of AMD Ryzen 6000 series in CPU compared with 5000 series can be said to be insignificant. However, AMD's new generation has attracted more consumers' attention, because it has updated the core architecture of the integrated graphics card of the Ryzen chip from Vega to RNDA2, which has brought nearly doubled 3D graphics performance and perfectly complemented it. It overcomes the shortcomings of thin and light notebooks and Mini PC game performance.

The SER6 Pro is equipped with an AMD Ryzen 7-6800H processor, which is based on TSMC's 6nm process technology, has 8 Zen3+ CPU cores, 16 threads, and a maximum operating frequency of 4.7GHz. The default TDP of this processor is 45W, but Beelink locked the TDP at 35W in order to ensure the stability of the computer. The integrated graphics card of SER6 Pro is currently the most powerful AMD Radeon 680M: built-in 12 graphics cores, 768 shaders, running frequency 2200MHz, the performance is basically the same as Nvidia GeForce GTX1050TI discrete graphics card.

Benchmarks

In the CPU performance test of Cinebench R23, the CPU multi-core score of 6800H is 11451, which is basically the same as that of Core i5-1240P. Although there is no obvious advantage compared to the previous generation Ryzen 7-5800H, if it is really fully fired, it can basically be regarded as omnipotent.

In the cross-platform running software Geekbench 5.4.1 CPU performance test, the single-core and multi-core scores of SER6 Pro are basically equal to the Mini PC equipped with I5-1240P, and about 20% higher than the R7-5800H Mini PC improvement.

The Geekbench 5 OpenCL test is mainly to investigate the general computing power of the computer CPU and GPU. The score of the SER6 Pro reached 31989, leaving the other models in this comparison far behind, and it is almost two of the 5800H small mainframe times.

3DMark is a benchmark software that tests 3D graphics performance by simulating game scenes. As before, I chose Time Spy, which examines the performance of DirectX 12 games, Fire Strike, which examines the performance of DirectX 11 large-scale games, and Sky Diver, which examines the performance of DirectX 11 general graphics. The scores of SER6 Pro in the three tests are 2677, 6405 and 22443 respectively, easily killing similar products equipped with Vega or Iris Xe Graphics series core display.

The testing principle of PCMark 10 developed by the professional software company UL is to simulate multiple workflows including video conferencing, content creation, web browsing, and document processing in the foreground, and then conduct a comprehensive analysis of the average frame rate of these workflows to obtain the Overall performance score. Usually, a computer with a score of more than 4000 is considered to have excellent performance, and the SER6 Pro got a score of 6757, which is far beyond the passing line. Compared with the i5-1240P Mini PC, it is also more than 20% higher.

However, what domestic consumers are most used to refer to is still Master Lu's running score. It tests the CPU, graphics card, memory, and hard disk separately, and finally adds up the test scores to become the comprehensive performance score of the computer. The total score of Beelink SER6 Pro reached 1,026,806, surpassing 81% of the devices on the entire network.

SER6 Pro comes standard with a 512GB M.2 2280 solid-state hard drive, the brand is Crucial, and the specification is PCIe4.0x4. From the test results of CrystalDiskMark, the sequential read speed is close to 5000mb/s, and the sequential write speed is also close to 2000mb/s. Booting up the system, large apps, and games is fast. In fact, the pre-installed M.2 interface also supports 7000mb/s SSD. If you have higher requirements, you can choose to buy a barebone system or upgrade it yourself later.

The memory is dual-channel DDR5-4800MHz, and the read, write, and copy speeds are all above 50,000mb/s, which is significantly improved compared to the DDR4-3200MHz used by the previous generation of Mini PCs. The data throughput speed of the graphics card has also been greatly improved due to DDR5 and dual channels.

Productivity Tasks

Because of the 6800H blessing, we naturally don't have to doubt the ability of SER6 Pro to handle basic daily tasks such as ordinary web browsing and MS Office. It is not difficult to measure relatively complex productivity tasks. Editing a very large image in Photoshop, no matter how many layers and renderings are added, the processing speed is very fast. In Power Director, when editing 4K video source files with multiple tracks, operations such as speed change, coloring, and transitions are also smooth and smooth.

Using hardware encoding to generate a 4K video file with a length of 10 minutes, SER6 Pro finally took 7 minutes and 44 seconds, compared to Mini PCs of Ryzen7-5800H (8 minutes and 43 seconds) and i7-1195G7 (8 minutes and 30 seconds) Much faster. The Mini PCs of Core i5-1240P and Core i5-1235U failed to complete the test because they could not start Power Director normally.

However, using the open source video conversion software Handbrake 1.4 to transcode a video of 3 minutes and 11 seconds from 4K/30fps to 1080P/30fps, SER6 Pro finally took 1 minute and 30 seconds, which is the same as the 1240P Mini PC. Compared with 5800H, the improvement is obvious.

Gaming Performance

Because it is equipped with a Radeon 680M integrated graphics card with 12 RDNA2 cores, the game performance of SER6 Pro has made great progress compared with the previous generation of mini consoles. In the past, when evaluating the performance of computer games, we usually used it as a criterion for judging whether it can play chicken smoothly.

It is actually measured that running (PUBG) on this Mini PC, with 1080P resolution + medium image quality, the average frame rate can reach 80 fps, although in a few more complex scenes, the immediate frame rate will drop to 50 fps Left and right, but overall still visually smooth.

"Genshin Impact" at 1080P, with medium special effects settings, the picture continues to stabilize at 60 fps, which is much better than the usual 30-40 fps of AMD 5000 series Mini PCs. Even if you switch to high-definition, the average frame rate is as high as 50 fps, and there is no sense of stuttering.

Even for "Witcher 3: Wild Hunt" and "Conqueror's Blade", which have high requirements on the graphics card, the average frame rate reached 52 fps and 45 fps respectively with 1080P resolution + medium special effects , which was almost unimaginable a year ago.

Of course, desktops and gaming notebooks equipped with the latest mid-to-high-end discrete graphics cards can still bring enthusiasts a better gaming experience, but for ordinary users like We who only occasionally play games, the graphics card performance of SER6 Pro is more than enough.

Video Decoding

We mentioned many times in previous evaluations that the AMD Vega architecture's core display support for video decoding is much worse than that of the Intel Iris series, and the new RDNA2 has not reversed the situation. From the results read by DXVA, the number of video formats supported by Radeon 680M is still far less than that of Iris Xe Graphics. Fortunately, the most mainstream HEVC and VP9 in daily life can support 8K, and all the movies and episodes in my personal video library can be played smoothly on SER6 Pro. When playing an 8K video in VP9 format, the CPU usage rate is only 1%, and the GPU usage rate is always maintained within 15%.

This Mini PC can also play 4K@60fps and 8K@30fps videos smoothly on the webpage, and the hardware usage rate is very low during playback. However, after switching to 8K@60fps, the picture becomes quite stuck. But what is more strange is that the CPU usage rate is still within 5% at this time, which means that the soft decoding does not really help when the hard decoding fails. I hope that AMD will solve this problem through driver optimization later. In contrast, We recently tested the Intel Core platform Mini PC, regardless of whether the core display is Iris Xe Graphics or Iris Plus 655, it can smoothly play 8K@60fps web video.

Power Consumption, Stability and Noise

The standby power consumption of SER6 Pro is about 9W, while the power consumption of the CPU graphics card can reach 74W when it is fully loaded, which is much higher than the previous generation SER5 Pro (Ryzen5-5600H), but it is still more energy-efficient than mainstream desktops. At the same time, it can be seen that the 120W output power of the power adapter still has a large margin. It is hoped that the TDP of 45W can be opened in the BIOS for users to choose later in the zero quarter. The traditional advantage of Beelink Mini PC in terms of noise control has also been maintained on the SER6 Pro. During standby and low-load operation, the SER6 Pro is almost completely silent. The noise from the internal cooling fan is also quite gentle during moderate use. When dealing with high-stress tasks such as games, running scores, and video editing, the sound of the fan will become obvious, but compared to the i7-1195G7 and i5-1240P Mini PCs recently tested by We, the SER6 Pro is still relatively quiet. Mounting the Mini to the back of the monitor with a VESA mount further dampens the noise reaching our ears.

Although Ryzen7-6800H puts forward higher requirements for heat dissipation, it seems that the patented heat dissipation system upgraded by Beelink can effectively cope with it. We played "The Witcher 3" for 2 hours and 30 minutes last weekend (there are too many stories in this game), and the frame rate of the picture has always remained relatively stable. In the 3DMark Time Spy stress test, SER6 Pro passed with a score of 97.7%.

Conclusion

The price of the barebone version of Beelink SER6 Pro without memory and hard disk is 2588 yuan, while the price of the full version of the pre-installed 32GB dual-channel DDR5 memory, 512GB PCIe4.0x4 solid state drive and genuine Windows 11 Pro is 3688 yuan. For such a small computer with high appearance, rich interfaces, excellent workmanship, capable of working and eating chicken, the price/performance ratio can be said to be quite high. In addition, Beelinkr officially provides a 30-day unconditional return service and a 3-year machine warranty for all its mini console products, which makes us more comfortable to use. So, for such a Mini PC, do you love it? OK, that’s all for this article. We will also release a complete video review of SER6 Pro this week. Interested friends, don’t miss it.