[Device Reviews and Information] Jupit3r:
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The good:

Beautiful, neat and compact design.

Solid build.

Licensed Windows 10 Pro OS.

Decent performance.

Lots of connectivity options.

The bad:

No SD card slot.

No WiFi6.

Bottom Line:

The Beelink GKmini is a mini PC designed for basic office workloads, media consumption and light creativity tasks, and it works as designed.

If you have considered buying a mini PC, you must have heard of Beelink, a Chinese brand known for making quality mini PCs and TV boxes with afforable price tags. The all new Beelink GKmini comes with the Intel Gemini Lake Celeron J4125 processor, 8GB DDR4 RAM, up to 512GB built-in SSD, an attractive new design, and a moderate price tag. it is set out to be a strong contender in the race of affordable mini PCs.

Main specs of the Beelink GKmini

Processor: Intel Gemini Lake Celeron J4125

CPU: Quad Core 2.0-2.7GHz CPU

GPU Intel HD Graphics 600

Process technique: 14nm

OS: Windows 10 Pro 64bit

RAM: 8GB DDR4 2400MHz

Storage: 128GB/256GB/512GB/1TB SSD (256GB in our review)

Network: WiFi5 + BT 4.2 / Ethernet Gigabit

Ports: 4x USB 3.0 / 2x HDMI 1.4 / 3.5mm audio jack / Kensington lock

Accessories: 12V-2A DC adapter/ 2x HDMI Cable (1m & 0.3m) / User Manual

Retail Packaging

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The GKmini ships with a very simple retail packaging, with illustration image on the front, and specs of on the back of the box.

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As we can see in the specs, the mini PC is powered by the Intel Celeron J4125 quad-core processor, coupled with 8GB RAM. The unit that I received has a 256GB SSD inside of it, but Beelink offers other storage options.

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Inside the box we have found a mini PC, a bracket for mounting the mini PC onto the back of a monitor, a 24-watt power adapter, two HDMI cables, a bag of screws, and a user manual.

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The GKmini is about the size of a TV box, with a footprint smaller than my already small palm. It'll take up next to no room on your desk. If there’s literally no room for even the GKmini on your desk, you can also choose to mount it onto the back of your monitor with the provided bracket and screws.

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The GKmini’s design doesn’t stray too far from previous Beelink mini PC models. It looks almost identical to the Gemini J45, which was released in 2019.

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The housing of the GK mini is a combination of plastic and metal, The top side is acrylic plastic, which is, in our opinion, an elegant touch as it gives the GKmini’s top a glossy and reflective look, although it is also more prone to collecting all your fingerprints. There’s a Beelink logo sitting comfortably in the middle. The other sides of the chassis are all made of aluminum.

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The front of the mini PC sports a reset hole, two USB 3.0 ports, a 3.5mm audio jack with mic support, as well as a power button which has a status LED built in.

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The rear side of the GK mini plays host to some vents, two USB 3.0 ports, a full-size Ethernet, two HDMI 1.4a ports, and a DC-in port.

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As the mini PC has an active cooling system under the hood, there are quite a number of vents on the left and right sides of the machine.

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There are four rubber feet on the bottom side of the GK mini, each one has a screw in it.

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Getting access to the internals is quite easy, just remove these screws and you will be able to upgrade the RAM and SSD.

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The GK mini weighs only 256g, not much heavier than some of the latest smartphones. Moving it around in the house is quite easy. The build quality is solid and definitely well above average, as the mini PC looks particularly refined, with no ugly mold lines on the surface. It also feels reasonably robust and sturdy, you won’t really break it without some serious force.

Setting it up

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As tiny as it is, the GKmini is still a Windows-based personal computer, and needs to be connected to a monitor (or TV, or projector), a keyboard and a mouse to work as one, and that’s how you should set it up.

During first-time start-up, you will need to go through some of the Microsoft Windows initialization protocols (choosing your region and language, connecting to the network, logging into your Microsoft account, etc), which is easy but definitely takes some time. After that, you are good to go.

System & apps

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Most mini PCs run on Windows 10 Home, but the Beelink GKmini ships with licensed Windows 10 Pro, For average consumers, you will probably see no difference, but for power users, Windows 10 Pro offers lots of extra features, the most important of which is being able to join a domain, including Azure Active Directory for single sign-on to cloud services (and have group policy applied as part of that).

You also get Hyper-V for virtualization, BitLocker whole disk encryption, enterprise mode Internet Explorer, Remote Desktop, a version of the Windows Store for your own business, Enterprise Data Protection containers (a feature that comes later in the year) and assigned access (which locks a PC to running only one modern application, to use like a kiosk). Pro users can get updates from Windows Update for Business, which includes options for scheduling updates so they don't reboot PCs at important business times.

Fortunately, the Windows 10 Pro here is a completely clean version, with no pre-installed 3rd party applications or bloatware. I don’t feel like digging into the main features Windows 10 offers. For those who is still unfamiliar and curious with this dominant PC operating system, we highly recommend you to watch some tutorial videos on YouTube.

Performance

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The GKmini is powered by the Intel Gemini Lake Celeron J4125 quad core processor (2.0-2.7GHz). This chip isn’t a powerhouse and won’t match the latest Intel Core processors found in mainstream laptops and desktop PCs in terms of performance, but it is still capable of dealing with normal everyday tasks with ease. There is 8GB DDR4 RAM under the hood to take care of multi-tasking.

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First, we ran Maxon's latest CPU-crunching Cinebench R23 test, which is fully threaded to make use of all available processor cores and threads. Cinebench stresses the CPU rather than the GPU to render a complex image. The result is a proprietary score indicating a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads. The GK mini scored 447 in single core, 1442 in multi-core.

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We also ran the Cinebench R20 test on the GKmini, and it scored 170 in single core, and 556 in multi-core. These scores are by no means impressive, but still way ahead of the Pentium N4200 powered Chuwi Gbox, or Beelink’s very own Gemini J45, which comes with an older Apollo Lake Pentium J4205 processor.