[Device Reviews and Information] Jupit3r:
Performance

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The Mini S rocks an Intel Celeron N5095 chip, which is built on 10nm process, with typical Thermal Design Power of 15 W. This chipset has 4 CPU cores, 4 processing threads working at 2 GHz (Turbo 2.9 GHz), and an integrated UHD GPU working at 650MHz. The N5095 SoC. is featured in lots of mini PCs and entry-level laptops. It is definitely not a powerhouse, but should be capable enough for most people’s everyday computing duties. My review unit comes with 8GB memory, as well as a 256GB SATA3 SSD, but Beelink does offer other configurations for you to choose from.

Benchmarks

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In the cross-platform Geekbench 5, the Mini S scored 645 in CPU single core, 2017 in multi core, and 2117 in OpenCL. Those are typical numbers for the N5095 processor.

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In the Cinebench R20 CPU-crunching test, the Mini S got 234 in single core, and 787 in multi-core.

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Running it through PCMark10, my review unit got 2,339 points. This is actually on the higher end of the performance rating, compared to other budget mini PCs I’ve tested.

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Beelink doesn’t sell the Mini S in barebone, so all units will come with an SSD. The speed of the 256GB SSD in my unit is pretty standard for an M.2 SATA3 SSD, nothing exciting here. Still, it is fast enough to guarantee that booting into Windows 11 takes only a few seconds.

Daily computing

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The Mini S was fairly capable for dealing with mainstream daily computing tasks. I could open a dozen content-heavy webpages in Microsoft Edge, play a 4K video, and edit my presentation in PowerPoint at the same time, without noticing any hiccups or delays.

Obviously, there are occasions where the Mini S wouldn’t make sense, like editing 4K footages from your professional DSLR, or designing complex artwork, but for lightweight creativity tasks such as editing photos in Photoshop and making a short video in for your TikTok channel, this would work great.

HTPC

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This mini PC could also make a perfect HTPC or media center. According to DXVA checker, the UHD Graphics GPU is able to decode most video formats up to 4K, some even up to 8K. I’ve played many UHD Blu-Ray movies on the Mini S and enjoyed perfectly smooth playback.

Streaming videos online was a similar story. When I was playing an 4K/60FPS YouTube video in Chrome, neither the CPU nor the GPU was stressed too much. Streaming 8K/60FPS videos could be challenging for the Mini S, as I noticed frequent frameskip during the playback, since this mini PC doesn't really support 8K output, there's no point in doing that anyway.

Gaming

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One of the areas where the Mini S didn’t do very well was gaming, as the integrated Intel UHD GPU isn’t really designed for graphics-intensive duties, and single-channel memory sort of made things worse. In 3DMark, the Mini S scored 2356 in Sky Diver, 606 in Fire Strike and 206 in Time Spy, falling behind the Beelink’s very own U59, which features the same processor, but has dual-channel memory.

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LOL, which was quite smooth on the Beelink U59 at 1080P and medium settings, was just playable on the Mini S. The average frame rate was 44 fps, and I noticed some frameskip in intense battle scenes. Turning the resolution down to 720P could improve the average frame rate to 79 fps, but some of the fine details could become just a little too blurry on a large desktop monitor.

If you only play simpler, more casual games like Angry Birds, Plant vs Zombies, or games installed from Microsoft Store, then you obviously have nothing to worry about.

Power consumption and noise

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This mini PC is very energy-efficient, as power consumption is at only 10 watts idle and 24 watts on max load. The Mini S stayed quiet most of the time, I could watch online videos for hours without hearing any noise from it. The cooling fan did spin up when the Mini S was under heavy workloads, but it was neither too loud nor too annoying.

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The Mini S was also very stable. In the AIDA64 stability test, the temperature of the four CPU cores stayed below 90 degrees in 1 hour of running at full load.

Verdict

The Beelink Mini S is priced at $199 for the 8GB/256GB configuration on Beelink’s official website. Given the performance and expandability, alongside its very affordable price tag, if you’re looking for a small form factor desktop PC that is adequate for basic home or business computing tasks, you can’t go wrong here. If you want to bring better performance out of the N5095 chipset and don’t mind the slightly larger footprint, then I would still recommend that you go with the Beelink U59 instead.