Beelink U59 Review – Windows 11, Ubuntu on a Jasper Lake mini PC

Coupling a German submarine with a North American lake seems a perfect match in this topsy-turvy supply-constrained COVID-19 broken world we find ourselves in but that’s just what Beelink has figuratively done by launching their new Intel Jasper Lake mini PC, the U59. Beelink kindly sent one for review and I’ve looked at performance running both Windows 11 and Ubuntu 20.04.

Beelink U59 Hardware Overview

The Beelink U59 physically consists of a 124 x 113 x 42mm (4.88 x 4.45 x 1.65 inches) square plastic case. As an actively cooled mini PC, it uses Intel’s new 10 nm Jasper Lake N5095 processor which is a quad-core 4-thread 2.00 GHz Celeron processor boosting to 2.90 GHz with Intel’s UHD Graphics.

The front panel has an illuminated power button, dual USB 3.1 ports, a Type-C USB 3.0 port with DisplayPort Alternate Mode, a 3.5mm headphone jack, and a reset pin-hole ‘CLR CMOS’. The rear panel includes a gigabit Ethernet port, dual USB 3.0 ports, dual HDMI (assumed to be 2.0) ports, and the power jack.

The review model included a 512GB M.2 2280 SATA SSD drive complete with heatsink and Windows 10 Pro installed and two sticks of 8GB DDR4 2666 MHz memory:

Additionally there is a replaceable M.2 2230 WiFi 5 (or 802.11ac) Intel Wireless-AC 3165 card located under the M.2 2280:

and the ability to add an additional 2.5” SATA drive to the lid which is connected to the motherboard via a short ZIF cable.

The specifications state:

and lists all the USB ports as 3.0 however testing revealed that the front two USB ports were 3.1 (USB 3.2 Gen 2×1 i.e. 10 Gbit/s) and only the rear and Type-C ports were 3.0 (USB 3.2 Gen 1×1 i.e. 5 Gbit/s). Also of note despite not being specifically mentioned was that the Type-C port also supports video output through ‘Alternate Mode’:

which together with the dual HDMI ports enables support for triple 4K displays.

Box contents

In the box, you get a power adapter and cord, both a short and a longer HDMI cable, a VESA mounting bracket together with a small packet of miscellaneous screws. Also included is a multilingual user manual:

Review Methodology

When reviewing mini PCs, I typically look at their performance under both Windows and Linux (Ubuntu) and compare them against some of the more recently released mini PCs. Where possible I will now review using Windows 11 version 21H2 and Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS and test with a selection of commonly used Windows benchmarks and/or equivalents for Linux together with Thomas Kaiser’s ‘sbc-bench’ which is a small set of different CPU performance tests focusing on server performance when run on Ubuntu. I also use ‘Phoronix Test Suite’ and benchmark with the same set of tests on both Windows and Ubuntu for comparison purposes. On Ubuntu, I also compile the v5.4 Linux kernel using the default config as a test of performance using a real-world scenario.

Prior to benchmarking I perform all necessary installations and updates to run the latest versions of both OSes. I also capture some basic details of the device for each OS.

Installation Issues

Running the benchmarks went smoothly with the exception of the ‘Selenium’ test from the ‘Phoronix Test Suite’. When running the test with ‘Chrome’ selected it errored with the message ‘The test quit with a non-zero exit status’. This is typically caused by the benchmark driver used by the test not supporting the newest Chrome release and has been encountered before. As a result, the Octane tests were run manually and edited into the final results.

When running Kodi on Ubuntu 20.04.3 hardware decoding was not supported. A release upgrade to 21.04 was required in order to benefit from hardware decoding.

Beelink U59 Windows 11 Performance

Initially, the Beelink U59 came installed with a licensed copy of Windows 10 Pro version 21H1 build 19043.1083 which I upgraded to build 19043.1288 after applying Windows updates. I then successfully upgraded the mini PC to Windows 11 version 21H2 build 22000.282 and also removed the old Windows 10 installation to save space:

A quick look at the hardware information showed an interesting bump to the published specification as mentioned above. Whilst the rear and front Type-C USB ports were 3.0:

The front USB ports were actually 3.1:

The rest of the hardware information was also interesting:

as whilst the iGPU was recognized:

it showed limited details in HWiNFO:

and was unknown by GPU-Z software:

A brief check showed working audio, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Ethernet.

I then set the power mode to ‘High performance’ and ran my standard set of benchmarking tools to look at performance under Windows:

For my specific set of Phoronix Test Suite tests the results were:

All these results can then be compared with other recent mini PCs:

The results show a noticeable improvement over the previous generation of Gemini Lake Refresh and also Gemini Lake mini PCs.

Beelink U59 Ubuntu Performance

After shrinking the Windows partition in half and creating a new partition I installed Ubuntu using an Ubuntu 20.04.3 ISO as dual boot. After installation and updates, a brief check showed working audio, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Ethernet.

The key hardware information under Ubuntu 20.04.3 is as follows:

with the rear and front Type-C USB ports confirmed as 3.0:

and front USB ports as 3.1:

I then set the CPU Scaling Governor to ‘performance’ and ran my Linux benchmarks for which the majority of the results are text-based but the graphical ones included:

I also ran PassMark PerformanceTest Linux:

which can be directly compared to the results from when it was run on Windows:

For the same set of Phoronix Test Suite tests the results were:

The complete results together with a comparison against other recent mini PCs are:

and again shows the improvement over the previous generation of Gemini Lake Refresh and Gemini Lake mini PCs.

Video playback in browsers (YouTube) & Kodi

Unfortunately, video playback is the nemesis that sinks this promising mini PC. For real-world testing I played some videos in Edge and Chrome on Windows and in Firefox and Chrome on Ubuntu:

The results were somewhat unusual. Whilst the iGPU on Jasper Lake supports hardware decoding of VP9 and HEVC, unfortunately, AV1 is not supported. So whilst typically dropping resolution from 4K to 1440p normally results in better playback, this time for Edge the decoding goes from using hardware for VP9 to software for AV1:

resulting in higher CPU usage and an increase in dropped frames.

What was strange however is that in Edge, 4K 60 FPS videos play better than 4K 30 FPS. However looking specifically at playing 4K 30 FPS, whilst Windows Chrome played better than Windows Edge, Ubuntu Firefox was better than Ubuntu Chrome. It is not obvious from the CPU/GPU performance what is causing this anomaly other than the browsers themselves:

I also played some videos in Kodi on both Windows and Ubuntu. For Windows differently encoded videos played up to 8K 30 FPS without issue:

However, as software was used for decoding in Ubuntu every video skipped frames:

Looking into this further revealed that there was an issue with the video acceleration library that provides access to graphics hardware acceleration:

I tried experimenting with upgrading various packages but ran into compatibility issues with the core libraries ‘libc’ package so ended up performing a distribution upgrade (‘do-release-upgrade’) to take the installation to Ubuntu 21.04 ‘hirsute’:

This solved the library issue:

with hardware now being used for decoding:

and the variously encoded videos used for testing played up to 8K 30 FPS without issue:

Interestingly, after rechecking YouTube video playback in both Firefox and Chrome I found that whilst the results were similar to Ubuntu 20.04.3, specifically the results for Firefox 1440p 60 FPS worsened by dropping slightly more frames (18 now compared with 8 before):

and Chrome 1080p 60 FPS went from playing perfectly to occasionally dropping frames:

However, as the Chrome video used the AV1 codec, I suspect that this was more a decoding performance discrepancy than being an impact from upgrading Ubuntu.

Thermals

The U59 uses active cooling and running a stress test on Ubuntu saw the CPU temperature rise to a peak of 76°C and then average around 74°C for the duration of the test:

During the stress test with an ambient room temperature of 24.2°C, the top of the device did not get hot to touch however due to its reflective surface it was difficult to measure the actual temperature other than indicative readings of around 40°C. The fan whilst audible was not excessively loud when it ramped up to its maximum even though it measured at times up to 48 dBA on my sound meter next to the device.

If the CPU frequency is monitored during the stress test it can be seen that it climbed immediately to and then averaged at just under 2800 MHz:

Beelink U59 Networking (Ethernet & Wi-Fi)

Network connectivity throughput was measured on Ubuntu using ‘iperf’:

with relatively poor Ethernet performance.

Power Consumption

Power consumption was measured as follows:

• Powered off (shutdown) – 0.4 Watts
• BIOS* – 10.8 Watts
• GRUB boot menu – 10.5 Watts
• Idle – 9.6 Watts (Windows) and 5.0 Watts (Ubuntu)
• CPU stressed – 20.4 Watts (Windows ‘cinebench’) and 22.2 Watts (Ubuntu ‘stress’)
• Video playback** – 13.5 Watts (Windows Edge 4K 60 FPS) and 15.8 Watts (Ubuntu Firefox 1440p 60 FPS)

*BIOS (see below)
**The power figures fluctuate notably due to the fan so the value is the average of the median high and median low power readings.

BIOS

Powering up the mini PC and hitting the F7 key results in a boot menu that includes access to the BIOS. The BIOS is unrestricted but there is only one setting that may be of interest and which can safely be changed, namely ‘Auto Power On’ which is set to ‘Power off’ by default. This setting is located under ‘Chipset’ and then under ‘PCH-IO Configuration’.

Beelink U59 Review – Final Observations

The CPU performance improvement offered by Jasper Lake is impressive. However, the ‘newness’ of the iGPU results in less impressive graphical performance which hopefully will improve as the software matures. Including USB 3.1 front ports is certainly welcome, however, restricting the main storage to SATA seems somewhat contrary given secondary storage now performs faster than primary storage. As a result of the SATA limitation, I did try replacing the WiFi card with an M.2 NGFF (A+E key) adapter for an eGPU however it was not recognized thereby ruling out using an external graphics card.

I’d like to thank Beelink for providing the U59 for review. It retails on Amazon at around $349 for the current (16GB/512GB) configuration and $279 for the 8GB/256GB configuration.

Ian W MORRISON (Linuxium)

Ian is interested in mini PCs and helps with reviews of mini PCs running Windows, Ubuntu and other Linux operating systems. You can follow him on Facebook or Twitter.

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