Beelink MINI S Review – A Low-cost mini PC tested with Ubuntu 22.04 and Windows 11

Whilst the first mini PCs were relatively simplistic using low-powered Intel Atom processors with minimal memory, storage, and ports, more recent mini PCs have become so advanced they can challenge SFF builds for both performance and functionality. However, such mini PCs come with prices to match. Beelink has now released the MINI S which is a mini PC that goes back to the basics and is based on a cut-down version of their earlier Beelink U59 mini PC and priced to match. Beelink kindly sent one for review and I’ve looked at performance running both Windows and Ubuntu and compared it directly against the U59.

Beelink MINI S hardware overview

The Beelink MINI S physically consists of a 115 x 102 x 41mm (4.53 x 4.02 x 1.61 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 a power button, a power indicator light, a 3.5mm headphone jack, dual USB 3.1 ports, and a reset pin-hole ‘CLR CMOS’.  The rear panel includes dual USB 3.0 ports, a gigabit Ethernet port, dual HDMI (assumed to be 2.0) ports, and the power jack.

The review model included a 256GB M.2 2280 SATA SSD drive complete with Windows 11 Pro installed and a single stick of 8GB DDR4 2666 MHz memory together with the ability to add a 2.5” SATA drive to the lid which is connected to the motherboard via a short ZIF cable:

In comparison, the U59 is physically very similar and consists of a slightly larger 124 x 113 x 42mm (4.88 x 4.45 x 1.65 inches) square plastic case. Again actively cooled, the mini PC also uses the same Intel Jasper Lake N5095 processor however the review model had a 512GB M.2 2280 SATA SSD drive and two sticks of 8GB DDR4 2666 MHz memory.

The key differences between the MINI S and the U59 are that the front panel omits the Type-C USB 3.0 port with Alternate Mode and that the memory is restricted to a single SODIMM slot resulting in running in single-channel:

The specifications state:

and list the USB ports as ‘USB 3.0’ so I tested them together using a Samsung 980 PRO PCle 4.0 NVMe M.2 SSD housed in a ‘USB to M.2 NVMe adapter’ (ORICO M2PAC3-G20 M.2 NVMe SSD Enclosure) which showed that the front two USB ports were actually ‘USB 3.1’ (USB 3.2 Gen 2×1 i.e. 10 Gbit/s):

and only the rear USB ports were 3.0 (USB 3.2 Gen 1×1 i.e. 5 Gbit/s):

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 and 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. I now review using Windows 11 version 21H2 and Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. I 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’ version 10.8.3 and benchmark with the same set of tests on both Windows and Ubuntu for comparison purposes. On Ubuntu, I also compile the v5.15 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 version of the OS. I also capture some basic details of the device for each OS.

Installation Issues

When booting Ubuntu 22.04, there are various BIOS errors being reported in the ‘dmesg’ although the significance of which has not been determined:

Otherwise 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.

Windows 11 performance on Beelink MINI S

The Beelink MINI S came installed with a licensed copy of Windows 11 Pro version 21H2 which after applying updates was build 22000.739. A quick look at the hardware information shows it is aligned to the specifications:

Similar to when I originally reviewed the U59, the iGPU showed limited details in HWiNFO and was unknown to GPU-Z:

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

I also tested Cinebench R23:

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

Ubuntu 22.04 performance

After shrinking the Windows partition in half and creating a new partition I installed Ubuntu using an Ubuntu 22.04 ISO as dual boot. After installation and updates the key hardware information under Ubuntu 22.04 is as follows:

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:

and the latter can be directly compared to when run in Windows using the OpenGL render:

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:

Beelink MINI S and U59 Comparison

In parallel with the testing of the MINI S, I also performed a fresh install of Windows 11 Pro on the U59 Beelink previously provided and which I reviewed. I then ran exactly the same set of benchmarks, alternating between the MINI S and U59 while running each individual test, to replicate similar conditions.

Taking a detailed look when comparing the CPU, GPU and memory performance of the MINI S and U59 shows that despite being limited to only having half as much RAM running in single-channel mode the MINI S performance isn’t significantly degraded compared to the U59. CPU performance was only up to around 3% slower in some benchmarks and GPU up to around 7% slower which appears attributable directly to the memory which was up to around 8% slower and the amount of memory is known to affect iGPU performance:

The complete Windows results together with the updated U59 results can also be compared against other recent mini PCs:

and similarly for Ubuntu:

Video playback in browsers & Kodi

For real-world testing, I played some videos in Edge and Chrome on Windows and in Firefox and Chrome on Ubuntu. On Edge, the initial codec for a video is ‘av01’ however as it then typically struggles to play the video it switches to ‘vp09’ whereas Chrome always used ‘vp09’. Again in parallel, I repeated the tests on the U59 so the results can be directly compared:

For both devices, Windows was better than Ubuntu, but interestingly, the memory restrictions of the MINI S didn’t markedly affect the results with only just a few more dropped frames here and there.

I also played variously encoded videos in Kodi all of which played up to 8K @ 30 FPS without issue and used hardware for decoding:

However whilst hardware decoding was used when trying to play 8K @ 60 FPS videos it resulted in frame skipping and juddery playback which was the same for both the MINI S and U59:

Beelink MINI S thermals

The MINI S uses active cooling and running a stress test on Ubuntu saw the CPU temperature climb to an average of 77°C with a single peak of 79°C for the duration of the test:

If the CPU frequency is monitored during the stress test it can be seen that it averages around 2800 MHz during the test whereas the average when idle is around 2455 MHz:

During the stress test, the maximum temperature I recorded on the top of the device was around 39.2°C at an ambient room temperature of 13.5°C. Although it runs hotter than the U59, it is much quieter as the fan is virtually inaudible and did not register a reading on my sound meter next to the device during the stress test.

Final Observations

As a low-cost mini PC, the Beelink MINI S performs remarkably well and the limitation of single-channel memory is likely to be unnoticeable given typical usage of the device.

I’d like to thank Beelink for providing the MINI S for review. It retails at around $219 for the tested configuration on Beelink or Amazon vs $229 for the equivalent U59 configuration or $279 for the tested U59 16GB/512GB 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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