Beelink SER9 review

AMD’s Strix Point Ryzen APUs arrived this year and have started rolling out into notebooks to enthusiastic reception. These amazing mobile processors feature the up-to-date AMD RDNA 3.5 integrated graphics architecture, also known as Radeon 890M. Laptop manufacturers often choose low-power APU variants or set lower TDP limits to extend battery life and minimize heat. This makes sense in a mobile context, but what if your operate case is desktop? I say plug it in and give it all the watts!

Meet the Beelink SER9 minicomputer with the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 processor: the highest-class Strix Point APU from AMD. Yes, a up-to-date generation of chips, a surprising up-to-date chip designation… it’s almost as if AMD is competing with Intel not only for market share, but also for who can troll consumers most effectively.

In any case, you can be sure that the HX 370 is a step up in performance over AMD’s Zen 4 Ryzen 8000-series APUs and outperforms Intel’s leading Meteor Lake processor, the Core Ultra 9 185H.

Strix Point also marks an architectural shift in gear for AMD. Instead of a set of identical cores as previous Ryzen processors, it is a dual-cluster design consisting of four Zen 5 cores with a frequency of up to 5.1 GHz and eight (compact) Zen 5c cores that are smaller, more energy-efficient, generate less heat, they have half the L3 cache and a maximum of 3.3 GHz. Intel has been at the forefront of the substantial/miniature philosophy with its 12th-gen processors, but this is up-to-date ground for AMD.

There is also a greater emphasis on artificial intelligence – the clue is in the name – so the AI ​​9 HX 370 is also equipped with an NPU (Neural Processing Unit) capable of delivering 50 TOPS, or trillions of operations per second, which is the defining measure of NPUs. Beelink claims this will boost to 80 TOPS when CPU and iGPU cores get involved, which is well above the 40 TOPS threshold required to qualify for Microsoft’s Copilot-branded PC initiative. SER9 isn’t branded Copilot, but it’s packed with features for managing useful AI tasks like voice recognition, bright call noise suppression, and the like.

Beelink suggests that SER9 is also suitable for art-gen models with text prompts such as stable diffusion; it will never be as quick as freeing up an extra GPU from the task, but it’s still nice to have. There’s still a lot of untapped potential in AI, but my interest won’t grow until NPC behavior and game dialogue are processed through neural processing.

The SER9 can run the HX 370 in balanced (54W) or performance (65W) mode, and I happily found that switching to the latter had no effect on noise levels – it cools the APU effectively and remains extremely silent even at full tilt. In fact, the only thing that caused the cooling fan to overspeed was the shader compilation process in Forza Motorsport, which this particular title seems to do every time I blink.

Benchmarks showed significant performance gains over the previous top-of-the-range iGPU, AMD’s Radeon 780M. This is no surprise, as the 890M offers 25% more compute units, shaders and RT cores than the 780M, among other features. Thanks to this, it is able to generate 5.9 TFLOPS to 4.3 TFLOPS in the 780M model. So: bigger, better, faster, more, basically.

Profits vary from game to game, but let’s start with the leader of the table. A Radeon 780M on a Ryzen 9 7940HS running at 65W TDP averages around 50fps in Cyberpunk, at 1080p, medium settings, Frame Gen and FSR set to balanced, which isn’t too shabby. The 890M in SER 9 increases this to a blistering average average of 88fps at the same settings, with the bottom 1% being above 60fps. I think that’s just incredible for an iGPU.

Not every game will see such a dramatic improvement, but it’s still an overall gain for the 890M at 1080p and medium settings over the 780M. Warhammer III sees performance increases of 26% in campaign and 25% in battle, reaching 38 and 53 fps respectively. Forza Motorsport sees a 14% boost to 53 frames per second, although Homeworld 3’s built-in benchmark, which always uses a higher CPU load, only sees an boost of 1 fps, so there’s no change there. The 780M was always elated with indie titles, and the 890M was even happier; I threw Stray and Subnautica at it, and it returned averages of 68 fps and 82 fps, respectively. So this is all good news. In miniature, the Radeon 890M is the up-to-date king of the iGPU hill.

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What about the rest of the SER9 package? In terms of RAM, it houses 32GB of LPDDR5-7500 memory and is quick. Compared to 32GB 5600MHz DDR5 desktop memory using MaxxMem, it only has 6% faster read speed, but it outperforms desktop RAM with 22% faster copy speed and a huge 77% boost in write speed. Considering that the Radeon 890M extracts a block of this memory for operate as VRAM, this undoubtedly has an impact on the system’s gaming performance.

The downside is that it’s soldered to the Macbook-style motherboard, and Beelink only sells the 32GB SER9 configuration. If you’re elated with 32GB for life – which I think is most people – then great. However, if your operate case requires 64GB or more, you are out of luck as the RAM cannot be replaced or upgraded.

In terms of IO, there’s a 10Gb/s USB-C connector on the front and a single Type-A port, as well as a 40Gb/s USB4 port and another three Type-A ports on the back. There’s a choice of DisplayPort 1.4 or HDMI 2.1, network connectivity is supported by a Wi-Fi 6/Bluetooth 5.2 M.2 or 2.5G LAN card, as well as a set of four microphones, front and rear audio jacks, and a miniature pair of basic built-in speakers. Unscrew the screws on the bottom to open the cover and you’ll find a steel mesh dust filter and a tough SSD cooler block covering both M.2 PCIe 4.0 slots. So, although the storage is not expandable, you can at least expand the storage with an additional M.2 drive.

All in all, it’s a neat, super-compact all-aluminum case that’s silent under load. It’s quite well-equipped with IO, and is easily the best mini PC we’ve tested for 1080p gaming, just behind a discrete GPU machine like Minisforum’s G7 PT. Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 and Radeon 890M are a killer combo that you pay for at checkout; at $999/£761, it’s not a inexpensive mini-PC. However, if you want the best possible pixel stuffing in the smallest form factor available, the SER9 will be the solution for you.