Beelink MINI-S12 Mini PC, 12th Gen Intel Alder Lake N95 3.4GHz Processor Mini Computer, 8GB DDR4 RAM 256GB SSD Business Mini Desktop PC, 4K Dual Display HDMI/USB3/1000M LAN

5 If you are using it for the right thing… Likely 0 for gaming!
Long review because I agonised over buying this so trying to help others doing the same. Quick summary; yes it’s bloody brilliant, amazing value for money and not too good to be true, more details below!Bought this as a cheap second PC for self employed office work and for kids to do homework and replace a dying Windows 10 machine (sick of kids sleeping on laptops, using them as trays to carry drinks and yanking the chargers out of them – bonus already; it will work their TV on the wall and you can hardly fit a can of coke on this never mind a pizza!).I’m quite a demanding Office PC user and I set it up last night with full installation of Office 365, all my data and have used it across 3 office Apps, 10+ web pages loaded in edge, background performance monitoring, scanning, Co-Pilot App (partly to help me set it up but also other random advice to mess with it), displaying to a 4K and HD monitors simultaneously so basically, pretty heavy office use and it copes just fine with that – using it for this and CPU with all this loaded up is at 20 – 30% load (v. use of cores and max clock speed) in NZXT CAM diagnostics, though 30 – 80% in Task Manager – so basically it is being quite highly worked, however, it is not stuttering and it is coping pretty well. At start up for the first 5 mins it is absolutely maxed out 100% on the processor doing anti-virus, search indexing and other background windows bits but it doesn’t interfere with using it at all. The fan can blow hard (processing updates last night it was quite noisy at times), however, just doing office stuff this morning after it I have to literally put my ear to it to hear the fan so I would accept on that basis it is silent in operation!As a user I would never have guessed it was doing so much in the background so I am calling it that if this is what you need; 100% yes it WILL do it and it is not too good to be true and it is lovely to use – if my work computer worked this fast my days would be much less painful!I would caution (and reading some of the reviews below people have returned on this basis); one thing it is absolutely rubbish at is unpacking Windows Updates (the key “2025-01 Cumulative Update for Windows 11 Version 24H2 for x64-based Systems (KB5050009)” took 4 hours or so!). When you open it from delivery it will need many many updates and overall it took from 4pm to 1am fiddling to get it up and sorted so it would restart without a black screen saying “don’t turn me off” (you shouldn’t, but you can and I did!). Having gone through this pain (mostly panicking I’d bought a dud because of issues noted in reviews!) I can report it it DOES do the updates in the background but several times I just canned it when it looked like it was doing nothing at all even watching task manager, restarted it and tried again. Some updates also failed and I asked Co-Pilot to help me find them online and managed to separately install.If you don’t fancy that pain my advice having gone through it would be that windows does fail updates itself, sorts itself, and it will get there eventually – just be patient. Maybe even just leave it on overnight to sort itself out (check sleep settings so you aren’t just both asleep!) and for more peace of mind don’t try reboot / turn it off until you can see it finally saying windows is fully up to date on windows update.Other panics from reading 1* reviews – it is Windows 11 Pro; the licence checks out with Microsoft and the updates update accordingly. I scanned it for viruses before anything else (another thing that it isn’t the fastest at – my main desktop checked 3 bigger disks in a quarter of the time making sure ‘I didn’t bring anything home’) and it came up clean following install of the latest virus definitions.Will it break in 12 months? I don’t know. I have smoked a mini-PC in the past (kids playing Minecraft cooked it!) but NZXT Cam software is telling me that it has the processor temp well under control – max I’ve seen is 70oC but for literally minutes before the fan caught up with it – generally even the evil processing of the windows updates and 100% processor use it was reporting 55oC – 60oC which should be long term sustainable. Not the fastest RAM, not the fastest processor, not the fastest SSD you can buy but the key to this system is it is so well balanced everything hits the same bottleneck and isn’t stressing anything. As long as windows doesn’t ‘fat out’ with future features – but as I noted, I’m already Co-Piloting, never close a browser window and all the animation settings are left on – and I don’t end up with too much time on my hands and end up video and photo editing I am optimistic. If it does break I am gonna cry a whole lot less than I did when the teenager broke a £1000 laptop inside a year of “borrowing it”… (“I didn’t” … “well it won’t charge because the sockets ripped out and the impression of your face is in the lid so that’s why the hinge is snapped” … “yeah but it wasn’t me” … “hmmm…” … “can I have a new one I need one for Uni?” …).So currently 100% happy with this for the £179 I bought it for; next level option would have been more than twice the price and for no net benefit. If it goes back to £200+ probably is still genuinely worth it as long as under £250 (Jan ’25). If you want to game I’d honestly buy a console or be prepared for minimum £600 (£250 on the graphics card…) and obviously this is not even being sold as that and it isn’t that.On the other hand if there any good offers for a second hand teenager that might be an even better way to solve my IT woes… Fair warning, their rent is due, they will soon be coming back indebted and in a few years might need a house deposit before you can kick them out!N.B. I bought the N150, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD – It comes up as Alder N150 not Twin Lake Processor N150 on it’s own diagnostics report but it does do it’s thing!).

small, powerful, efficient HA server
Bought as an upgrade from a RPI4 for a home assistant server and it does this well, much faster than the PI (especially noticeable on esphome compilation tasks) the downside is that is consumes around 8 to 9W on idle when compared to the RPI around 4W. there is plenty of headroom in terms of additional tasks with background CPU usage on a modest HA install is around 4% to 5%. i only used it briefly on the desk but didn’t notice it was noisy during HA install – where i would have expected load to be reasonable.Plenty of Ram usually with around 10MB free. system feels fair more responsive and has been reliable over the last few weeks or so.ProsPerformance,compatibility with HA (network port, USB for ZHA,, wireless, various system sensors etc),quiet and reliable (so far)Very small formfactor – easy to hideConsdouble the power consumption (8W on idle running HA)seems a waste to wipe the included win11

Nice little unit, but lacks Linux kernel support – for now.
I wanted to get a mini PC that I could use to run Linux Mint. However, at the moment, it seems that the N150 isn’t supported fully with the kernel. I couldn’t get any decent frame rates out of it, probably due to the lack of proper hardware acceleration drivers. As it could be 6+ months before it is resolved, I had no choice but to reset the PC and return it.

Great value, tiny, powerful, silent
Great value. This is a tiny, powerful, silent pc.I installed Ubuntu Server it and initially had issues getting Plex working with hardware acceleration.The N150 CPU is quite new so the Linux kernel needs to be updated. After upgrading the kernel the hardware acceleration in Plex started working.This PC can happily transcode 4k using only about 15-20% CPU.I’ve added pics to show the scale next to a 2.5″ external drive and an AA battery. It’s seriously tiny. Even smaller than a NUC.

Alles gut.

Muy práctico por lo pequeño que es, cumple su función de Office, ver películas, escribir correos electrónicos, firma electrónica,autofirma etc.Tiene espació para poner una SSD sata Interna,asi ampliar el espacio. silencioso

Der Mini-PC erfüllt meine Erwartungen, läuft super bei Office Anwendungen.