Quote:
Originally Posted by I-Hate-Hulse
Has anyone here bought one of the Beelink Mini PC's? Something like one of these:
From time to time Amazon runs sales on these which are a lot less that what I can build one from a barebones kit + parts. Reviews are mostly good, outside of a few failures.
Still, I can't help but think these have a short life span. Or will send my info to the CCP...
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I bought this one for my parents for Christmas:
BeeLink SER5 Max. I paired it with a grey-market Office key to replace their 11-year-old Excel, Outlook, FreeCell, and browsing machine that I assembled for them.
Obviously not had it long enough for any durability issues to crop up, but I have been quite impressed by it. Right from the start the packaging was very premium-feeling, which always makes me feel optimistic that they put some care into the product itself.
The build quality surprised me in a good way. Nice materials, fairly thoughtful layout and good included extras. It came with a mounting plate to attach it to the VESA mount on a monitor, as well as a short HDMI cable just about right to reach your monitor ports if you mount on the back. Even the power brick looked and felt premium, being all matte-black with that kind of soft-touch plastic you get on some higher end stuff.
The bottom even pops off with 4 screws and has a spot down for a 2.5" drive with the data and power connections hard-mounted so you don't have to worry about cables. If I had one small complaint it's that the fan can get a touch loud when it ramps up under heavy load, but it rarely seemed to do that once Windows finished all its mysterious new installation background tasks.
My overall impression is that it looks good, feels good, is very snappy for things like browsing and office tasks, and I still can't figure out how they can put the whole thing together for that cheap. There's no way in hell I could even come close to the specs if I built it myself, and it's ridiculously tiny to boot.
As for spying on you, I really can't say. I will say that Wendell at Level1Techs on YouTube seems to like BeeLink quite a bit, and if he doesn't know what he's talking about, I don't know who does.
https://www.youtube.com/results?sear...1techs+beelink