PROs: This Beelink SEi8 Mini PC has a i5-8279U SOC. It is very fast. Many SOC comparisons rate the i5-8279U performance in the top 30 percent of all modern SOCs for overall performance. The mainboard also seems quite good. The included 16GB RAM is plenty for my purposes. The 500GB SSD drive is lightning fast. Single FHD 1080p HDMI performance is also excellent using either HDMI port.
The preinstalled Windows 11 Professional OS works well. I also was able to repartition the SSD successfully and thereafter was able to install a Debian-based Linux distributon with a UEFI GRUB2 bootloader. The machine easily boots to either Windows or Linux as I please.
Power consumption is much lower than my 2018 HP laptop, another bonus.
CONs: Following the included instructions to flash update UEFI Firmware to enable Auto Power On functionality DID NOT WORK. i would like to use Auto Power On. So, I consider that this is an unfortunate shortcoming. I have contacted neither the seller nor the manufacturer about this problem yet. However, I intend to do so.
The included mounting bracket is too small to attach the SEi8 to the rear of my FHD TV (1080p HDMI monitor). Also, because I have many peripheral devices attached to the SEi8 box, which will also need to be mounted, I will need to fabricate a custom bracket for that purpose.
| Screen Resolution | 3840 x 2160 |
|---|---|
| Max Screen Resolution | 3840 x 2160 pixels |
| Processor | 3.7 GHz apple_ci5 |
| RAM | 16 GB DDR4 |
| Hard Drive | 500 GB SSD |
| Graphics Coprocessor | Intel Iris Plus Graphics |
| Chipset Brand | Intel |
| Card Description | Integrated |
| Wireless Type | Bluetooth, 802.11ax |
