Beelink MINI S12 Mini PC, 12th Gen Intel Alder Lake-N95 Processor (up to 3.4GHz) Mini Computer, 12GB DDR4 256GB SSD Office Mini Desktop PC Windows 11 Home, 4K Dual HDMI/WiFi6/BT5.2/LAN 2.5G

I already have a couple of Beelink devices and I was looking for a power efficient, dedicated device, to run some automated/scheduled tasks on my network, which I have been running from one of my other bigger and more power hungry PCs, so this little thing has fitted in perfectly. You can run this out of the box, no issues, the setup is straight forward and stress free, connected to the wired network instantly, and the Wifi also works well but I only really use wired devices for this kind of thing but am sure the Wifi is solid too. I went for the 500G storage as I was always going to put a different drive in (a Gen3 NVMe, so figured paying for 1TB was pointless), so planned on something faster as the installed drive is a PCIe SATA SSD not an NVMe drive, so it is not as fast as an NVMe (still pretty quick mind you, and will suit many folks just fine, just expect SSD speeds not NVMe speeds), which I have done, re-installed Windows and had the thing up and running within an hour of taking delivery. I also stuck in an additional drive in the second slot (Which I have now removed as the heat was slightly higher with two drives installed) to see how it would boot into Linux Ubuntu (from another device so Ubuntu Server was already on the drive) and it booted up first time, only issue was the Intel network ports, but this was easy enough to fix, and in some cases you will need to download the drives directly from Intel for some other operating systems or if you reinstall W11 clean. Overall, this is super little device, don't expect it win any races but it is a great choice for lots of reasons, power efficient, space saving, great value, and is easy to get setup and going, has a fair amount of ports, no USB-C mind you, I have mine running headless, no keyboard or mouse, just the power and network cable plugged in and RDP in or SSH in. Noise wise, it is really very quiet, even when the CPU is running at 100%, temps are good, so overall for me this is a perfect choice and perfectly fits its intended purpose. Well worth a punt if you are looking for something with a tiny footprint, tiny power consumption and super quiet, decent build quality, there are other mini-pc options if you need more horsepower too.

You can get cheaper mini PCs with this chipset, I decided to go for a more established 'off brand' in the mini-pc space. I have misophonia and have to be very careful when choosing small forma factor anything if there is a fan in it. Thankfully this mini-PC is fine for me and the fan noise during heavy use is more than bearable. Its a snappy device, its no speed demon but does everything I need for general web browsing and is saving me money due to the miniscule power draw compared to my main PC which has not been turned on from I received it! I hope it gives me a few years before I need to replace it, I shall update if anything happens in the coming months/years.

Cannot fault this at all. I bought it to be a media streaming server. Hasn't had a single fault yet. I installed Ubuntu, installed docker and Jellyfin. Works amazing. I can stream 4k and transcode it on the fly with not a single stutter. It's cheap to to run as it has low power requirements so I keep it running 24/7. Small enough to tuck away and never think about it again. I installed ssh and don't need it to be attached to a monitor. I connect it via ethernet so cannot comment on the WiFi capabilities.

This is a great little PC with decent performance for the form factor and good connectivity in terms of ports. The addition of two HDMI cables (short and long) and a mounting bracket is nice to have. However, despite what they say, Linux support is limited. The latest Linux kernel as of April 2023 doesn't support the N100 wireless or bluetooth chipsets due to a bug and Intel are seemingly not being very helpful fixing it from what I'm read. Initially Linux also didn't detect the true resolution of my monitor, defaulting to low resolution, but I manually set the kernel version to the very latest and this was fixed. Overall it's a great device and I'm happy I bought it, but having to mess about with kernel versions and resort to wired keyboard, mouse, ethernet, etc, is a bit frustrating.

Defective unit, did not even switch on! Thankfully, I could return it back to Amazon for a full refund.

Good product

Wow, it actually surprised me how good this tiny PC really is. First off, it won’t set any benchmark records for gaming, but as long as the games are light it will run them. Old DOS games no problem, even Fortnite will run. But the desktop performance shocked me, it’s snappy and fluid, making you think it has more than a 4 core intel N100 cpu. Web browsing and YouTube are smooth fast and 4K plays no problem. Office and windows in general work smoothly too. The thermals never reached above 80c and that’s during a video encode using handbrake, even the power consumption was excellent at a lowly 25 watts, at idle it's as low as 0.3 watts! Another amazing thing… it supports intel quicksync meaning H.265 and H.264 encoding is rapid and never dropped below 90FPS. Setting this up as a media server using plex or jellyfin is also a breeze and the incuded hardware encoding ensure video will be smooth and rapid during playback. Add another NVMe SSD and you can have a really amazing all round media server or desktop PC I love it, oh and I forgot, it’s tiny.