Beelink SER9 review

Our VerdictAMD’s latest mobile chip paired with the Radeon 890M make the Beelink SER9 the best mini-PC for 1080p gaming that we’ve tested.

Our Verdict

AMD’s latest mobile chip paired with the Radeon 890M make the Beelink SER9 the best mini-PC for 1080p gaming that we’ve tested.

ForAwesome APUVirtually silentGreat 1080p performanceAgainstSoldered RAMLimited upgrade pathNot cheap

ForAwesome APUVirtually silentGreat 1080p performance

AgainstSoldered RAMLimited upgrade pathNot cheap

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AMD’s Strix PointRyzenAPUs landed this year, and began rolling out in notebooks to a chorus of high praise. These smashing mobile processors come armed with AMD’s new RDNA 3.5 integrated graphics architecture, aka the Radeon 890M. Laptop manufacturers often select low-power variants of APUs, or set lower TDP limits, in order to preserve battery life and minimise heat. That’s prudent in a mobile context, but what if your use-case is the desktop? I say plug it in and give it all the watts!

Enter theBeelink SER9 mini PC, sporting the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370: AMD’s top-shelf Strix Point APU. Yep, new chip generation, baffling new chip designation… it’s almost like AMD is in competition with Intel not simply for market-share, but to see who can troll consumers the hardest.

At any road, you may be assured that the HX 370 is a step up in performance from AMD’s Zen 4 Ryzen 8000-series APUs, and outperforms Intel’s Meteor Lake headliner, the Core Ultra 9 185H.

Strix Point also marks an architectural gearshift for AMD. Rather than fielding a bunch of identical cores like previous Ryzen CPUs, it’s a dual-cluster design of four Zen 5 cores which run up to 5.1GHz, and eight Zen 5c (compact) cores, which are smaller, more power-efficient, generate less heat, have half the L3 cache, and max out at 3.3GHz. Intel led the way on the big/little philosophy with its 12th Gen CPUs, but this is new ground for AMD.

SER9 specsAPU:AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370iGPU:Radeon 890MMemory:32GB LPDDR5 7500MHzStorage:1TB M.2 SSDWireless:WiFi 6, Bluetooth 5.2I/O:4x USB 3.2, 1x USBC, 1x USB 4, 2.5G LAN, 2x 3.5mm audio jack, 1x DP 1.4, 1x HDMI 2.0, quad-mic arrayPrice:$999 | £761

SER9 specs

APU:AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370iGPU:Radeon 890MMemory:32GB LPDDR5 7500MHzStorage:1TB M.2 SSDWireless:WiFi 6, Bluetooth 5.2I/O:4x USB 3.2, 1x USBC, 1x USB 4, 2.5G LAN, 2x 3.5mm audio jack, 1x DP 1.4, 1x HDMI 2.0, quad-mic arrayPrice:$999 | £761

There’s also a heavier focus on AI—the clue’s in the name—so the AI 9 HX 370 also sports an NPU (Neural Processing Unit) capable of delivering 50 TOPS, or trillions of operations per second, the defining metric for NPUs. Beelink claims this rises to 80 TOPS if the CPU and iGPU cores get in on the action, which far exceeds the 40 TOPS threshold required to qualify for Microsoft’s Copilot-branded PC initiative. The SER9 isn’t Copilot branded, but there’s plenty of poke there to manage useful AI tasks such as voice recognition, smart noise-suppression in calls and such.

Beelink suggests the SER9 is also suitable for text-prompt art-gen models such as stable diffusion; it’ll never be as quick as setting a hench GPU loose on the task, but it’s a nice-to-have all the same. AI still has bags of untapped potential, but my interest won’t be intensively piqued until NPC behaviour and dialogue in games starts getting the Neural Processing treatment.

The SER9 can run the HX 370 in balanced (54W) or performance (65W) modes, and happily I found that switching to the latter makes zero difference to its noise output—it cools the APU effectively and remains extremely quiet even at full tilt. In fact, the only thing that kicked the cooling-fan into overdrive was Forza Motorsport’s shader-compiling process, which that particular title seems to want to do every time I blink.

Benchmarking highlights a solid performance uplift over the previous top iGPU, AMD’s Radeon 780M. Which is no surprise, as the 890M features 25% more Compute Units, Shader Units and RT cores than the 780M, among other improvements. This makes it capable of knocking out 5.9 TFLOPS to the 780M’s 4.3 TFLOPS. So: bigger, better, faster, more, basically.

Not every game is going to see such a dramatic improvement, but it’s still gains all round for the 890M at 1080p and medium settings, when set against the 780M. Warhammer III sees performance hikes of 26% in campaign and 25% in battle, reaching 38 fps and 53 fps respectively. Forza Motorsport sees a 14% uplift to 53 fps, though Homeworld 3’s built-in benchmark, which always benefits from greater CPU grunt, only sees a boost of 1 fps, so no change there. The 780M was always happy with indie titles, and the 890M even more so; I threw Stray and Subnautica its way and it returned averages of 68 fps and 82 fps respectively. So it’s all good news. In a nutshell, the Radeon 890M is the new king of the iGPU hill.

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(Image credit: Future)(Image credit: Future)(Image credit: Future)(Image credit: Future)(Image credit: Future)(Image credit: Future)

(Image credit: Future)