Beelink SEi12 Mini PC Review

Introduction, Specifications, and Pricing

Mini PCs have become increasingly popular, especially over the last year or so. With that comes a plethora of relatively "new" vendors to the marketplace, and we have had several of them reach out to us for reviews. One of these vendors was Beelink, who offered us their SEi12, a 4x4 small form factor offering using Intel 12th Gen CPUs.

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The SEI12 is offered in two SKUs, with several "sub-SKUs" underneath, which depict the memory and storage installed from the factory. Our sample of the SEi12 is the Core i7-12650H offering; this gives this Mini PC six performance cores and four efficient cores, with hyper-threading a total of 16 threads. Memory support includes DDR4, with two SO-DIMM slots supporting 3200MHz sticks with a max capacity of 64GB; our sample had 32GB of Crucial 3200MHz.

The expansion includes NVMe m.2 and 2.5" SATA storage support with one slot for each. It's also possible that the m.2 Wi-Fi card could be upgraded to something more modern than the AX201 that's included. Connectivity, on the other hand, includes dual Type-A USB 3.2 on the front panel alongside a single USB-C and 3.5mm audio jack, while the rear of the unit houses two USB 2.0 ports, gigabit ethernet and display outputs that include HDMI and DisplayPort.

The pricing of the Beelink SEi12, as configured above, comes in at $599.

Beelink SEi12 Mini PC

	Today	Yesterday	7 days ago	30 days ago
	$469.00	$469.00	-	$469.00	Buy
	$549.00	$549.00	$549.00	$549.00	Buy
* Prices last scanned on 6/1/2024 at 5:12 am CDT - prices may not be accurate, click links above for the latest price. We may earn an affiliate commission.

Overview

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The packaging for the SEI12 is very colorful and plays off the Intel wafer design.

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The SEi includes the power adapter on the far right and HDMI cables on the opposite. There is also a mounting plate included with the hardware.

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Unboxing the SEi12, we see a standard NUC form factor. The front offers three USB 3.2, the audio jack, and the power button in red. Far left, there is a clear CMOS button tucked into the chassis.

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The backside of the Beelink includes the cooling exhaust out the top of the unit. We have connectivity, including gigabit ethernet and two USB 2.0 down below, with both display outputs mentioned in the introduction on the far right.

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Internally, the design is a bit interesting. Once the bottom cover is removed, we have a 2.5" drive tray that is secured to the chassis as well.

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Under the drive tray, we have access to the NVMe slot up top and SO-DIMM slots at the bottom.

BIOS/UEFI

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The BIOS for the Beelink is the older style keyboard menu. This includes hardware information on the main tab, including CPU, memory, and reported clock speeds. The advanced menu is where most of the configuration will happen; in this menu, we have options for connectivity, power, and super I/O; there is also a hardware monitor along with settings for NVMe and CSM. Surprisingly, we did find some overclocking options in this menu as well that allowed us to change the bclk of the 12650H. The chipset menu offers options for SATA and USB devices along with audio.

System/CPU Benchmarks

Cinebench

Cinebench is a long-standing render benchmark that has been heavily relied upon by both Intel and AMD to highlight their newest platforms during unveils. The benchmark has two tests: a single-core workload utilizing one thread or 1T. There is also a multi-threaded test that uses all threads or nT of a tested CPU.

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Our Mini PC charts have grown quickly over the last few months. The SEi12, with its 12650H kicked off testing with an R23 single thread score of 1310, unfortunately putting it last in our charts.

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Multi-thread in R23 was a touch higher at 8777, this score still has the unit towards the bottom of our charts.

BAPCo CrossMark

CrossMark™ is an easy-to-run native cross-platform benchmark that measures the overall system performance and system responsiveness using models of real-world applications. CrossMark™ supports devices running Windows, iOS, and macOS platforms.

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CrossMark offered an opposite view of the Beelink, with a 1766 overall score, the SEi12 lands top five in our charts.

Geekbench 6

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Geekbench CPU threw in both single and multi-thread scores for the SEi12, for single thread we picked up 2175, while multi-thread landed at 8006. These scores put the Beelink a touch better than the AS5 from GEEKOM.

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Geekbench GPU scored 11512 for OpenCL and 14771 for Vulkan.

UL Benchmarks

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We kick off our UL benchmark stack with PCMark Extended. In this workload, Beelink scored 4682 overall, which lands third from the bottom in our chart above.

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The first half of our CPU Profile results once again pin the Beelink at the bottom of our charts, the 12650H picking up 871 for a single thread and 1493 for two threads.

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Hitting the second part of our CPU Profile workload, the 12650H in the SEi12 remains at the bottom of our charts, this time picking up just 4168 points at sixteen threads.

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Storage Benchmark within 3Dmark picked up an overall score of 2253, this pushed the SEi12 towards the middle of the pack.

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Putting the SEi12 to the test, we ran it through Time Spy to get an idea of how well it would game. With 12th gen integrated graphics this machine pulled a score of 1284.

Final Thoughts

The build quality of the Beelink SEi12 was good in testing. The chassis is robust all around, though we do have some concerns about the cloth-type material that Beelink chose for the top. Internally, it is quite cumbersome to swap out memory or NVMe storage, as you must remove the 2.5" drive tray anytime you want access.

Connectivity and expansion are both good but not great. We have dual USB 2.0 on the rear of the unit that will be snatched up quickly by your keyboard and mouse while wired ethernet connectivity peaks at gigabit speeds. Wi-Fi is again decent; with an Intel AX201, you at least get access to 5GHz networks, and it is perhaps upgradable to an AX211 if needed. The dual display outputs can both do 4K60p, which is probably the best feature we have come across in the SEi12, while internal storage is another plus with Gen4 NVMe support.

Into testing, the Beelink SEi12 suffers a bit here; we suspect the cooling isn't enough to handle the 12650H because we had the nearly identical GEEKOM Mini IT12 in the lab not long ago, and as you have seen in the charts, it performed much better. That said, the SEi12 did not do well with CPU-heavy workloads like R23, Geekbench, or 3Dmark CPU Profile; in all three of those workloads, the Mini PC came out at the bottom of our charts. Crossmark was perhaps its best workload, and it turned in a score of 1766 for a top-five placement in that chart. Storage, too, was good for the SEI12; it posted a score of 2253. Time Spy didn't help matters at all; the 64EU integrated graphics couldn't handle much and landed at 1284, which is the last in that chart.

As for pricing, the Beelink SEi12 is a tricky platform, with the 12650H, 32GB of RAM, and 512GB of storage it comes in at $549. This puts it in heavy competition with the GEEKOM Mini IT12, which comes in at the same price of $549 and offers 12650H, 32GB of memory, and 1TB of storage but also has light years better connectivity that includes 2.5Gbe, Wi-Fi 6E, and dual USB4.