This tiny little box stepped into the role that my Asus PM1855 desktop PC was just retired from ani it was decked out with a lot of the latest tech (sort of). So far I have been overwhelmingly pleased with my purcase. In fact I would like to have a dozen of these PC’s because they are as cute a a box of puppies. I have been a diehard fan of AMD’s microprocessors and GPU’s for over 20 years. I love their stuff as AMDs chips always uses less power, and they run as fast or faster than most of Intels stuff, and are also more tolerant of being overckocked. I have been honestly too disintresred in the games that are out now as compared to the first generation games like wolfenstien, and Warcraft because 20 years ago i could buy a game and i had complete ‘ownership’ or at least ‘complete control’ over whether or not i wanted an upgrade. Once upon a time a game would cost me one set dollar amount. But as soon as the gaming indutry got greedy, they started to sell software game titles (and Operating Systems) by monthly subscriptions, so I bailed out of the game scene. It just got too ridiculouslly expensive for me to keep up. Thus i I’m not able to give you a good review of this PC’s gaming performance capabilities. But for about $800 this little box would be very hard to beat because of all of its features and upgadability. –Like I said ; ‘as good as a box full of puppies’. I just bought this Little PC, and so i will come back after a more thourough evaluation…I think my wife would like one of these just for their cuteness factor. Cheers and have a good holiday season. I shall return.
20230331 Update.
This PC has so been rock solid in its performance I am just pleased. Although it does tend to get warmer when playing a game, like Diablo III. When watching online video from crunchyroll.com or netflix.com it doesn’t heat it up, but the game seems to spin the fan faster and driving out substansialy more heat. (of course I also tend bing when I play the games so that is also a factor). I like also like having 2 separate Ethernet ports as it allows me to switch between my network and my network’s DMZ at will, and of course I also have the WIFI option as well. If I get around to learning more about the Hypervisor in Windows 11 Pro then having three separate Ethernet ports in a virtual machine(s) environment should prove most interesting, and I am looking forward to it. Right now it makes monitoring and troubleshooting network issues much easier.
I have just finished outfiting my beelink with a two terrabyte M.2 SATA SSD, and a 1 terrabyte 2.5 inch SATA SSD. At first I mistakenly bought the wrong drive type. trust me when I say it is easy to do. In the case of the first Drive, I mistakenly inserted an M.2 Nvme2 style card into this internal slot. That should not have been possible. In fact, I can not believe that the notches on these M.2 card slots did NOT prevent me from inserting and trying to run this wrong NAND memory card into the wrong slot. But suprise! There is _nothing_ in the way that the cards are keyed, that prevents you from doing this. *AND*, I can’t believe it didn’t burn someting up in the computer when I turned it on, and tried to get the Disk Manager in windows to ‘talk to it’ –It couldn’t of course.
I made this error because the m.2 card right next to this slot inside the PC, *IS* an M.2 Nvme2 style SSD. It is also the boot drive ‘C:’ So I hope I can keep others from making my same mistake.
IF you By one of these PC’s, then be _sure_ to buy an m.2 SATA drive. –This is the card that has _2_ ‘keying notches’ on the card edge connector. It is *NOT* the M.2 Nvme2 type card which only has _1_ Keying notch on the card edge connector.
So now that the PC seesms to have escaped harm for this error on my part, I now have an additional 3 Terrabytes of relativly fast storage. About 500Mb/sec read/write speeds. And, the M.2 Nvme2 card that I bought and tried by mistake will not go to waste either. Because I bought an external drivebay enclosure for about $27, and now I have a one Terrabyte external M.2 Nvme2 drive, that I can carry around with me. It plugs into my PC’s USB C port so when I test throughput to this external drive it should prove ineresting because I am pretty sure that the Nvme2 card itself is capable of faster data transfers than the USB C port that it will be connected to. I should then be able to more accurately know the top speed of the much vaunted USB C port. We shall see. I will post what I get for drive read/write speeds. I benchmark my disks with a little program called ‘ATTO Disk benchmark’, so I will post all that a bit later. I use this program because it is free, the program itself is very small, and it is adequate for the purpose.
Let’s see, umm the GPU seesm rock solid I have no issue with that, but I do take issue with AMD imposing their digital rights stuff into the software that goes with this particular silicon hardware that _I_own_. That bugs me, but then again, Microsoft is doing the same thing with their Windows operating system. Every year we loose more, and more of the actual computer hardware that we ourselves buy. Then we link it immeadiately to the ball and chain that runs from my PC to various coroprate servers. Then they that corporation begin to assert themselves in lots of ways. They update the software whenever they want, they reboot my PC whenever they want, they tell me what to do and God only knows what I have reaqlly signed up for every time I have installed software and clicked to ‘accept’ an unread legal agreement. Anyway I am sorry about all of my meandering. I will return with some data next time. And maybe I will stick to the topic next time as well. It could happen.
2023
I forgot that last time I should have mentioned that I installed 64Gb of DDR4 RAM. Oh, and by the way, the RAM, and all internal SSD drives, are made by “Crucial”. Personally, I like Crucial’s stuff. And no one is paying me to say that. I know some about their history how it all began with Micron up in Idaho, blah blah. the bottom line is; Crucial makes good memory products. I am also a Western Digital fan, but let’s do that another time too.
I kind of expected the heat produced by the ehaust fan to immeadiately skyrocket, but so far, it has not. In fairness though, I also have not put any stresses on the system either. I am pretty sure that heat and workload will be directly related just as physics says that they will. It is just that all of this active silicon is in a box that is very small. It is also in a room that has a lot of dust. I live in Windy Wyoming with my window open year round, so yeah dust. lots of it.
Believe it or not, I believe my self to be a ‘fresh air fiend’. But in reality, I know that I am a living contradiction. Logically there would be way less dust in my house, and cleaner air in my lungs *if* I just would just shut the window, but I can’t do it. Weird huh? Anyway I am concerned about heat and monitoring heat because the air inlet is actually quite a small area out of all of the PC’s outer housing. According to the ‘dust’ that collects on the air inlet areaa, I apparently have at least 2 fans or else I have one fan with 2 inlets. 2 fans makes more sense to me, but I would have to completely take the PC appart to get to them, and to verify this. I do not look forward to that, as it is in the top side just to the left and right of center. I would guess each of the fans to be 60 millimeters in diameter. that is what the dust collecting on the screen is telling me. All of the exhaust is coming out on the side of PC where the display, USB, and Ethernet Cables attach. So I have allowed space behind that, to accomodate adequate dissipation of the heat. If this PC ever ‘decided’ to go into thermal runaway, it could wreck itself very quickly. Say for instance you lost a temprature sensor, and let’s say it occoured during a video game. The fan woul never come on, and the software would fail to shut the PC off when it exceeded temprature limits. *And* for the same reason too. You wouldn’t know anything was wrong until it BSOD’ed (crashed). I am hoping that the company will soon make the effort to write a small temprature monitoring program. It doesn’t have to be fancy. Even a text based readout is better than the nothing I have now.
The BIOS actually kind of terrifies me. And I have been working computers for 47 years, begining with avionics embeded computers and other similar stuff for military aircraft. So when I say that the BIOS is kind of scary, I hope you either have the manual, (I couldn’t find it) or you better hope you are very lucky and have excellent Karma.
Because the BIOS is a potential mine field without some kind of written guide. Especially if you want to overclock the hardware. When the companty ‘ASUS’ first started out making the most kick-ass motherboards years ago, they had really good manuals packed in with the motherboard. And they were a Taiwanese company too. Now, 20 year later, ASUS is still a player. I hope this company, the one that produced this PC will soon, or have published already, some decent and detailed documentation to go with this PC. I’m not talking about a basic user manual, I mean they need to write and publish a real in-depth manual, so that I can tune things and not lock myself out. or crash the hardware, or have a booting ball-up at system restart. AZW Are you listening? Where is your Motherboard and BIOS referance and/or service manual?
Where is my detailed and comprehensive .pdf file equivilant of a written manual for this PC? I know that this is a Taiwanese brand, but I _still_ need some written guidance.
I will probablly find it on the disk. That would be embarrassing. I haven’t given up yet, so I will ammend this later if I find it.
I managed to stumble upon the nessaceary setting(s) to get the BIOS to recognize the new M.2 SATA SSD, but I don’t feel like I should be the one to tell you what I did to make it work because I am honestly not sure what I did that made it work. So yeah, sorry about that. Also, I did find instructions on how to do it online, but once again, I forgot to get that too. Yeah, I know, I can be a pinhead.
Will try to document some of the various information flow speeds later.
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