As the streaming wars continue to heat up a casualty in the fight is the direct consumer: you and me. How many emails have you gotten that say "Hey we're going to charge you more money because we know you'll say yes lol."
Since I have tons of music and shows in digital format, I wanted a way to run a plex server in my house not on an old laptop. I wanted something that was easy to use, light on power consumption, and could perform. I think the beelink does all of these. I almost went with linux but decided on Windows because I have more experience there and so many things about this were new to me that I didn't want to get overwhelmed. I think in the future I'll upgrade to a Linux version in a few years (as hardware gets better too), but currently it's more than fine.
For some power notes, I see 2 watts when it's powered off completely. On start up it uses 25-45 watts, and with two external USB hard drives plugged in and it actively streaming via plex on my LAN it uses up about 25 watts. On idle, once powered up with non resource intensive things running, it's about 20 watts.
I threw folding@home on and with both the GPU and CPU doing work units I'm consuming 40-45 watts. So power consumption will largely be based on what you're doing with it. I think 480 watt hours (20x24) would be a good budget number for anyone looking for that value. If you're not using external hard drives it will probably be a bit lower but I don't know how much. I think beelink makes a unit that accepts 12v vs this one that takes 19v. The AC/DC transformer (power adapter) is warm to the touch so obviously some of that power is going into the heat and conversion. This is probably information overload for many, but for anyone offgrid or otherwise miserly about their power it may be good to know. Hence why long term for me I'll probably end up with a 12v version (more efficient) and maybe Linux just because of stability and processor efficiency. But that's a personal thing, I haven't had any problems with Windows on this machine so far.
I would highly recommend more memory. It came with two 8gb cards and I happen to have a spare 16gb laying around so I tossed that in and it made a HUGE difference. It seems like 16gb is about as much ram as my personal setup needed, just to run at a baseline. Opening a browser on that machine was painful. So now with 24gb it's still sucking up the 16gb but it leaves me with a ton of overhead.
Logistics wise I put this small box and its two hard drives (mirrored via Windows' "Storage Spaces") right behind my laptop. My external keyboard/mouse/monitor are all on a usb hub that plugs into a USB C port on my macbook. When I want to work with the beelink I just plug the single hub connection and pop it into the front of the beelink: nice and easy.
For a few hundred bucks I have a great home theater / plex server in my home that is also getting other digital media via the internet via various methods.
| Screen Resolution | 3840 x 2160 |
|---|---|
| Max Screen Resolution | 3840 x 2160 pixels |
| Processor | 3.3 GHz amd_r_series |
| RAM | 32 GB DDR5 |
| Hard Drive | 500 GB SSD |
| Chipset Brand | AMD |
| Card Description | Integrated |
| Wireless Type | Bluetooth, 802.11ax |
| Number of USB 2.0 Ports | 1 |
| Number of USB 3.0 Ports | 2 |
