Mini PCs have found their niche: Whether as a space-saving office solution for businesses or as a media player in the living room, the form factor means that the possibilities of use are almost limitless. These handy cubes, on which the patient software or the like runs, for example, can also be found again and again in doctors’ practices. Of course you pay a certain price for the compact design: of course no RX 6900XT or similar powerful gimmicks fit in a housing with dimensions of up to fifteen by fifteen centimeters. Nevertheless, the demand remains high and companies such as Beelink establish themselves here.

The Beelink U59 Pro Mini-PC is such a device and with its housing of 124 x 113 x 42 mm falls into the category where every centimeter counts. More than a CPU with integrated graphics chip, RAM and 2.5″ or m.2 SSDs rarely fit in there. In fact, there is much more detail, so here is a list of all the components:

• Processor: Intel 11th Gen N5105 (4C/4T, 4M cache, 2.9GHz)
• Operating System: Windows 11 Pro 64-bit
• RAM: 16 GB 2400 Mhz DDR4 (2 x 8 GB);
• Storage: 512GB M.2 2280 SATA SSD
• Additional storage slot: 2.5″ 7mm SATA SSD/HDD
• Ethernet: 2 x 1000Mbps LAN
• WLAN: IEEE 802.11ac, Wi-Fi 5; including Bluetooth: 4.0
• Price: approx. 349 euros

High standard so the whole. In principle, you cannot complain and the processing quality is also correct. However, the first impression leaves a slightly hairy taste on the tongue: there is no real high-quality unboxing feeling. Compressed into an ordinary cardboard box – in transparent bags with a zipper – next to the device itself is an adapter to hang it on a monitor, the power pack (12V 2A), an ordinary “User Manual” without much content and two HDMI cables of different lengths. Probably the shorter one for use on the back of a monitor. So far simple.

come from disillusionment

After the first boot, the typical Windows 11 installation interface is revealed. However, the optical elements are curiously much larger than usual (probably due to the lack of the correct graphics driver – too bad) and everything looks very sluggish. After the initial installation, there are tons of drivers to install; it’s not an OEM out-of-the-box experience. When running the Windows updates it quickly becomes apparent that much smaller processes seem to take much longer and the update runs until the first necessary reboot
lasted almost two hours.

While one or the other interface driver was certainly missing at the time, it’s surprisingly easy to figure out where the pinches are: apparently the CPU can’t really handle Windows 11’s load-balancing, and it doesn’t help that it used both. main memory as the M.2 SSD are quite unspectacular OEM hardware from the manufacturer “AZW”. However, once the typical Windows updates and associated drivers, especially the motherboard’s proprietary interface drivers, are installed, the Beelink U59 Pro performs more efficiently and can finally get to work.

Quick at the office? Only without multitasking.

Installing the usual benchmark tool is a good test right away, because download and copy processes shouldn’t cause any problems, even with a pure office device. Unfortunately, the U59 Pro went to its knees here unexpectedly, but regularly: only the copying process from a USB 3.0 stick to the internal hard drive took considerably longer than expected. However, the entire operating system slowed down significantly and reacted with delays – for example when opening Explorer, minimizing windows and the like.

The disillusionment came faster than expected and yet real values ​​were needed. A short test with CrystalDiskMark (v8.0.4) found that the internally installed 2280 M.2 SSD still achieves acceptable results in the sequential run. But a contrast of 30 MB/s between read and write tests is unusual. However, once the random 4 kibibyte tests come into play, the read speed drops dramatically in comparison. Despite the combination of only one queue and only one thread, the U59 Pro delivers a read speed of just under 15 MB/s in the benchmark.

Similar inconsistencies were found in the standard PCMark 10 benchmark: the Essentials score is more than adequate, but once spreadsheets are used, you notice that the CPU is overloaded. A productivity score of approximately 3600 points is in the lower average of the Celeron N5105 series in the PCMark database. It thus corresponds to the first impression of performance in purely everyday processes.

You can get started with that; Something like that should only be fun to a limited extent. By the way, a low room temperature seems to be of fundamental importance: after a few minutes of increased processor load, the mini-PC gets very hot.

And streaming over the internet? So…

Since both the manufacturer and the Amazon– in addition to 4K video playback, while several office applications opened in parallel are advertised with no performance loss, I could not leave the test to the example. When watching a YouTube video in 4K at 60 fps via Microsoft Edge, the effective processor load in the task manager increased by 30% quite quickly. Netflix and Amazon Prime registered just over 40% processor load, although the Netflix interface crashed twice during the test.

As a passionate video gamer, I couldn’t resist checking out Xbox Cloud Streaming and Steam Remote Play. The latter turned out to be very unstable, because in addition to the 12 minute (!) Steam installation process, the integrated Intel graphics processor couldn’t keep up with the decompression and the process crashed again and again.

Things looked better for Microsoft’s cloud gaming service. But here too the image was never without compression artifacts and unfortunately all inputs showed a noticeable delay. Incidentally, despite the direct gigabit connection to the router. Since the U59 Pro doesn’t support Wi-Fi6, I decided against going this route anyway. Still cool: thanks to the two 1 GBe network ports, the device could theoretically be in two different networks. Due to the lack of a suitable environment, I was not able to test the feasibility of Windows here without much extra effort. At least port throughput didn’t jump back and forth between 1,000 full-duplex and 100 half-duplex, as can be the case with Realtek network cards on popular motherboards.

Conclusion

Designed for pure office service, the Beelink U59 Pro should certainly cut a fine figure in many a doctor’s office or post office due to its reasonable price. Overall, the performance is exactly what you can expect from a Celeron-based mini PC, but no more. As soon as several things happen at the same time or the M.2 SSD is simply pushed to its limits, everything occasionally comes to its knees. The U59 Pro is absolutely fine for checking email, typing documents, browsing and listening to music at the same time. But unfortunately, you use YouTube Music and forget to switch from music video to audio only in the background.

Gaming or similar gimmicks need not be factored into the rating due to the mini PC’s intended use; that wouldn’t be fair to the integrated graphics processor.

About the author: Timo – by definition an overnight father, husband and hobbyist game developer. Entered the Metaverse before Meta was even fresh. Write here, there and everywhere.

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