Beelink GTR7 mini-PC Review: A Complete AMD Phoenix Package at 65W
by Ganesh T S on August 24, 2023 8:00 AM ESTSystem Performance: Multi-Tasking
One of the key drivers of advancements in computing systems is multi-tasking. On mobile devices, this is quite lightweight - cases such as background email checks while the user is playing a mobile game are quite common. Towards optimizing user experience in those types of scenarios, mobile SoC manufacturers started integrating heterogenous CPU cores - some with high performance for demanding workloads, while others were frugal in terms of both power consumption / die area and performance. This trend is now slowly making its way into the desktop PC space.
Multi-tasking in typical PC usage is much more demanding compared to phones and tablets. Desktop OSes allow users to launch and utilize a large number of demanding programs simultaneously. Responsiveness is dictated largely by the OS scheduler allowing different tasks to move to the background. The processor is required to work closely with the OS thread scheduler to optimize performance in these cases. Keeping these aspects in mind, the evaluation of multi-tasking performance is an interesting subject to tackle.
We have augmented our systems benchmarking suite to quantitatively analyze the multi-tasking performance of various platforms. The evaluation involves triggering a ffmpeg transcoding task to transform 1716 3840x1714 frames encoded as a 24fps AVC video (Blender Project's 'Tears of Steel' 4K version) into a 1080p HEVC version in a loop. The transcoding rate is monitored continuously. One complete transcoding pass is allowed to complete before starting the first multi-tasking workload - the PCMark 10 Extended bench suite. A comparative view of the PCMark 10 scores for various scenarios is presented in the graphs below. Also available for concurrent viewing are scores in the normal case where the benchmark was processed without any concurrent load, and a graph presenting the loss in performance.
| UL PCMark 10 Load Testing - Digital Content Creation Scores | |||
| UL PCMark 10 Load Testing - Productivity Scores | |||
| UL PCMark 10 Load Testing - Essentials Scores | |||
| UL PCMark 10 Load Testing - Gaming Scores | |||
| UL PCMark 10 Load Testing - Overall Scores | |||
Configuring the GTR7's Phoenix SoC at 65W gives it plenty of headroom to tackle multiple concurrent demanding workloads triggered by mainstream users (of the type benchmarked by PCMark 10). The GTR7 was already having leading performance in the absence of concurrent loading. Activation of such loads reduces the raw score, but the performance loss is less than the competition, and the GTR7 continues to remain on top.
Following the completion of the PCMark 10 benchmark, a short delay is introduced prior to the processing of Principled Technologies WebXPRT4 on MS Edge. Similar to the PCMark 10 results presentation, the graph below show the scores recorded with the transcoding load active. Available for comparison are the dedicated CPU power scores and a measure of the performance loss.
| Principled Technologies WebXPRT4 Load Testing Scores (MS Edge) | |||
The observations made for the overall PCMark 10 scores continue to hold for WebXPRT 4 also. The GTR7 has the least performance loss, and that allows it to leapfrog the RPL-P systems in performance.
The final workload tested as part of the multitasking evaluation routine is CINEBENCH R23.
| 3D Rendering - CINEBENCH R23 Load Testing - Single Thread Score | |||
| 3D Rendering - CINEBENCH R23 Load Testing - Multiple Thread Score | |||
Intensive background tasks keep the efficiency cores busy, and take up some of the power budget. As a result, while the RPL-P systems came out on top in the absence of the background loads in single-threaded mode, the AMD-based systems manages to outwit them in raw scores after the introduction of the load. Multi-threaded performance continues to be a strongpoint of the GTR7, with the system coming out on top irrespective of the concurrent loading.
After the completion of all the workloads, we let the transcoding routine run to completion. The monitored transcoding rate throughout the above evaluation routine (in terms of frames per second) is graphed below.
The transcoding rate during different segments is also recorded below.
| Beelink GTR7 (Ryzen 7 7840HS) ffmpeg Transcoding Rate (Multi-Tasking Test) |
|||
| Task Segment | Transcoding Rate (FPS) | ||
| Minimum | Average | Maximum | |
| Transcode Start Pass | 2.5 | 14.12 | 46.5 |
| PCMark 10 | 0 | 13.99 | 44.5 |
| WebXPRT 4 | 6.5 | 13.63 | 23 |
| Cinebench R23 | 5 | 13.78 | 48.5 |
| Transcode End Pass | 5.5 | 14.8 | 45.5 |
The comparison is against RPL-P systems such as the NUC BOX-1360P/D5. The GTR7 has a much lower delta in the transcoding rate between different task segments, but the power budget ensures that it doesn't translate to a lower primary workload score as seen in the graphs above. Overall, the RPL-P systems seem to prioritize foreground task better compared to AMD systems, but with the right power budget, the end user may not even notice the aspect.
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ActionJ26 - Friday, August 25, 2023 - link
Go with Minisforum um790 it is $519 barebonedhaplo602 - Monday, August 28, 2023 - link
that and tested as a SteamOS platform as well ...29a - Thursday, August 24, 2023 - link
"One of the interesting aspects of the I/O ports is the presence of an audio jack in both front and rear panels. Beelink has designed this in such a way that the connection of a headset of speakers to the rear jack automatically disables the front one."Does that mean you cant output different audio streams to both, for example game audio through the speakers in the back and chat audio through headphones on the front. Most MB allow this.
ganeshts - Thursday, August 24, 2023 - link
Can you give me some MB examples that allow this? I want to check their hardware audio path.As per Beelink's user manual, the disabling of the front jack is the expected behavior when the rear jack has a connected sink.
UserZ - Thursday, August 24, 2023 - link
Disabling the front jack seems really odd. I would have a pair of speakers connected to the rear jack as the default audio. When I occasionally plug in a headset to the front, I want to use that. I would hope that you could still choose which to use without unplugging anything in case I don't like their default behavior.darkswordsman17 - Friday, August 25, 2023 - link
Yeah I think it'd be preferable for the inverse (i.e. mute the rear when the front is detected), or for it to be able to be configured so it could do mic input from one with audio output from the other. Its probably easier for them to do this though. But then there's options if you use an external audio via USB (or probably Bluetooth as well).darkswordsman17 - Friday, August 25, 2023 - link
PC motherboards use separate audio chips for front and rear ports generally, and thus its easy for Windows/games to then be configured to output different for each one. I think there might be some external gaming audio boxes that could allow this as well (headset plugged in managing just chat whilst outputting game audio to speakers), so it could come down to drivers (or maybe it auto-configures).1_rick - Thursday, August 24, 2023 - link
The Crucial isn't a bad SSD if your needs align with it's capabilities. One place it completely falls down is large writes: I copied a ~60GB game to a Beelink SEI12 from a USB-C connected SSD, rather than let it be downloaded, and the pSLC cache was exhausted pretty quickly. At that point the performance tanked to somewhere around 40MBps, down about 90% from peak speed of about 500MBps.For normal day-to-day usage, you probably won't see much of a speed penalty, though.
NextGen_Gamer - Thursday, August 24, 2023 - link
@AnandTech: Were the 3DMark Port Royal benchmarks rerun on all of the older systems? Because the DeskMeet B660 system seems way off. The Radeon RX 6400 and Radeon 680M iGPU are actually the same in specs: RDNA-2, 12 Ray Accelerators, 32 ROPs, 48 TMUs, 768 Shading Units. It should, in theory, be RX 6400 just ahead of Ryzen 9 6900HX which in turn should be just ahead of Ryzen 7 7735U. And then the latest Ryzen 7 7840HUS, with its newer and higher-clocked RDNA-3 Radeon 780M iGPU, should be on top of the charts still.ganeshts - Thursday, August 24, 2023 - link
Unlike CPU or GPU reviews, for mini-PCs, we do not update the results in every review because most of the mini-PCs are loaner samples and go back to the manufacturer.The numbers presented in the graph for the Deskmeet B660 are from January 2023, using Adrenalin GPU drivers that were the latest in December 2022. FWIW, 3DMark also has online score submissions from different users searchable at www.3dmark.com/search
For RX 6400, Port Royal overall scores range from 126 to 558 (seems to depend on the CPU also), with an average of 252
For 680M, they range from 1081 to 1415 with an average of 1026.
In the above context, the scores we have graphed (427 and 1212) are entirely plausible.
It is also possible that recent driver releases might have improved scores, but our policy for mini-PC reviews is that we carry forward the scores from the time of the original review. Every few years, we purge the database and move to the latest versions of the benchmarks and also update the OS to the latest stable (for example, we are currently using Win 11 21H2 with the latest updates, but not 22H2). At that time, we choose a set of PCs that we still have in hand, re-bench them and use the newly obtained scores with the new benchmark version / OS for comparisons starting from that point onwards.