Beelink SER5 Pro 5800H - Affordable 8-core 45W MiniPC

# A Closer Look at the b-link SURF Series Ryzen 7 5800h: Performance and Features

In this detailed review, we dive into the b-link SURF series powered by the Ryzen 7 5800h processor. This machine is a standout in the small form factor (SFF) segment, particularly when compared to Intel-based systems like the Nook. The b-link system offers a well-thought-out configuration with smart USB port management and efficient cooling solutions.

## Base Configuration: Affordable Power

The base model comes equipped with 16GB of RAM and 500GB of storage. It features a single gigabit network interface card (NIC), which is sufficient for most home or office use cases. Whether you're setting up a machine for your grandma, a guest room computer, or even a simple TV setup, this configuration delivers more than enough performance for basic tasks.

One of the standout features of this system is its versatility. It can be used as a souped-up Chromecast for streaming content or as a full-fledged productivity machine. The 16GB of RAM ensures smooth multitasking, and the 500GB storage provides ample space for essential applications and files.

## Bare Bones Option: Expandability

For those who prefer to build their own system, b-link offers a Bare Bones kit. This option allows you to add your own memory and storage while still benefiting from the included components such as the VESA/wall mount bracket and a power brick. The system supports up to 32GB of RAM, making it a future-proof choice for demanding workloads.

The power brick is notably smaller due to the lower power requirements of the Ryzen 5800h processor. This makes it easier to install in confined spaces without compromising on performance or efficiency.

## Hardware Features: Comprehensive Connectivity

At the rear of the system, you'll find dual HDMI ports, each capable of handling 4K resolution at 60Hz. Additionally, there are two USB 3.5Gbps ports and one USB 2.0 port, ensuring fast data transfer rates for external devices. The system also features a single gigabit LAN port for reliable network connectivity.

The cooling system is designed to exhaust air out the back while maintaining efficient airflow through strategically placed vents on the top and sides. Four Phillips screws on the bottom allow easy access for replacing or upgrading storage and memory components.

At the front, the system includes two USB 5Gbps Type-C ports, a combination headphone/microphone jack, a power button, and a recessed clear CMOS button for advanced BIOS operations.

## Performance: geekbench Scores and More

The Ryzen 7 5800h processor delivers impressive performance metrics. In Geekbench 6 testing, the system scored 1129 for single-core tasks and 6315 for multi-core workloads. These scores highlight its capability to handle office productivity tasks, such as email management and document creation, with ease.

The memory configuration is dual-channel DDR4-3200 with a command rate of 22-22-22, offering a latency of 88 nanoseconds. While not the fastest, this setup provides reliable performance for most users. The system's BIOS allows some level of tuning for enthusiasts, but its primary appeal lies in its plug-and-play functionality.

## Graphics: Built-in Vega GPU

The system features integrated Vega graphics, which are more than sufficient for basic productivity tasks and digital signage. It supports driving three monitors simultaneously—two via HDMI ports and one through DisplayPort Alt Mode on the USB Type-C port. While not ideal for gaming, the Vega GPU handles 1080p video playback and light gaming at reasonable frame rates.

## Cooling and Power Efficiency

The cooling system is designed to keep noise levels minimal under normal usage. During intensive benchmarking, the fan's high-pitched tone was barely audible, especially when the system was placed behind a monitor or in a noisy environment like an office with running air conditioning.

Power consumption remains efficient, with the 65W power brick delivering consistent performance. The system typically consumes around 40-45 Watts under load, well within the brick's capacity and ensuring component longevity.

## Specialized Use Cases: Open Source Projects

One of the most exciting aspects of this system is its versatility in running open-source projects. For instance, you can set up a dashboard using Grafana and Greylog to monitor network traffic or firewall activity. This makes it an ideal choice for server closets, war rooms, or hallway displays where visualizing data is essential.

## Final Thoughts: Value and Versatility

The b-link SURF series Ryzen 7 5800h system offers a perfect blend of performance, affordability, and expandability. While it may not have the most cutting-edge features or the highest-end components, its ability to handle a wide range of tasks makes it a strong contender in the SFF market.

The only minor drawback is the limited number of USB ports, which might require users to rely on external hubs or built-in ports on monitors and peripherals. However, for most use cases, the system's connectivity options are more than adequate.

In conclusion, the b-link SURF series Ryzen 7 5800h is a well-rounded machine that excels in both productivity and entertainment scenarios. Its ability to run demanding applications smoothly while maintaining a low cost makes it a standout choice for users seeking a reliable SFF system.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enpre-links back and they got an even tinier machine we've taken a look at Intel and we've taken a look at relatively high end Radeon with the 680m but now it's time to take a look at a 5800h based system why because well it costs less b-link is kind of a standout in the small form factor maker machines especially when compared with the Intel Nook because usually the b-link system will have a better or smarter configuration in terms of USB ports and how they've done the cooling or how they've structured the case and I really liked the 680m based b-link machine as well so I thought I would take a look at the Lesser expensive 5800h 16 gigabytes and 500 gigs of storage is what our base configuration here has it is only a single one gigabit Nic but again you know if this is for your grandma's machine or a guest room computer or even just running a TV that's going to graph the status of things you know you can plug greylog and grafana into open sense and get a really cool Nifty dashboard that's open source on GitHub and you don't need much of a computer to do that you can just plug it in you could build a war room it's a lot of fun I do really like how these are basically becoming super insanely high-end devices for whatever you want to do from souped up Chromecast to Grandma's computer now sometimes you can buy these kinds of machines as a Bare Bones kit that just means you add your own memory and storage this thing will Support 32 gigabytes of memory no problem but even if you get the Bare Bones kit it's going to come with the VISA slash wall mount metal bracket it's going to come with a lovely power brick now this is a much smaller power brick probably owing to the more modest power requirements we've got our Visa Mount HDMI cable as well as our regular length HDMI cable a little power cord and some Visa Mount screws that we're trying to escape thank you for your choice due to the system boot process if you cannot log into your personal account please turn off the Wi-Fi and land select the skip option and then log into your personal account in the system please peel off this film before using good job b-link Microsoft if anybody from Microsoft is watching your choice is about setting up Windows 11 are awful and require companies like b-link to add a notice like that to their products because no one debugs the Windows installation process nothing to do with b-link it's really awesome by the way Linux on this thing pretty awesome at the rear we've got dual HDMI yes that is full HDMI you want to run 4K 60 no problem we've got a USB 3 5 gigabit port and a USB 2 Port as well as our one gig Lan a DC input jack like other models this exhausts air out the back and has air venting on the top and sides there are four normal Phillips screws on the bottom that allow you to remove the bottom to replace the storage and memory at the front for Io we have two USB 5 gigabit ports type c port and our combination headphone microphone port a power button and a tiny recessed clear CMOS button now in case you're not familiar the 5800h is kind of a mobile product normally you find these in laptops so it kind of makes sense that our power brick is 65 Watts even given that we can do some power delivery and some charging their USB setup that we have here now even though our USBC Port does support DisplayPort alt mode as we tested we're not going to get pcie tunneling or anything really a lot more advanced than that I'm using it to connect to the keyboard which has a built-in Hub which works pretty well when we're running geekbench as well as a to 64 it gives us a little bit more insight not just into the specs on paper but also how the system will perform for long-term benchmarks that you send a bench and I let it run for a little while letting send a bench run for about 20 or 30 minutes you will hear the cooling fan in this and it does have a little bit of a of a high pitch to it it's not just the whirring rushing sound but the good news is most of the time under normal usage scenarios I can't even tell that the fan is on even over a completely silent room sitting this far away from it I can't hear anything usually when I put it behind the monitor is when it's like okay I can hear it here a little bit and then I put it behind the Monitor and it's like okay I can't hear it anymore but with this thing mounted on the wall or behind a monitor even running that Full Tilt Center bench it's not really super loud if you have literally anything else my case running the air conditioner today because it's in the 80s so warm weirdly it's weirdly warm all of a sudden uh I can't hear this I can't hear the fan even in its loud mode over the air conditioner so our memory configuration is dual Channel ddr4 3200 the command rate is nothing really special to ride home about 22 22 22. it's not fast ddr4 3200 our latency is about 88 nanoseconds so not bad overall b-link does give us some options to tune this in the Bios but again if you're buying this you probably want it to be more Appliance like you don't care you just want to plug it in and go and it definitely does that and with the says end Apu family you may remember it's Vega built-in Graphics so it's good enough for basic stuff it's productivity stuff you can drive three monitors with it two HDMI and one DisplayPort alt mode through your USBC Port but it's Vega it's an older platform if you're looking for something that could play games like DOTA a little bit of Stellaris even at 1080p reasonable ish frame rates you're going to probably want to look at that sir Pro with a 680m that's a much better igpu but make no mistake for productivity tasks Vega is fine if you just need to run two or three displays with this Vega will do everything you need if you just need some digital signage with the aforementioned grafana perfect technically this Apu is a 45 watt Apu which means that it can use you know a little bit more than 45 Watts or 65 watt power brick selection makes sense however with the BIOS configuration on this it was really tough to get the system to consume more than about 40 Watts 45 Watts at the wall and the cooling here is not such that you'll want to be doing overclocking or anything else I mean the maximum you can get from the power brick is 65 watts and really you don't want it to be running more than 85 90 of that any given time because that'll shorten the life of the power components that's usually the case that's a rule of thumb I don't know that to be true here sometimes the power bricks are overspeced so that they can deliver burst power beyond their rated wattage that might be the case here just letting you know our geekbench 6 scores 1129 for single core 6315 for multi-core now keep in mind that's geekbench 6 doesn't necessarily directly compare to older versions of geekbench that is a pretty respectable score I mean but this is an older Apu keep in mind again perfectly viable for office productivity checking email doing document creation 16 gigabytes of memory is plenty you might want to upgrade to 32 gigabytes that's the easiest upgrade to make the system feel a lot snappier if you want to do that but again low cost machine very competent very capable if you're rocking something like an 8th gen Intel maybe even a 9th gen Intel and like a small form factor business class machine got sad news this thing is probably 35 40 percent faster it'll feel 100 plus percent faster if you don't have high speed storage if you're still on spinning rust because they got the cheapest I3 they possibly could six years ago this is going to run circles around it and it's so inexpensive that it's like hey you could just get this and migrate all your data and be in a completely different world in in the first week the time saved waiting on an old slow computer would pay for this thing well that's been a quick look at the b-link surf series ryzen 7. it's the Five series but it's a rising seven fifty eight hundred H from b-link again thanks be link for sending this over so I could take a look at it it's a Verizon 5800h it performs like a ryzen 5800h at the 45 watt TDP power limit but in a small form factor configuration it might have been nice to have a couple of more USB ports but hey it ain't bad it's pretty darn good in fact I feel like most people are probably going to be using both the front and rear USB ports or you're going to be using a wireless keyboard and mouse even if you're using a wireless keyboard mouse receiver in the rear USB 2 Port it's like ah there's never enough USB ports maybe your monitor has some USB ports or built in the USB hub or something like that maybe you've got a document scanner and some other things like that I mean you do have a total of four type A ports One USB two three three five gigabit but hey it's not bad around here I've got a special task for it there's a GitHub project that is a sort of a dashboard I guess you'd call it for open sense check it out look at these cool graphs it's showing stuff that's going on with your firewall how awesome would it be to have in your server closet or your war room or just in the hallway when people are walking by go to the bathroom a dashboard showing a picture of the globe and where everybody's connecting to your firewall and everything like that this Appliance could do it just run the software connect it to a couple of 4K monitors and you're done it's that inexpensive and that flexible fun times I'm one of this level one I'm signing out you can find me in the level one forumspre-links back and they got an even tinier machine we've taken a look at Intel and we've taken a look at relatively high end Radeon with the 680m but now it's time to take a look at a 5800h based system why because well it costs less b-link is kind of a standout in the small form factor maker machines especially when compared with the Intel Nook because usually the b-link system will have a better or smarter configuration in terms of USB ports and how they've done the cooling or how they've structured the case and I really liked the 680m based b-link machine as well so I thought I would take a look at the Lesser expensive 5800h 16 gigabytes and 500 gigs of storage is what our base configuration here has it is only a single one gigabit Nic but again you know if this is for your grandma's machine or a guest room computer or even just running a TV that's going to graph the status of things you know you can plug greylog and grafana into open sense and get a really cool Nifty dashboard that's open source on GitHub and you don't need much of a computer to do that you can just plug it in you could build a war room it's a lot of fun I do really like how these are basically becoming super insanely high-end devices for whatever you want to do from souped up Chromecast to Grandma's computer now sometimes you can buy these kinds of machines as a Bare Bones kit that just means you add your own memory and storage this thing will Support 32 gigabytes of memory no problem but even if you get the Bare Bones kit it's going to come with the VISA slash wall mount metal bracket it's going to come with a lovely power brick now this is a much smaller power brick probably owing to the more modest power requirements we've got our Visa Mount HDMI cable as well as our regular length HDMI cable a little power cord and some Visa Mount screws that we're trying to escape thank you for your choice due to the system boot process if you cannot log into your personal account please turn off the Wi-Fi and land select the skip option and then log into your personal account in the system please peel off this film before using good job b-link Microsoft if anybody from Microsoft is watching your choice is about setting up Windows 11 are awful and require companies like b-link to add a notice like that to their products because no one debugs the Windows installation process nothing to do with b-link it's really awesome by the way Linux on this thing pretty awesome at the rear we've got dual HDMI yes that is full HDMI you want to run 4K 60 no problem we've got a USB 3 5 gigabit port and a USB 2 Port as well as our one gig Lan a DC input jack like other models this exhausts air out the back and has air venting on the top and sides there are four normal Phillips screws on the bottom that allow you to remove the bottom to replace the storage and memory at the front for Io we have two USB 5 gigabit ports type c port and our combination headphone microphone port a power button and a tiny recessed clear CMOS button now in case you're not familiar the 5800h is kind of a mobile product normally you find these in laptops so it kind of makes sense that our power brick is 65 Watts even given that we can do some power delivery and some charging their USB setup that we have here now even though our USBC Port does support DisplayPort alt mode as we tested we're not going to get pcie tunneling or anything really a lot more advanced than that I'm using it to connect to the keyboard which has a built-in Hub which works pretty well when we're running geekbench as well as a to 64 it gives us a little bit more insight not just into the specs on paper but also how the system will perform for long-term benchmarks that you send a bench and I let it run for a little while letting send a bench run for about 20 or 30 minutes you will hear the cooling fan in this and it does have a little bit of a of a high pitch to it it's not just the whirring rushing sound but the good news is most of the time under normal usage scenarios I can't even tell that the fan is on even over a completely silent room sitting this far away from it I can't hear anything usually when I put it behind the monitor is when it's like okay I can hear it here a little bit and then I put it behind the Monitor and it's like okay I can't hear it anymore but with this thing mounted on the wall or behind a monitor even running that Full Tilt Center bench it's not really super loud if you have literally anything else my case running the air conditioner today because it's in the 80s so warm weirdly it's weirdly warm all of a sudden uh I can't hear this I can't hear the fan even in its loud mode over the air conditioner so our memory configuration is dual Channel ddr4 3200 the command rate is nothing really special to ride home about 22 22 22. it's not fast ddr4 3200 our latency is about 88 nanoseconds so not bad overall b-link does give us some options to tune this in the Bios but again if you're buying this you probably want it to be more Appliance like you don't care you just want to plug it in and go and it definitely does that and with the says end Apu family you may remember it's Vega built-in Graphics so it's good enough for basic stuff it's productivity stuff you can drive three monitors with it two HDMI and one DisplayPort alt mode through your USBC Port but it's Vega it's an older platform if you're looking for something that could play games like DOTA a little bit of Stellaris even at 1080p reasonable ish frame rates you're going to probably want to look at that sir Pro with a 680m that's a much better igpu but make no mistake for productivity tasks Vega is fine if you just need to run two or three displays with this Vega will do everything you need if you just need some digital signage with the aforementioned grafana perfect technically this Apu is a 45 watt Apu which means that it can use you know a little bit more than 45 Watts or 65 watt power brick selection makes sense however with the BIOS configuration on this it was really tough to get the system to consume more than about 40 Watts 45 Watts at the wall and the cooling here is not such that you'll want to be doing overclocking or anything else I mean the maximum you can get from the power brick is 65 watts and really you don't want it to be running more than 85 90 of that any given time because that'll shorten the life of the power components that's usually the case that's a rule of thumb I don't know that to be true here sometimes the power bricks are overspeced so that they can deliver burst power beyond their rated wattage that might be the case here just letting you know our geekbench 6 scores 1129 for single core 6315 for multi-core now keep in mind that's geekbench 6 doesn't necessarily directly compare to older versions of geekbench that is a pretty respectable score I mean but this is an older Apu keep in mind again perfectly viable for office productivity checking email doing document creation 16 gigabytes of memory is plenty you might want to upgrade to 32 gigabytes that's the easiest upgrade to make the system feel a lot snappier if you want to do that but again low cost machine very competent very capable if you're rocking something like an 8th gen Intel maybe even a 9th gen Intel and like a small form factor business class machine got sad news this thing is probably 35 40 percent faster it'll feel 100 plus percent faster if you don't have high speed storage if you're still on spinning rust because they got the cheapest I3 they possibly could six years ago this is going to run circles around it and it's so inexpensive that it's like hey you could just get this and migrate all your data and be in a completely different world in in the first week the time saved waiting on an old slow computer would pay for this thing well that's been a quick look at the b-link surf series ryzen 7. it's the Five series but it's a rising seven fifty eight hundred H from b-link again thanks be link for sending this over so I could take a look at it it's a Verizon 5800h it performs like a ryzen 5800h at the 45 watt TDP power limit but in a small form factor configuration it might have been nice to have a couple of more USB ports but hey it ain't bad it's pretty darn good in fact I feel like most people are probably going to be using both the front and rear USB ports or you're going to be using a wireless keyboard and mouse even if you're using a wireless keyboard mouse receiver in the rear USB 2 Port it's like ah there's never enough USB ports maybe your monitor has some USB ports or built in the USB hub or something like that maybe you've got a document scanner and some other things like that I mean you do have a total of four type A ports One USB two three three five gigabit but hey it's not bad around here I've got a special task for it there's a GitHub project that is a sort of a dashboard I guess you'd call it for open sense check it out look at these cool graphs it's showing stuff that's going on with your firewall how awesome would it be to have in your server closet or your war room or just in the hallway when people are walking by go to the bathroom a dashboard showing a picture of the globe and where everybody's connecting to your firewall and everything like that this Appliance could do it just run the software connect it to a couple of 4K monitors and you're done it's that inexpensive and that flexible fun times I'm one of this level one I'm signing out you can find me in the level one forums\n"