Midland Cyclist: March 2021

Beelink U57 Review

This is a review of the Beelink U57 Mini PC I bought recently.

A bit of background first as to why I bought one of these. I am a keen cyclist and I have a "Smart" trainer that I use generally in the Winter in the garage. By the very nature of a Smart Trainer you need something to drive it and up until recently I used my laptop. My laptop is 6-7 years old Dell Inspiron and although its a Quad Core i5 it's getting on and the graphics are only on-board Intel (and some sort of Radeon GPU as well). I'd used Road Grand Tours (RGT) for a couple of years and also Velo Reality (here) during this time. I connected up a second monitor so I had one monitor for the training software and the other for something like Netflix/Spotify etc

RGT started off being OK for my laptop but as it was developed the graphics demands rose and my laptop was flat out when using it and got very hot after 30 minutes or so. I ended up binning RGT as I struggled to connect reliably (although I think I know why now) and just used Velo Reality for a while. However Velo Reality (as I used it) is a vanilla training tool with 0 graphical demands. It was also very boring even with Netflix.

The result was that I tried Zwift on the free trial. Zwift is also a fairly demanding game graphics wise but my laptop initially seemed to handle it much better than RGT

What swung it for me though was how many more people used Zwift and hence there were always other people to pace against and "ride with". It didn't take long for some of the people who I follow on Strava to invite me to groups rides, and I also rode a number of the challenges. Hence I signed up to Zwift.

What I found though was that my initial thought that my laptop was OK was not true when I tried to use 2 monitors and watch Netflix on the other monitor. However I had an old desktop in the loft with a Quad core CPU of some sort and an NVidia GTX 460 with 768MByte Ram - this must be better I thought than my laptop. So with a bit of updating I found it was just capable or running Win 10 and the graphics card was capable of the same resolution as the laptop but was a lot smoother and the whole system was capable of running both Zwift and Netflix smoothly enough. I did manage to get some 2nd hand RAM from EBay to upgrade from 4Gbyte to 6GByte and that also made a difference although it ran adequately with 4GByte (Zwift and a couple of browser tabs only). I also initially used a slow 3.5" HD but had a spare SSD which made it really very usable.

I cobbled up a system on the work bench to check in real use if it was fine as shown here:

But the problem was that this took up all the space on the work bench (that I do use) so I bought a few shelving parts and moved it to onto the wall:

Ideally the monitors would be a little higher but it all worked fine but it was a bit clunky and awkward.

During 2020 I had been half thinking about updating my "proper" desktop (again quite an old machine with a Intel Core i5-4430 CPU @3GHz). I wasn't looking that hard as even though this is also ~7 years old with an SSD and now 16GByte RAM, for what I now use it for it flies. Whilst looking though I came across the Intel NUC units. These looked really attractive - very small and powerful (more limited with graphic options than a proper desktop) but importantly they ran at typically 20W compared to my desktop that is typically 120W

Despite the attractions there is an element of premium in the cost and when i specified out the sort of the unit I'd consider it came to ~£800 - you need RAM, storage and not least an OS. So whilst I was interested the price point at the time was higher than I wanted

However given I was looking on Amazon, once they see what you are browsing for I started to get emails not only for Intel NUC but basically a load of cheap Chinese clones, and I realised there was a whole new world out there of these types of computers, from basically something that would run a browser and a word processer to some really quite powerful units

This is a Beelink U57 PC:

Specification

Manufacturer	Beelink
Model	Beelink U57
Processor Brand	Intel Core i5-5257U Processor up to 3.10 GHz
Processor Count	2 (4 Threads)
RAM Size / format	8 GB DDR3L SDRAM
Hard Drive Size / Format	256 GB M.2 SSD
Additional Hard Drive Interface	2.5” HDD/SSD
Graphics Coprocessor	Intel Iris Graphics 6100
Networking Type	1000Mbps Ethernet 5.8 GHz Radio Frequency, Bluetooth, 2.4 GHz Radio Frequency
USB	2x USB 3.0, 2 x USB 2.0 ports, 1 x USB Type-C port
Number of HDMI Ports	2
Operating System	Windows 10 Professional
Product Dimensions	12.4 x 13 x 4.1 cm; 860 Grams