Beelink GTi 12 and EX Docking Station review

pcgamer.com:

Being something of a mini-PC connoisseur certainly has its moments, and Beelink's GTi 12 mini-PC and EX Docking Station combo has served me up a corker. I mean look at it! Just who is this crazy, half-naked PC aimed at? I'm fairly certain I've arrived at the answer, but let's have a poke around the thing before we go planting flags.

I keep glancing at it from different angles, trying to get a handle on its form. It presents a mass of shapes; a sort of grey, brutalist edifice of steps, blocks and ledges. If you plonked it down in the centre of East Berlin circa1955 and hung a ‘STASI HEADQUARTERS' sign on the front, passers-by wouldn't bat an eyelid.

The east-wing of this little military-industrial complex is the Beelink GTi 12 itself, a mini-PC driven by Intel's i9-12900H. It's an Alder Lake APU; a few generations old now, but still solid, delivering 5 GHz turbo speeds at a max draw of 65 W across six performance cores and eight efficiency cores. Set against Intel's 13^th and 14^th-gen ride-or-die watt-gobblers, it's a sensible and dependable choice of chip for a mini-PC.

It comes with the Iris Xe iGPU (Eww, gross I know, but don't worry you won't be using it), 32 GB of 4800 MHz DDR5 (the 12900H's RAM-speed ceiling), and a demonstrably swift 1 TB M.2 SSD.

APU: Intel Core i9 12900H
iGPU: Iris Xe
Graphics expansion: Full-length X8 PCIe 4.0
Memory: 32 GB DDR5-4800 SODIMM
Storage: 1 TB M.2 SSD
Wireless: WiFi 6E, Bluetooth 5.3
I/O: 5x USB 3.2, 1x USBC, 1x Thunderbolt 4, 2x 2.5G LAN, 2x 3.5 mm audio jack, 1x SD Card slot, 1x DP 1.4, 1x HDMI 2.0
Price: $738 | £551

Its chassis is on the larger side as these things go, but the internal space has been utilised well, particularly in the cooling department. Pushing all cores to the max with Prime95 it remains whisper-quiet, quaffing a reasonable 65 W and sitting snug at 76 °C. Pop the lid and you'll also find a pair of tiny speakers; hardly hi-fi, but they're able and clear enough for system sounds, video calls, and the odd