Beelink SER9 review

pcgamer.com:

AMD's Strix Point Ryzen APUs landed this year, and began rolling out in notebooks to a chorus of high praise. These smashing mobile processors come armed with AMD's new RDNA 3.5 integrated graphics architecture, aka the Radeon 890M. Laptop manufacturers often select low-power variants of APUs, or set lower TDP limits, in order to preserve battery life and minimise heat. That's prudent in a mobile context, but what if your use-case is the desktop? I say plug it in and give it all the watts!

Enter the Beelink SER9 mini PC, sporting the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370: AMD's top-shelf Strix Point APU. Yep, new chip generation, baffling new chip designation… it's almost like AMD is in competition with Intel not simply for market-share, but to see who can troll consumers the hardest.

At any road, you may be assured that the HX 370 is a step up in performance from AMD's Zen 4 Ryzen 8000-series APUs, and outperforms Intel's Meteor Lake headliner, the Core Ultra 9 185H.

Strix Point also marks an architectural gearshift for AMD. Rather than fielding a bunch of identical cores like previous Ryzen CPUs, it's a dual-cluster design of four Zen 5 cores which run up to 5.1GHz, and eight Zen 5c (compact) cores, which are smaller, more power-efficient, generate less heat, have half the L3 cache, and max out at 3.3GHz. Intel led the way on the big/little philosophy with its 12th Gen CPUs, but this is new ground for AMD.

APU: AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370
iGPU: Radeon 890M
Memory: 32GB LPDDR5 7500MHz
Storage: 1TB M.2 SSD
Wireless: WiFi 6, Bluetooth 5.2
I/O: 4x USB 3.2, 1x USBC, 1x USB 4, 2.5G LAN, 2x 3.5mm audio jack, 1x DP 1.4, 1x HDMI 2.0, quad-mic array
Price: $999 | £761

There's also a heavier focus on AI—the clue's in the name—so the AI 9 HX 370 also sports an NPU (Neural Processing Unit) capable of delivering 50 TOPS, or trillions of operations per second, the defining metric for NPUs. Beelink claims this rises to 80 TOPS if the CPU and iGPU cores get in on the action, which far exceeds the 40 TOPS