Beelink SER9 Pro review: Great performance in a small and affordable package, with support for a clever dock

Beelink is back with a new version of its SER9 Pro mini PC, this time powered by an AMD Ryzen 7 H 255 CPU and Radeon 780M GPU. Still housed in a premium, compact form factor with plenty of ports, the new SER9 Pro is all about offering great CPU and GPU performance that tries not to throttle while still remaining cool and quiet when in use, and affordable.

I've been daily driving the Beelink SER9 Pro for the last month, and this is my full review.

Price and availability

The Beelink SER9 Pro with AMD Ryzen 7 H 255 is available directly from Beelink, and can also be found on Amazon. It usually retails for $639, but can be had for just $519 right now at the Beelink website.

There's just one configuration of the SER9 Pro with AMD Ryzen 7 H 255 to be had, featuring 32GB RAM and 1TB SSD storage out of the box. It is available in two colorways however, coming in either Silver or Space Grey. The RAM Is unfortunately soldered, but the storage can be upgraded yourself after purchase.

Beelink also sells a seperate dock accessory called the Mate Mini that adds an additional set of ports and two more M.2 SSD slots for $99. It's designed in a way that complements and integrates well with the SER9 Pro, making it feel like a natural extension of the mini PC.

Beelink SER9 Pro: was $639 now $509 at bee-link.com

The SER9 Pro with an AMD Ryzen 7 H 255, 32GB RAM, and 1TB Storage can be had on sale for just $509 right now if you buy it through Beelink. That's where we recommend you grab it, because that's the cheapest you'll find right now.

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Design and ports

Like most Beelink PCs, the SER9 Pro looks and feels great. It's made out of high-quality material, with a metal chassis that's cold to the touch. The device is available in two colors: silver or space grey, but we think the silver one looks best. Its overall size is similar, though slightly bigger, than a Mac mini M4 coming in at 135 x 135 x 44.7 mm.

Along the front, we have our power button, a 3.5mm audio jack, a USB-C port, and a USB-A port. Also on the front are four holes that run along the top front panel, which is where the omni-directional microphone is placed. We'll get into more about how that sounds in the next section.

Around the back, we have a whole bunch more ports including three more USB-A ports, another USB-C port, another 3.5mm audio jack, a 2.5Gb LAN port, a HDMI 2.1 port, and a DisplayPort 1.4. Also on the back is where the venting for the fan and heat is, so be sure to give the backside plenty of room for the best cooling.

Features and dock

The Beelink SER9 Pro comes with a number of features that help differentiate it from the crowd. Right out of the gate, Beelink touts the SER9 Pro as being great for talking with AI chatbots like ChatGPT, thanks to its built-in omni directional microphone that's designed to isolate your voice, even in a loud open space.

The microphone is capable of isolating your voice up to 5 meters away, which is really handy if you have the PC sat on your desk like most people would. The microphone is very clear for one that's built-in, and AI apps had no trouble picking up my voice, even when I had loud music playing in the background.

I will say that if you're someone who mounts their mini PCs behind or underneath your desk, you might find that the built-in microphone has a little harder time picking you up. This wasn't always the case, but I found if the mini PC was under my desk, some AI apps would struggle to fully hear what I was saying and misinterpret my commands.

The mini PC also has an integrated dual-speaker system on the inside, which is handy for when you need to listen to audio but don't have a dedicated audio setup or monitor with speakers available to you. The built-in speakers are just fine, they're nothing, but you wouldn't expect them to be. They have no real bass, but are clear enough for calls.

The other big selling point of Beelink mini PCs is their upgradability. Both RAM and storage can be very easily upgraded on the SER9 Pro, with the process just requiring a handful of screws to be undone before the bottom plate pops off, giving access to the internals.

The device has two M.2 2280 PCIe 4 SSD slots, with one of them occupied as spec'd out of the factory. That means you can have two separate SSDs inside the mini PC for whatever you like, whether that be to run in a RAID configuration or to use as a backup, or something else entirely.

With the new SER9 Pro, Beelink is now also selling a new dock accessory dubbed the Mate Mini, which adds a set of additional ports to the Beelink that integrates really nicely with the overall SER9 Pro design. The dock is super compact and flat, and is designed in such a way where you can place it on either the bottom or top of the SER9 Pro and have it look integrated.

The dock connects to the SER9 Pro using the USB-C port on the back, and comes with a special USB-C adapter that makes aligning the dock with the PC easy. Once connected, you've got an additional row of ports, including two more USB-A ports, another Ethernet jack, a 3.5mm audio jack, and a USB-C port. It also has a full-sized SD card reader on the side!

But it's what's on the inside that makes the Mate Mini special. It features two additional M.2 SSD slots, so you can have even more storage attached to your SER9 Pro. Each slot supports up to 4TB in size, so you could have 8TB of storage inside your Mate Dock, and 8TB of storage inside the SER9 Pro for a total of 16TB. Crazy stuff for a mini PC.

Performance

On the inside, the Beelink SER9 Pro is powered by the AMD Ryzen 7 255H, which is essentially a rebadged Ryzen 7 8745H. That means it's built on the older Zen 4 architecture and so doesn't have all the performance improvements in the GPU and CPU department that were made with Zen 5. That also means it doesn't have an NPU that makes it Copilot+ capable, and so isn't a great choice for Windows AI features.

With that in mind, it's still a very capable machine. In our Geekbench 6 test it earned a single-core score of 2,495 and multi-core score of 12,129, putting it in the same ballpark as the Ryzen 7940HS and 8945HS. In Cinebench 2024, its single-core score was 100 and multi-core score was 836. It also earned a score of 1,806 in CrossMark.

When it comes to gaming, the AMD Radeon 780M is a capable integrated graphics processor. It's not the best by any means, but if you're looking for a mini-PC that can handle casual gaming it will serve you well. Cyberpunk 2077 averaged around 35fps in the benchmark test on high graphics settings at 1080p, which is perfectly playable.

Both Shadow of the Tomb Raider and DOOM: The Dark Ages averaged around 27fps on high graphics settings at 1080p too, which means if you were willing to drop your graphics settings to medium, you would very likely see upwards of 40fps in most modern titles. When it comes to older games, the 780M is a champ. I was able to run GTA V at a full 60fps on the highest settings, no problem.

Is the SER9 Pro a gaming mini-PC? Absolutely not. But it'll handle gaming in a pinch if you need it. I'd say the 780M is better served when editing photos and rendering videos, as it makes rendering creative projects much faster compared to most integrated GPUs. I would recommend running the device in the 65W performance mode if you are planning to game.

When under load, the SER9 Pro doesn't get all that loud. Its fan is audible, but it's not at an offensive level and is what you'd expect when running the CPU and GPU at full blast.

Conclusion

The Beelink SER9 Pro with an AMD Ryzen 7 H 255 is really interesting. The chip is new, but its performance is really only on par with flagship chips from a couple of years ago. It's not pushing the boat out by any means, but that's not Beelink's fault. The H 255 is just a rebadged Zen 4 CPU, designed as a lower cost APU.

With that in mind, it does make the SER9 Pro more affordable. Coming in at around $500 if you can find it on sale with discounts, it's an incredible deal with you consider the good GPU performance and the fact that it comes with 32GB RAM and 1TB storage. It's no slouch of a PC, capable of productivity workflows, creative tasks, and even some gaming.

I really like the size of the SER9 Pro, and I also love the new Mate Mini dock, which makes turning this device into a powerful at home server or storage machine super easy.