I recently bought this SER5 when it was <$250 after coupons. At that price, this is a very good little mini PC. It is an upgrade from a 3 year old Terryza (no longer offered on Amazon) with a J4125 CPU. That PC worked fine until a few months ago when our internet seemed to slow considerably on only that PC, and not several other PCs in the house. It turns out that was a faulty 5-port unmanaged switch at the PC, but I used the internet issue to justify an upgrade. I paid about $186 for that Terryza in 2020 and about $70 more for this one. The difference is amazing. The Terryza served us well for Office, internet browsing, YouTube streaming, Spotify streaming, etc. We don't play games on any computer, so that was never an issue. This new Beelink is so much faster, it's pretty amazing. I use Novabench to benchmark my PCs, and went from a combine score of ~775 to 1,776. Sure my main photo editing PC hits just over 5,000, but for day-to-day tasks I can't tell the difference.
FYI: The Novabench graphics test resulted in 14 FPS on the Beelink vs. 4 FPS on the older Terryza.
There is virtually no fan noise at all. I have to put my ear to the PC to hear the fan and cannot hear anything with it mounted behind my monitor. I did have to buy a new monitor (I got the ~$100 Sceptre F24 – very nice) because my old cheap 22" Acer had neither HDMI nor DP and this Beelink does not have VGA. Oh well, the new monitor is also a very nice upgrade in our kitchen over the old Acer.
The PC does produce some heat, but not a lot. I did notice that a flashdrive I had to use that had an older Adobe Acrobat Pro that I wanted to re-install from the Terryza got very hot after transferring only 725 MB of install files. That's probably more a problem with the flashdrive than the USB port, but I have yet to investigate.
The PC I received had absolutely no bloatware that I could find (searching programs, services, start-up files, uninstall apps, and going through the Program Files and Program Files (x86) folders). If they stuck something in there, I can't find it.
Overall, we are very happy with this $250 mini PC. Only time will tell if it will hold up, but for the time being it's quite, small, fast and seems to have a clean OS. It's not a gamer, but it is a very powerful unobtrusive little workstation PC.
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