Beelink EQ14 mini PC with Intel N150 review Leave a comment
Mini PCs are a great way to cater to your computing needs while keeping your desk clean and minimalist. The days of old tower PCs you tuck under the desk only to take away space from your feet (collect dust) are truly over. Most people are fine with a laptop, a Mini PC, or even a powerful tablet (what’s a computer, eh?).
Here’s where the Beelink EQ14 comes in. It’s built around the very new Intel N150 – the successor to 2023’s Intel N100 – a staple for entry-level systems.
Beelink EQ14 mini PC
The Beelink EQ14 comes in this Navy Blue option and features a honeycomb pattern on the top. It’s a stylish Mini PC, which is unusual for the category.
At the time of writing, the configuration we have for review costs $230 (and there’s a $40 coupon on Amazon), which includes a 500GB SSD, 16GB of RAM, and Windows 11 Pro preinstalled.
The machine has Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.2 built-in, along with a good selection of ports on the front and rear.
The EQ14 ships in a small enough box, featuring a separate power cable and an HDMI cable (1 meter). The power supply is built into the PC, so there are no chunky bricks to worry about.
Design and ports
Mini PCs aren’t flashy machines and they’re not supposed to be. The Beelink EQ14 is subtle in its Navy Blue – it’s not a bland black plastic box.
There’s a pattern on the top and an EQ lettering in the corner. There’s an EQ on the bottom of the machine alongside small holes for ventilation.
The ports are excellent on the EQ14. Upfront are two USBs – one A (USB 2.0, 480Mbps) and one C (Data, 10Gbps), a 3.5mm audio jack, and the power button. Round back, there are three USB-As (USB 3.2 Gen2, 10Gbps), two HDMI (4k@60Hz), two LAN (1000Mbps), and the figure 8 power connector.
As you can guess from the specs above, none of the ports are Thunderbolt, and the USB-C port lacks DisplayPort support, so you’d need to connect monitors via the two HDMI ports.
Opening up the Beelink EQ14 is easy enough. You’d need to remove the four rubber covers over four Philips head screws and undo those. When you’re done, pull the small rubber tab to get the bottom panel off.
Inside, you’re greeted by a small heatsink (kept in place by two other Philips heads) with two thermal pads on the bottom, the power supply, two PCIe 3.0 M.2 SSD slots (the main is PCIe 3.0 x4, the other PCIe 3.0 x1 and free), and a single DDR4 SODIMM slot with 16GB 3200MHz preinstalled (the maximum supported).
That means that you can easily add a second SSD (or swap both for bigger ones), or swap the RAM in case of failure (you can’t have more than 16GB).
Performance
The most noteworthy feature of the Beelink EQ14 is its Intel N150 processor. The N150 is the successor to the popular N100 and is a higher-clocked variant of that processor.
The Intel N150 is based on the Intel Twin Lake architecture, which is more of a tweak of the old Alder Lake, than a new setup. It’s based on Intel’s 7 lithography, meaning this is a 10nm processor.
Interestingly, Intel has yet to detail the processor and doesn’t have an Arc page published just yet.
Being physically identical to the N100, the N150 has four Efficiency-focused cores and four threads. The maximum Turbo clock speed is 3.6GHz – up from 3.4GHz – while the cache is the same 6MB. On the GPU side, you get the same Intel Graphics with 24 compute units, but the peak clock has gone up from 750MHz to 1000MHz.
The N150 has a peak TDP of 25W (the typical TDP is 6W). We ran several benchmarks on the Beelink EQ14 to give you an idea of what to expect from the machine. In Geekbench 6, the N150 scores around 18% higher in single-core and some 5% higher in multi-core tests than the N100. The Passmark score is around 5% better than the N100, as are the Cinebench numbers.
That means you can expect nearly identical performance to the N100, which is perfectly fine for an entry-level computing machine or an in-house server.
| Benchmark | Test | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Geekbench 6 | Single Core | 1199 |
| Multi Core | 3045 | |
| Geekbench AI (NPU) | Single Precision | 863 |
| Half Precision | 468 | |
| Quantized | 1396 | |
| Passmark | CPU | 5990.3 |
| 2D Graphics | 226.0 | |
| 3D Graphics | 759.0 | |
| Memory | 2463.6 | |
| Disk Mark | 4160.3 | |
| Overall | 1222.4 | |
| Blender 4.3.0 | Benchmark Score | 30.42 |
| Cinebench R23 | Single Core | 902 |
| Multi Core | 2771 | |
| Cinebench 2024 | Single Core | 58 |
| Multi Core | 183 |
To put the numbers above into some kind of perspective, let’s compare the N150 against the Intel Core i3-14100 – the logical step up from the N series. The Core i3 has the same four physical cores, but twice the number of threads at 8, it also supports up to 96GB of RAM to the N150’s limit of 16GB. Looking at Geekbench 6 numbers, the Core i3 scores a little over twice as high as the N150. Moving to Cinebench R23, the Core i3’s single-core score is two times higher and its multi-core score is three times higher, on average.
The built-in SSD didn’t impress. The preloaded unit is a SATA III SSD and it’s worth swapping it for a PCIe 3.0 NVME drive. Keep in mind, though, that the second SSD slot is SATA III incompatible so the preinstalled SSD can’t be moved to the second slot.
Disk speed and 7zip benchmark
We ran a three-hour stress test on the Beelink EQ14.
The processor started the test at its full 3.6GHz (around 22W) but then nearly immediately dipped to 2.7GHz (around 15W) and entered a cycle of going up to around 2.7GHz and going down to around 600MHz.
It never returned to 3.6GHz (22W) and stayed around 15W for the test duration, meaning a sustained 3.6GHz is out of the question. The processor got as hot as 61°. The PC itself felt just a little warm on the outside.
To sum up performance, we’ll say the Intel N150 is good for what it’s meant for – entry-level computing. This isn’t a good choice for gaming or video editing, but it will be ideal for an office computer, a student machine, or a server. It’s fast enough for daily tasks to not get in the way and it’s silent and very efficient. Most of the time it will run at around 6W and sip electricity.
Fan noise
During our stress test, the built-in fan was inaudible in our typical office environment. If you’re very near the EQ14, you can hear the fan when the system boots up. We measured below 30 dB.
Conclusion
The Beelink EQ 14 is $250 but at the time of this article, you can get it for $190 from Amazon.com – there’s an 8% discount plus a $40 coupon. That’s a superb price and hard to beat – the entry-level Apple Mac Mini is $599. Yes, the Mac has a much more powerful 10-core M4 processor but has the same 16GB of RAM and half the storage at 256GB without the option of a second SSD slot.
Apples and oranges, sure, but at the end of the day, a Mini PC is an affordable and minimalist way to handle your computing needs, and the Beelink EQ14 is perfectly capable of that.
