Beelink launches Wildcat Lake mini PC for around €500

The cable clutter stays to a minimum on the desk: the Beelink Eqi Wildcat Lake Core 3 304 has its power supply built into the compact NUC case. The Chinese manufacturer sells the mini PC for around €500 — with 16 GB of RAM and 512 GB of storage.

The equipment is extensive for this price range. It includes Thunderbolt 4 as well as two Ethernet ports, meaning network jacks, one of which transfers data at 10 Gbit/s. According to Heise, high memory prices make it difficult to find inexpensive mini PCs with up-to-date technology and plenty of ports.

The computer contains an Intel processor from the Core 300 series, “Wildcat Lake,” introduced in April. The entry-level Core 3 304 combines one performance core with four low-power efficiency cores. The test showed that the chip is fast with a single task but falls significantly behind when several computing tasks are running at the same time.

Heise put the Beelink through a test routine under Windows 11 and Ubuntu 26.04. In addition to processor performance, the test examined the transfer rates of the ports as well as noise levels and efficiency. The test title sums up the performance profile: “Single-threaded good, multi-threaded bad” — strong in single tasks, weak under multi-core workloads.

What’s next? For office work, the computer offers a lot of connectivity and storage in a small space, without a separate power supply next to the device. However, anyone who frequently runs several computationally intensive tasks in parallel will have to account for its weaker performance under multiple simultaneous workloads. The detailed measurements cited in the test are not included in the freely viewable excerpt.