Beelink EQi 304 Mini PC Review – Introduction to the Series

First Impressions Running Linux

To test the hardware under Linux, I installed two popular distributions: CachyOS on the integrated flash storage and Fedora on an external NVMe SSD.

The CachyOS installer offers a wide choice of bootloaders, desktop environments and optional packages. I selected Limine, KDE Plasma and the default package set.

Both distributions installed flawlessly, with all hardware detected and working without additional drivers or configuration.

The intel_vpu driver loaded successfully, including the required NPU 50xx firmware, and exposed the accelerator through /dev/accel/accel0. No additional driver installation or configuration was necessary.

I ran top under both CachyOS and Fedora. CachyOS configured approximately 15.3GiB of swap, matching the machine’s usable RAM, whereas Fedora allocated a much smaller 8GiB. CachyOS’s approach seems more sensible, particularly for heavier workloads.

I’ve only been testing the machine for a few days. From my initial testing, desktop performance is decent, helped considerably by the strong performance of the single P-core. Web browsing felt responsive, although the limited core count means that compiling software takes significantly longer than on many of the machines I have reviewed. This is particularly relevant for Arch-based distributions, where installing packages from the Arch User Repository often involves compiling them from source.

In the next article, I’ll put the machine through a series of benchmarks.

Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction and Design
Page 2 – Interrogation of the System
Page 3 – First Impressions Running Linux

Complete list of articles in this series: