Beelink GTR7 mini-PC Review: A Complete AMD Phoenix Package at 65W

HTPC Credentials

The 2022 Q4 update to our system reviews brings an updated HTPC evaluation suite for systems. After doing away with the evaluation of display refresh rate stability and Netflix streaming evaluation, the local media playback configurations have also seen a revamp. This section details each of the workloads processed on the Beelink GTR7 as part of the HTPC suite.

YouTube Streaming Efficiency

YouTube continues to remain one of the top OTT platforms, primarily due to its free ad-supported tier. Our HTPC test suite update retains YouTube streaming efficiency evaluation as a metric of OTT support in different systems. Mystery Box's Peru 8K HDR 60FPS video is the chosen test sample. On PCs running Windows, it is recommended that HDR streaming videos be viewed using the Microsoft Edge browser after putting the desktop in HDR mode.

YouTube Streaming Statistics

The GPU in Beelink GTR7 supports hardware decoding of VP9 Profile 2, and we see the stream encoded with that codec being played back. The streaming is perfect, thanks to the powerful GPU and hardware decoding support - the dropped frames observed in the statistics below are due to mouse clicks involved in bringing up the overlay.

The streaming efficiency-related aspects such as GPU usage and at-wall power consumption are also graphed below.

The NUC BOX-1360P/D5 RPL-P system is the most energy efficient of the tested lot by a huge margin, but the Phoenix and Rembrandt systems (GTR7 and GEEKOM AS 6) slot in right behind.

Hardware-Accelerated Encoding and Decoding

The transcoding benchmarks in the systems performance section presented results from evaluating the VCE encoder within Handbrake's framework. The capabilities of the decoder engine are brought out by DXVAChecker.

Video Decoding Hardware Acceleration in Beelink GTR7

On paper, this codec list is quite comprehensive and should cover most home consumer and digital signage requirements

Local Media Playback

Evaluation of local media playback and video processing is done by playing back files encompassing a range of relevant codecs, containers, resolutions, and frame rates. A note of the efficiency is also made by tracking GPU usage and power consumption of the system at the wall. Users have their own preference for the playback software / decoder / renderer, and our aim is to have numbers representative of commonly encountered scenarios. Our Q4 2022 test suite update replaces MPC-HC (in LAV filters / madVR modes) with mpv. In addition to being cross-platform and open-source, the player allows easy control via the command-line to enable different shader-based post-processing algorithms. From a benchmarking perspective, the more attractive aspect is the real-time reporting of dropped frames in an easily parseable manner. The players / configurations considered in this subsection include:

• VLC 3.0.18
• Kodi 20.2
• mpv 0.35.1 (hwdec auto, vo=gpu-next)
• mpv 0.35.1 (hwdec auto, vo=gpu-next, profile=gpu-hq)

Fourteen test streams (each of 90s duration) were played back from the local disk with an interval of 30 seconds in-between. Various metrics including GPU usage, at-wall power consumption, and total energy consumption were recorded during the course of this playback.

All our playback tests were done with the desktop HDR setting turned on. It is possible for certain system configurations to automatically turn on/off the HDR capabilities prior to the playback of a HDR video, but, we didn't take advantage of that in our testing.

The GTR7 turns out to be the most energy efficient of all the compared AMD systems. All codecs play back well, except for the AV1 clip. VLC doesn't take advantage of the GPU hardware decoding capabilities for that codec.

The GTR7 continues to impress with energy efficiency for Kodi playback also. Like with VLC, AV1 hardware acceleration is again unused. Since the Kodi GUI is kept active at the main screen between the playback of different streams, the GPU remains active and continues to render the UI. This results in the energy numbers creeping up when the full playback period is considered.

AV1 decode acceleration is utilized by mpv, contributing to the excellent energy efficiency numbers. Unlike our experience with a previous driver release in the Rembrandt-based systems, playback is perfect without any dropped frames./p>

Setting the playback profile to 'gpu-hq' results in a lot more work for the shaders. We find that the 8Kp60 AV1 clip decode and presentation is not able to keep up with the real-time requirements because of the extra loading. This results in choppy playback as almost half the frames (2632 out of 5388) are dropped prior to presentation.

Compared to the default playback profile, the energy consumption numbers are slightly higher for this workload set because of the added shader work and extra GPU loading.