Beelink Open-Sourced Multi-Functional GPU Ex Docking Station for Mini PCs

I bought a Beelink Ser6Max (7735hs) model on my trip to China in 2023. I'm using it for a NAS (a mini PC + a 4-bay DAS) I couldn't be more happier. My watt meter says the box sips 13-15W when idle in stark contrast to my desktop "oven" which usually goes up 250-300W even without GPUs. I loaded it with 64GB of RAM and a 4TB nvme (out of which I use 1 for a zfs cache for my DAS) running Ubuntu (no proxmos). It's running 20-40 containers behind a nginx instance and I didn't run into perf issues yet. It really is a set-and-forget little machine.

The only slightly annoying thing is that there's only one thunderbolt port and it's being used by the DAS. For some reason, the DAS doesn't work on a USB3.1. Otherwise, I'd love to plug eGPU in and use for simpler AI tasks such as CV in immich and RAGs on some repos.

It's wild the way the mass and power requirements have effectively made the rest of computers daughterboards to GPUs.

Minisforum made a mini pc with oculink this last year.

I ended up 3d printing a stand for it to hold a GPU card and a power supply, using an oculink to pcie adapter I found on amazon.

https://www.amazon.com/MINISFORUM-Barebone-Desktop-HDMI2-1-O...

https://www.amazon.com/chenyang-SFF-8612-SFF-8611-External-G...

I had only heard of Beelink this year, when I bought two of their mini gaming PCs about six months ago.

I actually really like them. I use one as my home server (replacing a rack mount one that idled at about 250W and went up to 500W at peak), and one running a customized NixOS/SteamOS thing as my primary gaming console (after the MiSTer), and I've been extremely satisfied with both. Getting NixOS on them was pretty painless, and even getting some non-obvious stuff like eGPUs wasn't terribly hard.

It's cool that they're giving back to the community.

All they did was release technical drawings for a proprietary connector they designed to interface with their products. That's not what "open source" means. They're not releasing any schematics for their products. This is purely so you can build devices that can interface with their proprietary connector, which will be financially beneficial to them as most people probably do not own a Beelink PC.