As an early adopter of the Beelink GTR9 Pro with the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 processor, it took several weeks of intensive testing and tuning before the machines were stable enough for full‑day workloads. On paper the specs are excellent, but the real‑world experience exposes serious stability, PCIe, NIC and acoustic issues that need to be addressed.
I am running Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. I started with the HWE kernel and then moved to a mainline 6.18 kernel, which finally gave me a stable baseline with this platform. The iGPU is configured with 64 GB shared memory and 32 GB GTT memory, without extra kernel parameters. Each of my four units has 128 GB RAM, and with the latest AMD repositories and ROCm 7.1 installed, LM Studio can run almost 24/7 and handle full‑day AI inference workloads once everything is tuned correctly.
To reach that point, a lot of low‑level work was required. I performed a full BIOS reset and updated to BIOS version 1.08. In the BIOS I set AMD PBO to Auto and the power profile to Balanced to avoid aggressive boosting. I disabled onboard audio and turned off all PCIe lanes except the one for the system SSD. On the OS side, in /etc/modprobe.d I blacklisted/disabled almost all unused onboard devices such as Wi‑Fi, Bluetooth and the internal microphone. Only with this stripped‑down configuration did the systems become reasonably stable under Linux.
The integrated 10 GbE NICs have been a consistent problem. I applied the November Intel firmware updates for the NICs, so the NVM and drivers should be current and correctly matched, but the issues persist. Under load or even light use the 10 GbE interfaces can hang, drop link or become completely unresponsive until a full power cycle. Because of this, I ended up disabling the onboard 10 GbE and now use a USB‑C Gigabit Ethernet adapter for all network access. From how it behaves, it does not feel like “just” a driver or firmware bug on the NIC side, but more like a PCIe / platform‑level problem.
Storage has been another serious concern. I started with four 4 TB PCIe 4.0 Kingston KC3000 NVMe drives (one for each unit). During installation and early testing, two of those drives effectively died after being used in the GTR9 Pro. Because this happened on two different units, I stopped installing the remaining two drives as a precaution. To me this strongly suggests that something in the PCIe power delivery or reset/initialisation on this platform can stress or even damage certain NVMe drives. That is not acceptable behaviour for a product in this price and positioning.
From the outside and inside, the machines look and feel premium. However, the cooling solution lets the whole system down. All four of my units have noticeably different fan sounds; they are relatively loud and have a scratchy, grinding character, more like cheap fans than something in a “mini workstation” device. For anyone planning to use these on a desk or in a quiet office, the acoustic profile is a real drawback.
In summary: with enough manual work (kernel change, BIOS reset and tuning, disabling multiple onboard devices, using an external USB‑C NIC), the GTR9 Pro with Ryzen AI Max+ 395 can be made to run stable enough for heavy AI workloads on Linux. But as an early adopter with four units and two dead NVMe drives, the experience is very disappointing. The combination of unreliable 10 GbE, potential PCIe‑related NVMe damage, random hangs if you do not follow a strict tuning recipe, and low fan quality does not match the marketing or the expectations for a high‑uptime, professional‑grade mini PC.
What I would like to see from Beelink:
- A genuinely revised and thoroughly tested BIOS that stabilises PCIe lane management and NVMe power/reset handling, and properly integrates the 10 GbE controllers.
- Coordinated fixes on the NIC side so that the 10 GbE ports no longer lock up or disappear under load.
- Improved, higher‑quality fans and the option to replace fans without sending entire units back.
- A clear, structured RMA and communication process specifically for GTR9 Pro early‑batch issues, so early adopters are not left to debug these problems alone.
At this point, I feel I might have been better off spending a bit more on a different mini‑workstation platform, but I still hope Beelink will take this feedback seriously and provide firmware, hardware and RMA solutions for existing GTR9 Pro owners.
