Pros & Cons
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- Attractive and well-built
- Small, unobtrusive chassis design
- Solid productivity performance from Ryzen AI chip
- Generous connectivity options, including four front USB ports and dual Ethernet
- Upgradable memory and storage
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- Cooling fan can get noisy under load
- Single available config is a bit expensive, if you don't need all the ports and CPU power
Geekom A9 Max Specs
| Boot Drive Capacity (as Tested) | 2 |
| Boot Drive Type | SSD |
| Desktop Class | Small Form Factor (SFF) |
| Graphics Card | AMD Radeon 890M |
| Operating System | Windows 11 |
| Processor | AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 |
| RAM (as Tested) | 32 |
You can pack some punchy components into today's mini PCs—a paradigm epitomized by the Mac mini. The Geekom A9 Max (starts at $1,199, as tested) bears a striking resemblance to Apple’s desktop, backing up those inspired aesthetics with one of the fastest mobile PC processors around. The Geekom makes some compromises to achieve that Mac mini-like experience, namely a fair deal of fan noise and steep pricing compared with some competitors. Regardless, if you're hungry for speedy productivity from a compact Windows system, the Geekom A9 Max won't disappoint, earning our latest Editors' Choice award in the Windows mini desktop category.
Configuration: A Potent But Pricey Loadout
The Geekom A9 Max comes in just one configuration, for a sizable $1,199. While this is competitive with similarly built mini PCs, the Apple Mac mini comes in way cheaper in its starter model. Then again, Geekom's loadout is considerably more affordable than a similarly configured Mac mini, which approaches $2,000. Geekom's asking price includes an AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 processor, 32GB of DDR5 memory, and a 2TB solid-state drive. This configuration will meet the needs of the most demanding productivity users.
Unlike NUC-style mini PCs, you can't buy a barebones kit version of the A9 Max that lets you add your own operating system, RAM, and storage. The Geekom is upgradable, though, meaning that you can expand to 64GB of RAM and a second SSD via an extra M.2 slot, giving this mini PC some growth potential.
Design: An Attractive, Minimalist, and Well-Crafted Chassis
I’ve reviewed several mini PCs lately, and the Geekom A9 Max comes closest to mirroring the Apple Mac mini's look. That’s not a bad thing; the silver, all-aluminum chassis is an attractively minimalist, solid piece of metal. It doesn't quite pull off the Mac mini's vibe of a little block of metal hovering above your desk, but it’s close and will blend well into any office environment.
The venting around the edges breaks up the design, though. It's not the slickest look, but it serves a purpose: keeping the powerful components inside cool. When the AMD Ryzen AI 9 chip starts working hard, the fan gets a little loud, especially in performance mode. The noise won't ruin your day, but keep it in mind for comparison-shopping, especially if you're going to place the Geekom close by you on your desk. (Some other Lenovo mini PCs I’ve tested of late, based on Qualcomm Arm CPUs, are mostly a lot quieter.)
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)Geekom's construction feels as high-end as it looks, for the most part. When I pick up the Geekom to move it around (an easy enough task), the bottom feels a little less rugged than the rest of it. The machine also lacks the kind of easy-open chassis that I’ve come to appreciate from PCs this size, but the case comes off via four screws beneath its detachable rubber feet. Geekom has done a commendable job of creating a mini PC that feels like the money you’re paying.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)In terms of size, the Geekom A9 Max measures 5.3 inches wide by 5.2 inches deep—ever so slightly larger in one dimension than the Mac mini, which measures 5.25 inches on each side. But it's just 1.85 inches tall, slightly shorter than the Mac mini’s 2 inches. You can also use a VESA mount accessory to place the Geekom out of the way.
(Credit: Mark Coppock)Ports: It's a Connectivity Cornucopia
The Geekom A9 Max delivers a ton of connectivity for its size—so much, in fact, that all those ports slightly mar the aesthetic. But, as with the venting, the trade-off is worth it.
On the front, you’ll find four USB Type-A 3.2 Gen 2 ports lined up like soldiers in a row, plus a 3.5mm audio jack. Around the left side is a full-size SD card reader, and on the back is another USB-A 3.2 Gen 2 port, two USB4 Type-C ports (one providing power), two RJ-45 jacks running at up to 2.5Gbps, and two HDMI 2.1 outputs. One complaint: I wish the system featured a more easily accessible USB-C connection than the two around back.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)The two Ethernet jacks are included for two reasons: connection redundancy/failover in case one of the ports fails, or connecting to two discrete networks, such as an intranet or a privately hosted server. As for wireless connectivity, the A9 Max handles that via antennas inside the chassis, which are entirely up to date (Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4).
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(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)Performance Testing: A Powerful Petite PC
For our performance comparisons here, we've selected mini desktops with a variety of processors. First is the Mac mini with M4 Pro ($2,199 as tested), which has been the performance leader among mainstream mini desktops and the most expensive. The budget-oriented Geekom A6 Mini ($499 as tested) has a slower AMD Ryzen 7 6800H chip. Rounding out the comparison group are two Intel-based machines, the midrange Asus NUC 14 Essential ($869 as tested) with an Intel Core Ultra 7 165H, and the high-end Asus NUC 15 Pro+ ($1,199 as tested) with the top-tier Intel Core Ultra 9 285H—the most comparable in price and performance to the Geekom A9 Max.
Productivity and Content-Creation Tests
Our primary overall benchmark, UL's PCMark 10, puts a system through its paces in productivity apps ranging from web browsing to word processing and spreadsheet work. Its Full System Drive subtest measures a PC's storage throughput.
Three more tests we rely on are CPU-centric or processor-intensive: Maxon's Cinebench 2024 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene; Primate Labs' Geekbench 6.3 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning; and we see how long it takes the video transcoder HandBrake 1.8 to convert a 12-minute clip from 4K to 1080p resolution.
Finally, workstation maker Puget Systems' PugetBench for Creators rates a PC's image-editing prowess through a variety of automated operations in Adobe Photoshop 25.
The Geekom A9 Max packs a mighty Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 mobile processor, which directly competes with the Intel Core Ultra 9 285H in the Asus NUC 15 Pro+, and wins half of their matchups. These two battled for distant second place behind the Mac mini across our benchmarks. The M4 Pro processor still proves much faster in single-core tasks and multi-core performance. The other mini PCs in this comparison group have much harder times competing and so compete more amongst themselves.
In that context, the Geekom A9 Max is among the speediest tiny towers in its class. The A9 Max will excel at less demanding creative tasks, such as photo editing and basic 1080p video editing. The lack of a discrete GPU will hold it back in more demanding creative workflows, though, and any jobs that use the GPU to speed up operations, despite its competitive performance shown below.
As mentioned above, you’ll have to put up with some fan noise when pushing things the hardest, but that’s not unusual for the fastest mini PCs. Also note that the AMD processor can handle up to 80 trillion AI operations per second (TOPS) when crunching generative and agentic AI tasks, with 50 TOPS concentrated in the chip's neural processor. That can’t rival the fastest discrete GPUs, but it will still power today’s typical AI features in Windows 11.
Graphics Tests
We challenge each reviewed system’s graphics with a quintet of animations or gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark test suite. The first two, Wild Life (1440p) and Wild Life Extreme (4K), use the Vulkan graphics API to measure GPU speeds. The second pair, Steel Nomad's regular (4K) and Light (1440p) subtests, focuses on APIs more commonly used for game development to assess gaming geometry and particle effects. A fifth test, Solar Bay, emphasizes ray-tracing performance. (We do not have 3DMark results for the Mac mini, so it is not included in the charts below.)
The AMD Radeon 890M integrated graphics chip (IGP) inside the A9 Max desktop pushes the envelope of x86 PC integrated graphics performance, so much so that Geekom suggests you can play games on this desktop at 1080p using AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution techniques for frame generation and upscaling. However, while these are synthetic results, these 3DMark numbers aren't even close to what an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5050 mobile GPU can produce. While we haven't tested the M4 Pro inside the Mac mini using 3DMark, the M4 Pro within the 16-inch MacBook Pro blew all of these systems away in the three tests it supports by thousands of points. Regardless, without dedicated resources, none of these mini desktops are ideal for anything more than low-detail or casual gaming.