The Geekom X14 Pro is an excellent first effort laptop from the mini PC maker – only drawback is the limited availability

Geekom is primarily known for making mini PCs, and rather good ones at that. We've recently looked at such machines as the A8 AI, IT15, and A9 Max and said some very nice things about all of them.

Now Geekom has entered the altogether more challenging laptop market with a brace of slim and light machines called the X14 Pro and the X16 Pro. That betokens a desire to go head-to-head with the likes of Apple and Asus by appealing to people who are in the market for a MacBook Air or Zenbook.

As part of its efforts to persuade the buying public that this is a sign of bravery rather than foolishness, Geekom has sent us a top-of-the-range sample of the X14 Pro for evaluation. Before we go any further, it's worth pointing out that, at the time of writing, the X14 Pro and X16 Pro are only officially available in the USA and Germany.

In the former, it can currently be picked up for $1,049, and in the latter for €1,149, though Geekom has sent us a discount code (ITPROX14) which should deliver at 10% discount, valid until March 5th, from both Geekom and Amazon in the respective markets. Hopefully, other countries, including the UK, will get an official release in due course, but at the time of writing, Geekom is still pondering the matter.

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Geekom X14 Pro: Design

We defy anyone not to remark on the physical similarity between the X14 Pro and Apple's MacBook Air. Make no mistake, the X14 Pro looks a lot like Apple's smallest offering. Of course, that's no bad thing given that the MacBook Air is something of a design classic and, more importantly, the X14 Pro gives little away to the Apple machine in terms of build quality.

To keep the weight down (Geekom claims 999g, but by our measurements it's actually 980g), the X14 Pro is made mainly from magnesium alloy. It would be reasonable to assume that something so light (remember, the 13.3in MacBook Air is over 200g heavier) and thin, at just under 13mm, would be a bit fragile.

But not a bit, both the lid and the body of the X14 Pro are impressively solid with very little flex evident when we tried to twist it out of shape. Even the middle of the keyboard deck resists pressure heroically.

If we had to pick a fault with the design, the matte finish silver paint job is just a little too prone to showing fingerprints. We've seen worse, but we did find ourselves idly trying to rub grease marks off the palmwrest during our testing.

On the left side of the X14 Pro, you'll find two 40Gbps USB-C ports, both supporting DisplayPort video output and an HDMI 2.0 video feed. On the right, there's a single 5Gbps USB-A port, a 3.5mm audio jack, and a webcam isolator.

That's a perfectly decent selection of ports for a 14in superlight, but that hasn't stopped Geekom from bundling a very handy USB-C dock with one USB-C port for pass-through charging, two USB-A 3.2 Gen 1 ports, HDMI 2.0, and RJ45 Ethernet.

Wireless communications are handled by a MediaTek MT7922 card, which supports 6GHz Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.4.

Getting inside the X14 was almost a walk in the park. The 9 Torx screws that secure the base plate in place came out cleanly, and the clips around the edge of the base popped up without drama. However, there was something in the middle of the unit attached to the base plate.

We couldn't see if this was something to do with a thermal pad covering the innards or a Wi-Fi antenna cable, but it felt like applying enough force to separate the base from the body would result in something Quite Bad happening, so we didn't force the issue.

Given the high specification of the X14 Pro, we don't imagine many users will feel the need to upgrade the storage or RAM, assuming that's even technically possible. According to Geekom, there is only a single 2280 SSD slot inside the X14 Pro.

Geekom X14 Pro: Keyboard, touchpad, and webcam

The X14 Pro has a wholly standard keyboard with a US (or German) layout. The typing action is light yet positive, though the end-stop could do with being just a little more firmly damped.

The white-on-black keycap graphics are a model of clarity, and there's a four-stage white backlight for use in low-light environments.

The on/off button is a circular affair set in the top right corner of the deck, well away from the keyboard proper, and it contains a fingerprint scanner, which proved to be wholly reliable.

The touchpad is a 120 x 71mm Mylar affair with a pleasantly smooth surface and crisp corner click action, which, if not silent, is certainly not loud enough to scare the horses or annoy those sitting nearby.

The 1080p webcam is also a thoroughly competent piece of kit. Images looked bright and colourful, and things didn't degrade too badly in low light. There's no support for Windows Hello facial recognition, but there is a manual cut switch on the right side of the base.

Geekom X14 Pro: Display and speakers

The Edo-made 2,880 x 1,800 OLED display is one of the X14's principal claims to your attention and money. With a peak brightness level of 420cd/m2 in SDR mode and 650cdm/2 in HDR, it's more than bright enough to use outdoors, and it's very colorful, covering 171.3% of the RGB color space, 121.3% of the DCI-P3, and 118% of the AdobeRGB.

Color accuracy is good too, with a Delta E variance of just 1.3 vs the DCI-P3 standard. Combine that with a fluid 120Hz refresh rate and a glossy but not overly reflective finish, and you have a display that's very easy on the eye.

The 2 x 2W DTS-certified speaker system doesn't let the side down. It delivers ample volume, averaging 77.8dBA against a pink noise source at a 1m distance, without any hint of distortion.

There was plenty of low-end presence with a solid bass output underpinning high levels of detail and an expansive soundscape. We've heard worse sound quality from laptops costing more and boasting a more prestigious heritage.

Geekom X14 Pro: Specs and performance

The X14 Pro is available with two Intel Meteor Lake first-generation Core Ultra CPU options, the Core Ultra 5 125H and the Core Ultra 9 185H, both with 32GB of LPDDR5x RAM, the former with 1TB of storage, the latter with 2TB.

Those processors are now two generations old, with the recent arrival of machines built around Intel's Panther Lake Core Ultra Series 3 chips, which boast superior graphics performance and efficiency.

The Core Ultra 9 185H in the machine we were sent to test is still a potent little number with 16 cores, 6 of which are deemed performance and can run at a maximum speed of 5.1Ghz.

The X14 Pro scored 267 points in ITPro's bespoke 4K multi-media test and 8,102 in the PCMark 10 basic test. For comparison, Lenovo's five-star ThinkPad X1 Carbon, which is built around an Intel Core Ultra 7 258V CPU, again with 32GB of RAM, scored 245 and 6,909 in the same tests.

In the Geekbench 6 CPU test, the X14 Pro scored 2,283 in single-core and 12,365 in multi-core. That's very similar to what you'd expect from a 16-core Arrow Lake Core Ultra 7 255H, as was the OpenCL graphics test score of 31,985.

Of course, the new Panther Lake machines can do rather better: The Asus Zenbook Duo we had in the office recently scored 2,900, 16,920 and 56,817, respectively and delivered graphics performance which, if not quite on a par with the AMD Strix Halo chipset inside the HP ZBook Ultra G1a laptop, was still hugely impressive for a laptop with an integrated rather than discrete GPU.

None of this is to say that the X14 Pro's Arc iGPU can't handle graphics jobs; it ran the SPECviewperf 3dsmax 3D modelling benchmark at 21.2fps, almost twice as fast as the best Intel Iris Xe iGPU can manage.

Under maximum stress, some thermal throttling was in evidence with CPU utilisation dropping to around 70% while the integrated GPU chugged along at 100%. That said, fan noise was never an issue, and the base of the X14 Pro never got more than warm to the touch.

Given that the integrated NPU only boasts 11 TOPS, this is not a CoPilot laptop. It does support features like Windows Live Captions and Studio webcam effects, but not Recall or the full range of generative fill options in Paint.

The Micron 2TB SSD performed well, recording average sequential read and write speeds of 5033 MB/s and 2718 MB/s, respectively. It's also worth mentioning that, unlike some Chinese laptop makers such as Honor, Geekom has not divided the SSD into two partitions, one for the Windows OS and one for data.

In our standard battery video rundown test, the X14 Pro just made it to the nine-hour mark. That's pretty mediocre when the likes of the ThinkPad X1 Carbon can last for over 20 hours, and the new Zenbook Duo can easily clear the 25-hour mark. Granted, the Asus has a 99Whr battery, but the X14 Pro's 72Whr battery is hardly what we'd describe as small.

It is perhaps a little unfair to criticise the X14 Pro too harshly about its battery life and graphics performance compared to the newest Panther Lake laptops, given that they are likely to be rather more expensive for some time, but it's impossible to avoid the conclusion that the use of an Arrow Lake chipset would have been a better choice even if it made the X14 a little more expensive.

One last word here, the X14 Pro is delightfully free of excessive OEM bloatware with only control panels from Geekom, DTS, Realtek and Intel added to the basic Windows 11 Pro install.

Geekom X14 Pro: Is it worth it?

For a first try, the Geekom X14 Pro is a very praiseworthy effort. It looks and feels every inch a premium business laptop; the standard specification is excellent, with a 2TB SSD and 32GB of RAM, while the 2.8K OLED display is as good as anything you'll find on a high-end laptop from the likes of Samsung or Asus. The sound system is pretty decent, too.

Working off the US price, which translates into a UK price of just over £900, it has to be said that the Geekom X14 Pro is a great package for the price and is certainly worthy of consideration.

If Geekom can follow this up with a second-generation machine with Arrow Lake underpinnings and an official UK sales channel, people will likely be queuing up to buy it.

Geekom X14 Pro specifications