The Geekom A7 Max is a useful addition to Geekom's already impressive range of AMD-based Mini PCs – with more ports than you can shake a stick at

The idea for the Geekom A7 Max must come from somewhere deep in the bowels of Geekom's HQ in Shenzhen. We can only assume that there is a room with the sign 'Department of Niche Eradication' on the door. Within that room, a team works whose sole function is to identify and plug gaps in the Geekom Mini PC range.

Its most recent accomplishment was to notice a gap between the A9 Max and the A8 AI, which could easily be filled by a model with the connectivity of the former but the performance and price of the latter. The result is the new A7 Max, a £600, give or take, box with more AI ports than you can shake a stick at, room for more RAM, and running on an AMD Ryzen 9 chipset.

Geekom A7 Max: Design

The Geekom A7 Max and A9 Max share a common external case, internal chassis, and matte silver paint job. At 135 x 132 x 47mm, the A7 Max is the same size as the A9 Max, though it is 20g lighter at 630g.

Neither the A7 Max nor the A9 Max is what you could call big or heavy, and both come with a VESA bracket to mount them out of sight and mind, but they are a full size up from the diminutive A8, which otherwise shares a similar aesthetic.

All the Geekom boxes we've tested have had a reassuringly solid feel to them, and the A7 Max is no exception. The metal exterior shell, in particular, feels very solid and will apparently survive 200Kg being stacked on it.

The A7 Max has ports galore, just like its A9 Max big brother. To kick things off, you get six USB-A ports; four 10Gbps 3.2 Gen 2 spec on the front, another 3.2 Gen 2, and one 2.0 480Mbps on the back. Also on the back, there are two 2.5GbE RJ-45 ports, useful if you want to wire the box up to a network and an NAS box, two USB-C 4.0 ports, which also support DisplayPort video, and two HDMI 2.1 video outputs.

Rounding things out are an SD card reader on the left side, a Kensington security lock on the right, and a 3.5mm audio jack on the front next to the LED power button. The DC jack for the 120W rat-and-tail charger is at the back.

The right-hand USB-C port should be able to power the A7 Max, but, like the A9 Max, it didn't want to play ball with any of the USB-C chargers we had to hand during testing, none of which were rated at exactly 120W. You may have more luck with a different 120W-rated USB charger.

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Getting inside the A7 Max is a repeat of the process with the A9 Max, so you have to prise the four rubber feet off and then undo the four screws that hold the plastic base plate in place. Next, you need to remove four more screws that secure a metal internal cover.

Once you're in, you find two SODIMM slots but only one SSD mount. The mount for a second 2230 SSD inside the A9 Max is missing. Annoyingly, the A7 Max suffers from the same design flaw as the A8 and the A9 Max: the Wi-Fi antenna cables that are fixed to the metal plate that covers the internal components are too short.

Removing the metal plate to access the RAM and drive mounts will almost certainly make the cables ping off their pressure mounts on the wireless card, so you need to unscrew the wireless antenna mounts from the base plate before you remove it. It's all a bit of palaver.

The A7 Max uses the same MediaTek MT7922 wireless card as the A8, which supports 6GHz Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.2. That's another downgrade on the A9 Max, which features a Mediatek MT7925 card that supports Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4.

The A7 Max comes with a fully activated and entirely clean copy of Windows 11 Pro, but everything worked perfectly when running on Ubuntu 24.10, making this a good platform for anyone wanting to use an open-source OS. Sadly, you can't buy the A7 Max barebones or with Linux preinstalled to save some money.

Geekom A7 Max: Specs and Performance

At the heart of the A7 Max, you'll find an 8-core, 16-thread AMD Ryzen 9 7940HS CPU with Radeon 780M graphics. Technically, it's not a million miles away from the (officially China-only) Ryzen 7 8745HS chip in the A8.

Both are Zen 4 chips with 8 cores, but the Ryzen 9 chip is a little faster with a maximum clock of 5.1GHz vs 4.9GHz, and in this instance, it has a higher TDP of 45W vs. 35W.

The Ryzen 9 7940HS also has a 10 TOPS Ryzen AI NPU, something the Ryzen 7 8745HS in the A8 does not have. Given that a 10 TOPS NPU isn't enough to run the more exotic Windows Copilot AI features, like Recall, it's of questionable benefit.

While the A9 Max and A8 AI also ship with two sticks of 16GB as standard, the A7 Max makes do with one 16GB stick. Geekom's justification for this is that shipping with one stick of RAM keeps the price down and doesn't have a major impact on basic day-to-day office activities.

Given the ludicrous price of aftermarket RAM at the moment, that makes some sense, though we think shipping the A7 Max with 2 x 8GB would have been a better idea, because, as we shall see, the single-channel RAM does limit performance in some areas.

This may be a sign of the new normal, with smaller PC manufacturers facing a stark choice: either increase their prices or reduce the amount of RAM their boxes ship with.

In the ITPro 4K Handbrake-based multi-media benchmark, the A7 Max scored 346 points compared to 356 on the A9 Max (running on an AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 processor) and 363 on the A8 AI. That's a healthy score and proof that the A7 Max can take the vast majority of basic computing tasks in its stride, even with just one stick of RAM.

CPU benchtests showed that, as expected, there's not a vast amount of inherent performance difference between the A7 Max and A8 AI, the former scoring 2,569 and 10,031 in the Geekbench 6 single-core and multi-core tests, to the latter's 2,568 and 12,842 and 106 single-core and 847 multi-core in the Cinebench R24 test, to the latter's 104 and 873.

With an extra 16GB of RAM added, the Geekbench 6 multi-core score increased by over 30% to 13,121, proving that with equal RAM, the A7 Max is faster than the A8 in demanding and RAM-critical productivity jobs.

Out of the box, the A7 Max did rather less well when it comes to graphics performance. The SPECviewperf 3dsmax 3D modelling benchmark ran at 19.6fps compared to the A8 AI's 39.8 on the same GPU and the A9 Max's 42.4fps.

Make no mistake, the single-channel 16GB RAM configuration seriously limits the A7 Max's performance in dedicated graphics jobs; with a second stick of 16GB RAM in play, the 3DMark Fire Strike benchmark score jumped from 4,672 to 8,131 while the SPECviewperf 3dsmax 3D modelling benchmark result doubled to 38.9fps.

In another similarity with the A8, running high-demand jobs at no point strained the A7 Max's cooling system. After several hours with the CPU and GPU running at maximum stress, utilisation settled down in the high nineties and 100 per cent, respectively.

Under heavy stress, the noise from the single fan is certainly audible, but not what we'd call intrusive or annoying. As is the case with the A8, the 1TB SSD comes from Chinese maker Wodposit. The performance of the SSD in the A8 was very impressive, but in the A7 Max, it was even more so, returning average sequential read and write speeds of 5,708MB/s and 5,552MB/s, respectively.

Geekom A7 Max: Is it worth it?

At the time of writing, the A7 Max is available for £594 from Amazon and £659 from Geekom UK, which is very close to the price of the A8, but that ships with twice the RAM in dual-channel mode. In a world where a stick of 16GB RAM can cost close to £200, that makes the smaller A8 AI the better choice if graphics performance is high up your list of requirements.

To counter that, the A7 Max offers the same very wide range of ports as the considerably more expensive A9 Max, including two RJ-45 ports and two v4.0 Type-C ports. If wired networking is your primary concern, the A7 Max is the better choice.

We think Geekom has missed a trick by not fitting the A7 Max with a mount for a second SSD, and the overly short Wi-Fi antenna cables continue to be a bit of an irritant, especially as buyers delving inside to add more RAM is a likely occurrence.

Those minor issues aside, the Geekom A7 Max is still very much a five-star product and a useful addition to Geekom's already impressive range of AMD-based Mini PCs.

Geekom A7 Max Specifications