The Geekom A9 Max is the most expensive but also the most capable Mini PC we've tested recently

The Geekom A9 Max has its work cut out; it is a small-form PC with plenty of powerful rivals, such as the Core Ultra 288V-powered MSI NUC AI+ 2MG and the Core Ultra 9 285H-powered Geekom IT15. The A9 is built around one of AMD's latest Ryzen AI 300 Series chipsets, in this case, the top-of-the-line 12-core AI 9 HX 370.

Like the 288V but unlike the 285H, the AMD chipset comes with a 50 TOPS-rated NPU, which means it can more readily handle local AI tasks without tripping up the CPU or GPU. It also features one of AMD's powerful 890M integrated GPUs, which gives it a useful advantage over the Intel duo when it comes to moving pixels about.

However, having the latest and greatest silicon comes with a price impact. At £999, the A9 Max is the most expensive small-form Mini PC we've tested of late, though to be fair, that price does include 2TB of storage and 32GB of RAM, so it's unlikely that most buyers will need to put their hand in their pocket to upgrade it any time soon.

Geekom A9 Max: Design

Physically, the Geekom A9 Max is a slightly larger, silver version of its IT15 brother, and to the naked eye appears to share its casing with two other recent Geekom models, the A8 Max and the GT1 Mega. Bigger and heavier than the IT15 it may be, but at 135 x 132 x 47mm and 570g, it is still small enough and light enough to be easily hidden away on a desk or hung behind a monitor using the bundled VESA bracket.

All the Geekom boxes we've tested have had a reassuringly solid feel to them, and the new A9 Max is no exception. The metal exterior shell, in particular, feels very solid, and in its all-silver glory, it looks rather smart too. The metal exterior will apparently survive 200Kg (roughly 100 average-size house bricks) being stacked on it. That wasn't something we tested, nor expect it to be a likely occurrence in everyday use.

Getting inside the box to access the RAM and storage isn't the most straightforward of tasks. First, 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. All the screws are small, and we dropped one of the second set into the internals of the A9 Max when our magnetic screwdriver decided to be less magnetic than needed. It took several minutes and tweezers to retrieve the screw.

It's at this point that you need to be very careful: There's an antenna cable that runs around the base plate and is connected to the wireless card, and there's hardly any slack in it. Even being as careful as possible, the two antenna connectors popped off when we tried to move the base panel out of the way to photograph the insides.

The lack of slack in that antenna cable changes the job of accessing the two SODIMM slots and the SSD bays inside the A9 Max from straightforward to a pain in the backside and a major chore for the less technically capable, dexterous, and patient.

Make no mistake, relocating the antenna cable connector is a very fiddly job, so fiddly in fact that in the absence of our magnifying stand, we gave up and stuffed the A9 Max back in its box once our testing was complete.

Geekom has made one of the two PCIe 4 × 4 NVMe SSD slots 2230 format. It's not like 2230-size SSDs are hard to come by, but we didn't have any around the office. On balance, we'd have preferred a 2240 or, better yet, a 2280 mount.

When it comes to ports, the A9 Max certainly delivers. It features no less than 6 USB-A ports; four 10Gbps 3.2 Gen 2 spec on the front, one 3.2 Gen 2 and one 2.0 at the back, two 2.5GbE RJ-45 ports, which is handy 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 2 HDMI 2.1 video outputs.

There's also an SD card reader on one side, a Kensington security lock on the other, and a 3.5mm audio jack at the back, along with a DC-in for the 120W rat-and-tail charger. That array of HDMIs and DPAltMode USB-Cs means the A9 Max can quite happily drive up to four 8K monitors, which is a trick few Mini PCs can pull off.

The iconography on the rear of the box and Geekom's website suggest that the right-hand USB-C port should be able to power the A9 Max, but it didn't want to play ball with the 125W USB-C charger we had to hand during testing. You may have more luck with a different charger. Wireless communications are managed by a Mediatek MT7925 card that supports Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4.

Though the A9 Max is only available to order with Windows 11 Pro, Geekom advertises it as Linux compatible and as working well with Ubuntu specifically. We booted the unit into Ubuntu 24:04 from a USB stick and everything worked out of the box, making this a safe bet for those wanting an open-source machine.

Geekom A9 Max: Specs and Performance

Hauling the coal inside the A9 Max is the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370. It has 12 cores (4 x Zen 5 and 8 x Zen 5c) and supports up to 24 threads, and can run at a maximum speed of 5.1GHz. It's partnered by a 50 TOPS NPU and AMD's Radeon 890M integrated graphics solution. All told, the integrated AI engine can deliver up to 80 TOPS, which bodes well for being able to cope with future AI tasks.

Unlike the MSI NUC AI+, the Geekmon A9 Max doesn't carry Microsoft's Copilot branding, but all the Windows built-in AI tasks ran, except Recall, which requires at least one form of built-in biometric security to first run. Many people will regard not running Recall as a good thing.

In ITPro's in-house 4K multimedia benchmark, the A9 Max scored 356 points, while the PCMark10 test score came in at 7,712. If you want a small-form PC with meaningfully higher levels of performance, you'll need to spend considerably more money on something like the Framework Desktop.

To put the A9 Max's performance into context, the new Core Ultra 288V-powered MSI NUC AI+ 2MG we recently tested scored 301 points in the 4K test, while the Core Ultra 9 285H-powered Geekom IT15 managed 361 points. But if the CPU performance of the A9 Max isn't in a different league from the Intel-powered alternatives, the graphics performance is.

The integrated Radeon 390M scored 3,701 in the Time Spy benchmark and ran the SPECviewperf 3dsmax modelling test at 43fps. Those are three mightily impressive scores for an integrated GPU, even if they can't match the new Radeon 8050S in the Framework Desktop we tested recently.

Again, for context, the MSI box ran the 3dsmax test at 26fps, the Geekom IT15 at 29 29fps. The Framework managed 118fps, but again, that's a machine that costs 50% more and is four times the size and weight.

The cooling system clearly works well. After a full hour with the CPU and GPU running under maximum stress, utilisation levelled out at 87% and 99% respectively, which is impressive.

Our test unit came fitted with a 2TB 2280 Lexar SSD, and it delivered some usefully impressive speeds, averaging 4,436MB/s sequential read speeds and 3,116MB/s sequential write speeds. That's more than adequate for most usage scenarios.

Geekom A9 Max: Is it worth it?

Even at just shy of £1,000, the new Geekom A9 Max is a thoroughly impressive little machine. The graphics performance puts it comfortably ahead of the competition running on Intel's Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake platforms, while the plethora of ports makes it an ideal machine to form the AV and data hub of a substitutional network.

The list of niggles is short and minor: we'd have preferred to see a second 2280 rather than a 2230 SSD slot, a proper DisplayPort video output wouldn't go amiss, and tinkerers will grow to curse that overly short and hard-to-reattach antenna cable.

Assuming the vast majority of buyers won't want to rummage around inside the A9 Max to add more storage and RAM, and again assuming they have a Type-C/DisplayPort cable to hand, our niggles will remain largely theoretical and do not in any way detract from what is a smart, potent and very capable little box of tricks.

Geekom A9 Max specifications