Geekom A8 Mini PC Review: A Ryzen 9 8945HS in a TINY Shell!

the smallest computer in my office right now is one of the most powerful computers in my office right now but this episode of some Gadget guy is brought to you by you huge thank you to the generous folks on my patreon who are helping to keep the lights on more info on those amazing supporters later in this video no Microsoft co-pilot plus PC AI recall tracking here just a really solid deal on a bucket of compute power the folks at gecom sent this my way well I mean this is just the empty part of the Box sent this my way for me to take on a test drive and share some thoughts it's real little this is the A8 it's a smaller shell Mini PC from gecom but the insides are even more powerful stepping away from the old school Nook style design the outer case is almost one aluminum piece but we still have plenty of I/O got usba and 3.5 mm Jack on the front SD card on the side and the back has all this goodness you usba USBC 2.5 gig ethernet and HDMI gcom rates the USB 4 ports at 40 gbits and they should support external gpus I'm eventually going to have to buy an egpu aren't I but one quick note I usually don't talk a whole lot about packaging the little shell that the uh the Mini PC came in so when you uh ship this unit I'm going to send this information up to gecom too it's a little cardboard sleeve that's supposed to help keep this in place but mine had bent over and it was sliding back and forth Inside the Box thankfully there doesn't seem to have been any damage there aren't a lot of moving Parts really just the fan if you think about it but is something to look out for if you decide to shop one of these get it sent to you and you can hear it rattling around in the Box too back to the PC vase am Mount included in the Box similar mounting holes to where you might connect it to a monitor two screw assembly to slot the gecom to the back of a display but this new design does make Ingress a bit more difficult you got to peel off four of these feet then we have four screws and then there's a plate inside with four more screws and you have to be really careful not to yank on this cable which is connected to the Wi-Fi card we still get access though and you can swap out the RAM and the SSD this is too small of a shell to add a smaller SATA drive like some of the larger Nook clones can do but I think that's a small tradeoff for the price and the performance I'm stoked to see gecom including name brand parts in their systems my A8 had Ram from crw and there was an Acer label on the SSD and I thought it was cool to see a mediatech wireless card connected to that obnoxious cable because of the way these Brands Source Parts I'm not sure if that's what everyone's going to get they're probably shopping the best prices they can get on small batches of these individual components but the company seems to be trying to get good quality parts we also get a new smaller power supply and it's still a 120 W power supply this is a pretty beefy little system gecom has been touting their new cooling solution I I think it's surprisingly well pitched compared again some larger mini PCS and some of those pyramid dual fan mini PCS the fans on this spin up on the aggressive side the the fans get active quick but the fan tone is lower pitched than I was expecting really the only issue I ran into with this new hardware form factor that cable on the inside on the internal plate runs to the bottom of the shell and out of all the geekon machines that I've reviewed this specific unit had the poorest reception in my office my Wi-Fi router is right outside my door so usually I see full reception great signal great speed great coverage just okay when I see Wi-Fi reception a bar down sometimes two bars as Windows reports reception I think most other Min systems I've reviewed have had better Wireless performance in this space but I also have a fancy switch over there so I do like plugging these in over ethernet and they get real Speedy when they're interacting with my network and my NS gecom sent over the top spec machine they currently sell and it's a Mighty Mouse of a computer we're at a place where a lot of these Mini PC companies make money on selling older laptop processors at reduced prices it's a great business model but now they're starting to get a bit more current with their Technologies the chip here is the current best AMD chip available that's pretty cool folks more familiar with ryzen processors might be quick to point out how similar the 8945 HS is to the last generation 7940 HS they're almost identical except for a nudge in npu performance that's so messed up I say nudge but just the mpu AMD claims around a 60% Improvement on apps that use that little npu and this is kind of where Microsoft Is Burning AMD and Intel all of those AI PCS out now don't deliver the mandatory mpu performance to be rated co-pilot plus that new rating requires machines deliver up to 40 tops where this only delivers 16 and it's why AMD is rumed to be working on an arm chip right now but we'll have to cover that in a podcast or another future video the more traditional computer work there really isn't a lot of need to push harder on CPU and GPU performance it's a bit cynical to say but for a mobile part we're in fantastic shape against Intel and Qualcomm and apple processors right now the shareholder investor bait fad is AI all the things so it makes sense to offer up a solution that handles AI tasks a little better I don't know about you but I'm so sick of hyping up language learning models as the AI but I digress again the geek bench scores are a good place to start we've got single core performance falling behind an apple M3 and multi-core performance passing the Apple M3 and it's a general Trend where we can find Intel parts for example that eek out wins in single core performance but I like to lean on AMD for multi-core and multitasking performance my beefy workstation under my desk is a thread Ripper I like to do lots of things lots of things things all at the same time on my computers and this chip helps reinforce that kind of an idea also the Radeon is still a solid competitor where Intel recently moved over to arc graphics on the core Ultra Series and the arc can narrowly Edge out the Radeon 78m in some of our synthetic tests I'll show what this GPU can do in a bit one quick example of CPU performance I like to run a file compression test and the score here is still handily outpacing last generation into in core I9 like it's not close the more cores an app can use it seems the better a ryzen will score I've only just started tackling browser performance and this ryzen delivers the highest score I've seen yet in browser bench in any of the systems I've actually had my hands on you might notice I'm still running the older 2.1 test and I'm doing that until I can get a new Qualcomm machine to compare on the newer benchmarks that's how Qualcomm rated the performance of The X Elite but compared against qualcomm's test machines under optimal conditions for Qualcomm this is outpacing X Elite that brings us to my little de Vinci resolve video rendering test and I have a mobile CPU that can render my one minute project faster than one minute that's really cool to see and things get even better when we do a GPU render and I finally have a sub 40c result we like that a lot I'm still not sure I'd recommend a Mini PC as a Mainline video editing workstation but this price to Performance is huge for folks doing moderate moderate High editing at home easily tackling 4K video projects and now including even better support for resolves neural engine plugins like creating a depth map or tracking a face it's not co-pilot plus worthy but we get a lot more use out of those npu based plugins those tools are now so much faster on this little mini PC than on my old beefy thread Ripper workstation that's the kind of AI stuff I actually do get lit up for now shifting to that GPU my gaming tests for mini PCS are falling ridiculously out of date where a couple years ago I would Marvel at late stage vampire survivors or can it do TMNT Shredder's revenge the A8 plays those games without blinking that's cake but I still like to show off Tetris effect like the older A5 I got to review from gecom it's pretty easy now to keep 1080p at higher graphic settings running at or above 60 frames per second something you definitely want in a twitch heavy game like Tetris I'm happy to see games like hellblade continue to improve in Native rendering but really that game is only playable on integrated Graphics using FSR but compared against Intel systems and older AMD systems we can now step up to higher quality while using FSR we take less of Graphics hit to keep us a consistent frame rate the main win is using that upscaling Tech to improve our frame rates and keep more consistency especially in combat sequences ditto Spider-Man with FSR we can almost play this with Ray tracing settings on and everything set to high almost we're so close but instead I think it's just better to sacrifice the pretty Reflections for better consistency that takes me to Robocop and RoboCop does real well with FSR I'm using the per performance setting in FSR high graphics and even during combat sequences the game reports frame rates in the low to mid 80s it's surprisingly good and that's super refreshing after I took a 12th gen core I9 for a spin where it couldn't play the game at all because of lacking direct X12 support this little AMD bugger is just going to town I'd buy that for a dollar now I don't have a good method of testing all of these AI claims 16 tops to 40 tops to to 45 tops all the tops you want I've been struggling with this on phones 2o AI is kind of unpredictable in the kind of output we should expect so how do you create a consistent and fair test that you can accurately measure or time especially when you get different results from the same setup process on the same machine but I recently did a comparison between Google's Magic Eraser on an Android tablet versus Microsoft's new generative erase feature in the photos app on Windows 11 on a Windows tablet and this chip has a better mpu than on my Windows tablet so it shows support for Microsoft's generative erase and it's pretty quick against that older Qualcomm chip we get better and faster results on the AMD npu there is no good way for me to create a scientifically identical test to measure this but just taking this photo wiping out some cones it's pretty clear how the A8 is beating my older windows on arm slate I'll be very curious to see how this Stacks up against ex Elite when we finally start getting those laptops shipped for now I'm going to call that progress like in Da Vinci resolve and looking forward to filters and generative Tools in our photo and video editing apps this kind of on device AI is really handy for reducing the tedious work in Creative fields that works real good this thing is a champ now I need to get a good current egpu to test this with an external graphics card but otherwise it's a crazy powerful little home PC ridiculous overkill for most folks compute tasks and it's very capable on its own for some AAA gaming and with all of that the price is not obscene now full MSRP is always a bit of a stretch but at launch this is on sale for $899 I think it would be very difficult to build this system for less than $899 not impossible but you'd have to shop it around a bit where this comes assembled with Windows 11 and it's ready to go out of the box and here's where I have to comment on software after my experiences with that other brand this came decently clean now there's a lot of Windows bloat and we get a lot of those obnoxious apps that come recommended in your start menu but I did full scans and I pulled the SSD and nothing flagged as malware the only side eye I can point to there was an experience pack preloaded for Russian updated in the Microsoft App Store I don't think that's an indication of anything UNT but please let me know in the comments if that should be a concern like all of the other bloatware I was just more annoyed as it seemed unnecessary when you're selling and shipping to the USA the world of mini PCS is just crazy fun right now this is a great performance per price trading blows well against a 10 core Apple M2 Pro but to get a new Mac mini with an M2 Pro you're starting at $1300 and to match the 2 tbte SSD that price climbs to $1900 and on the Mac Mini that's just with regular gigabit Ethernet and 16 gabes of RAM and that pie is baked the Mac Mini can't be upgraded after you buy it if you want to move this up to 64 GB of RAM after you buy it you can it just takes four more screws than it used to too I've had really good experiences with this brand and this feels like a proper premium experience in an even smaller and cuter shell so be on the lookout this is going to pop up again in some of my future videos as we start looking at other mini PCS and a whole new slate of Windows co-pilot plus laptops coming soon to this YouTube channel and while I do performance testing and compare these scores against Intel chips and Qualcomm chips and mediatech chips the first folks who will get to hear about that are my generous patrons the amazing people at patreon.com someguy my videos and articles and reviews and editorials would literally not be possible without their support I hugely thank them from the bottom of my heart and they're just really cool people to hang out with Early Access production Diaries and the private Discord if you have the means please consider checking out patreon.com someguy and of course I greatly appreciate all the folks who subscribe to these YouTube channels and share videos from their favorite content creators across social media that helps us out more than you know the YouTube algorithms are reckon mediumsized channels left and right now you know where you can find me around the rest of the 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Channel: JuanBagnell

Views: 8,093

Keywords: juan carlos bagnell, some gadget guy, SomeGadgetGuy, juan bagnell, geekom, geekom a8, mini pc, best mini pc, mac mini alternative, better than mac mini, amd, windows, windows 11, ai pc, ai, ryzen 9, ryzen 8945hs, ryzen 9 8945hs, fastest mini pc, pc building, sff, sff pc, small form factor, pc, microsoft

Id: _Xew1nftoys

Length: 15min 25sec (925 seconds)

Published: Fri May 24 2024