Geekom A8 Mini-PC Review: A Sleek, Tiny Ryzen 9 Powered Titan

Before testing the Geekom A8, we installed all avaialble Windows udpates and any AMD-related driver updates that were available, similar to what any consumer buying one of these machines would do.

Thankfully, Geekom has had a very light touch as far as the included software goes – there isn’t any special Geekom app or other bloatware on the system. Any system tweaking would therefore need to be done via AMD-provided tools, drivers, or in the BIOS. We left the system at stock settings, however, with the processor configured to run at its default 45W.

ATTO Disk Benchmark

ATTO’s benchmark provides a useful overview of a storage device’s write and read performance. This is a quick and simple benchmark that reports read and write performance over a variety of block sizes to show how a drive behaves with small and large transfers.

This system is fitted with an Acer N7000 2TB, which is a PCIe gen4x4 drive using QLC NAND and HMB caching technology. Its transfer speeds are pretty good, at an average of approximately 5GB/s for writes and 6.5GB/s for reads.

Speedometer 2.0 Browser Benchmark

BrowserBench's Speedometer tests your browser speed with web app frameworks like React, Angular, Ember.js, and even vanilla JavaScript. This test is an example of how systems may cope with real web applications, as opposed to a pure JavaScript compute test like JetStream.

The little Geekom A8’s score is a chart leading 388, when compared against a range of modern laptops with integrated graphics. In case it isn’t obvious, we are mainly comparing the A8 to other system that use mobile processors, with and without discrete graphics chips. Even so, a score of 388 is only beaten by a small margin by a gaming laptops like the ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 (2024) with the same AMD Ryzen 9 8945HS processor inside, but backed up with Nvidia’s powerful RTX 4070 laptop graphics.

Cinebench R23 Rendering Benchmark

Here is our first focused look at CPU performance. Cinebench R23 renders a scene using the Cinema 4D R23 rendering engine. We tested both single-threaded and multi-threaded performance here...

This is another great result for the Geekom A8. Remember, it is running the Ryzen 9 8945HS at a nominal 45W. However, as you will see on the next page, this chip boosts and consumes much more power when the cooling system provides headroom to do so. Again, to find a laptop to beat the Geekom A8, you would have to look at gaming-class DTR machines like the recently reviewed Alienware m16 R2 which packs in both an Intel Core Ultra 7 155H and GeForce RTX 4070. While the Alienware edges ahead in nT tests scoring 14401, it is still a little behind the Geekom A8 with a 1T test score of 1787.

Geekbench Benchmarks

Geekbench is a cross-platform benchmark that simulates real world processing workloads in image processing, compression / decompression and particle physics scenarios, among others. We tested the devices featured here using Geekbench 6's single- and multi-core CPU workloads...

This is another solid showing for the A8. The newer Geekbench 6 includes tasks like video conferencing, background blurring for video calls, and HTML5 rendering, which are increasingly common workloads for home and office PCs, and the A8 with its Ryzen 9 processor is obviously up to the task.

PCMark 10 Whole System Benchmarks

PCMark 10 uses a mix of real-world applications and simulated workloads to establish how well a given system performs productivity tasks, including image and video editing, web browsing, and OpenOffice document editing. While these scores appear to be all over the place, the systems are sorted by their overall PCMark 10 score.

The Geekom A8 performs very well here and hangs with some of the best performing laptops we have tested. With AMD's current top-end mobile processor, plenty of memoty and a PCIe Gen 4 SSD, this result isn't exactly a surprise.

UL Procyon AI Benchmark

Procyon by UL offers standardized AI PC benchmarks to provide a score that's comparable across different comptue architectures. We ran the AI Computer Vision test (formerly dubbed AI Inference) on the Geekom AI using the integer and float16 tests.

This AI processing test demonstrates that software support is essential for peak system performance. Despite Hawk Point's more powerful NPU, the Ryzen 9 8945HS failed to outclass Phoenix chips we have tested previously. In short, its NPU wasn't used by the Procyon AI Inference Benchmark and it's not selectable as an option. The same issue faced devices like the the Phoenix-powered ROG Ally and HP Dragonfly Pro results, as you can see, though the A8 pulls ahead by a small margin in the int8 test.

3DMark Fire Strike Graphics Test

3DMark offers several different tests, using different API, targeted at different market sectors -- gaming PC, mobile device, etc. The Geekom A8 is not really a gaming system, so we used some less-taxing tests, like this DX11 Fire Strike Extreme benchmark. 

The above chart nicely shows the benefits of discrete GPUs, along with the latest iGPUs, and some also-rans. Geekom's A8 is one of the best systems represented here using an iGPU.

Middle Earth: Shadow Of War Benchmark

Middle Earth: Shadow of War is a fun and beautiful title set in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings universe. To test the game's performance relative to other systems, we set the resolution to 1920x1080 and turned the visuals up to the High preset. The frame rates here are the average reported by the built-in benchmark.

The Geekom A8's Radeon 780M iGPU put up 47 frames per second here, which is right in-line with the ROG Ally and Intel's current top-end integrated mobile iGPU.

Gears Tactics Performance

To round out our game tests, we have Gears Tactics, a "fast-paced, turn-based strategy game from one of the most-acclaimed video game franchises – Gears of War." In this DX12 title, you form and lead a squad to fight for survival while taking on an "evil mastermind who makes monsters." For this test, we ran the built-in benchmark on the high, medium, and low presets at 1080p...

The Geekom A8 performs just about as well as you might expect in Gears Tactics. It is interesting to see its 1080p low frame rate so closely behind the Dell XPS 14 with its RTX 4050. It even managed to hit 60fps average using 1080p high settings.

Encouraged by the handful of gaming benchmarks, we also tried some old favorites like Shadow of the Tomb Raider (1080p, medium, 41fps) and The Division 2 (1080p, medium, 56fps). As you can see, we have approximately ROG Ally power or better here, so if your favorite PC games or emulators run well on that handheld (or one of the many other AMD Phoenix-based  handhelds), the A8 is going to handle them just a little better.