Geekom A9 Max Review: This Ryzen Mini Desktop Is a Major Flex

Our primary overall benchmark, UL’s PCMark 10, puts a system through its paces in productivity apps ranging from web browsing to word processing and spreadsheet work. Its Full System Drive subtest measures a PC’s storage throughput.

Three more tests we rely on are CPU-centric or processor-intensive: Maxon’s Cinebench 2024 uses that company’s Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene; Primate Labs’ Geekbench 6.3 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning; and we see how long it takes the video transcoder HandBrake 1.8 to convert a 12-minute clip from 4K to 1080p resolution.

Finally, workstation maker Puget Systems’ PugetBench for Creators rates a PC’s image-editing prowess through a variety of automated operations in Adobe Photoshop 25.

The Geekom A9 Max packs a mighty Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 mobile processor, which directly competes with the Intel Core Ultra 9 285H in the Asus NUC 15 Pro+, and wins half of their matchups. These two battled for distant second place behind the Mac mini across our benchmarks. The M4 Pro processor still proves much faster in single-core tasks and multi-core performance. The other mini PCs in this comparison group have much harder times competing and so compete more amongst themselves.

In that context, the Geekom A9 Max is among the speediest tiny towers in its class. The A9 Max will excel at less demanding creative tasks, such as photo editing and basic 1080p video editing. The lack of a discrete GPU will hold it back in more demanding creative workflows, though, and any jobs that use the GPU to speed up operations, despite its competitive performance shown below.

As mentioned above, you’ll have to put up with some fan noise when pushing things the hardest, but that’s not unusual for the fastest mini PCs. Also note that the AMD processor can handle up to 80 trillion AI operations per second (TOPS) when crunching generative and agentic AI tasks, with 50 TOPS concentrated in the chip’s neural processor. That can’t rival the fastest discrete GPUs, but it will still power today’s typical AI features in Windows 11.