Geekom AX8 Pro review

As I hefted the AX8 Pro from its packaging, my first impression was of a pleasing weight and density. My second was: «Holy CRAP this thing is small!» 

I'm not kidding, the AX8 Pro is an absolute marvel of miniaturisation. Measuring just 11.1cm x 11.7cm x 3.8cm, it's the most compact mini-PC we've tested by some margin, And within this tiny frame is housed one of the latest and best AMD APUs. 

Featuring eight cores and sixteen threads, the Ryzen 9 8945HS is a great little chip. In stress-testing, we saw it draw a peak of 65 W, boosting from its base clock speed of 4 GHz to a healthy 5.2 GHz, with a peak operating temperature of 92 °C under sustained loads. That might feel a bit on the balmy side, but it's still eight degrees short of the CPU's 100 °C TJMax rating, the point at which throttling kicks in.

Paired with this fine silicon is the Radeon 780M iGPU, aka RDNA 3, and this is probably the last generation of chips we'll see it in. AMD's upcoming, AI-branded Zen 5 mobile APUs will feature a Radeon 890M GPU with RDNA 3.5, and our Zen 5 laptop testing so far shows how strong that is. But until they hit the mainstream, the Radeon 780M is still the most reliably performant iGPU around, bettered only by the leap in performance—and commensurate cost—of adding a discrete mobile GPU into the mix, which we see in the likes of the ASUS ROG NUC.

APU: AMD Ryzen 9 8945HS
iGPU: Radeon 780M
Memory: 32GB DDR5 5600Mhz SODIMM
Storage:  2TB M.2 PCIe Gen4
Wireless: WiFi 6E, Bluetooth 5.3
I/O: front: 2x USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A, 3.5mm Headset jack
I/O rear: 2x HDMI 2.0, 1x USB4 Type-C, 1USB 3.2 Type-C, 1x 2.5G LAN, 1x USB 3.2 Type-A, 1x USB 2.0 Type-A
Price: $899 | £949 

What this all adds up to is a powerful, do-it-all mini-PC, a machine you can use equally for work and pleasure, with desktop-chasing productivity chops and muscle enough to run most games well at 1080p. A lot of its gaming performance hinges on that Radeon 780M, so it's no surprise to find it trades blows with previous-gen APUs