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Like its predecessors, the IT13 comes with a mounting plate for VESA holes on the rear of a monitor and a short HDMI cable to do a tidy job of that. While a barebones option would have been nice, the asking price for a machine of this specification is competitive and highlight how much more power and capability paying extra can net you. What was most striking here is that we recently covered the Geekom AS 6, a Ryzen 9 machine that, with a few small exceptions, beat this Core-i9 across the board.
Even when the machine isn’t under duress, this makes a clearly audible noise, one that might ultimately annoy the owner. When we investigated the BIOS settings, we discovered that the AS 5 and AS 6 both had a fan speed set to ‘Standard’ by default. It is possible to use ‘silent’ mode instead and reduce the hum, though this obviously might not cool the machine as effectively, resulting in CPU and GPU throttling.
For those using this system in anger, the 2.5GbE LAN port is a must, irrespective of the quality of WiFi in the office. It’s a fire-and-forget solution that, if the connected switch supports 2.5GbE, can easily shift 250Mb/s a second to and from network servers. a b c Adrien (4 August 2022). "GEEKOM: tour d'horizon d'un nouveau venu dans le monde des mini-PC". Techno-Science.net (in French) . Retrieved 10 August 2022. The good news is that the DDR5 SODIMM modules are fully accessible, as is the M.2 NVMe drive that Geekom pre-installed. There is also a short M.2 2230 slot that takes the WiFi and Bluetooth module that could be changed, and a spare M.2 2280 slot. All the other CPUs we just mentioned use DDR5, which not only provides more bandwidth (much more in dual channel mode), but also plays a significant part in GPU performance.
Therefore the predictable perspective that Ryzen 9 should be better than Ryzen 7 is misplaced, although the 5900HX is a good processor, and by Mini PC standards, it is a powerful platform. The only caveat to the addition of NVMe drives is that there isn’t room for large heatsinks on any installed drives, and there are heat pads that are in place to manage how hot any drive might get. The performance of this machine was something of a disappointment, given that it has a Ryzen 9 processor with eight cores.
More power and bandwidth than the AS 5
That infers that some of the things we weren’t very keen on with the AS 5 are sadly replicated here, including the completely plastic exterior to the case and inside the dual board layout. We’ve seen enough of these cables break or wriggle out of their fragile connectors to be wary of them, so those working inside the AS 6 should be very careful when opening and closing it.
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