Geekom A5 Pro review: you’ve heard the one about things in small packages?

If you thought the Mac Mini was small, get a load of this. Geekom’s lower-end mini PC, the A5 Po, is barely any bigger than an Apple TV box, yet packs a six-core AMD Ryzen processor and 16GB of upgradable RAM into that tiny space. This means you’re stuck with integrated graphics, but the payoff is a PC that you can hang on the back of a monitor or balance on top of a docking station, and it comes with the added benefit of low noise and power consumption, even compared to some laptops.

We've reviewed some more powerful Geekom models recently, such as the A9 Max, but could this cut-price model also contend for a place among the best computers for video editing, for example? Well...

Key specifications

Design, build and display

• Really, really small
• Easily VESA-mountable

Geekom has made a lot of mini PCs in the past. My muscular colleague Erlingur has reviewed a couple of them, the Intel-powered IT15 and the A9 Max with its huge Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 CPU. The A5 Pro is yet another teeny little thing, even smaller than the more powerful models and more like the sort of thing you’d have sat alongside your TV in the days before they became razor-thin and were hung on the wall.

The A5 Pro is a tiny silver puck with rounded corners, looking very much like a Mac Mini that’s been through the wash at too high a temperature with its silvery finish. The Geekom logo is picked out in blue on top, and the power button is easy to access. It has fewer USB ports along the front than the A9 Max, but there are enough studded around its casing for most peripheral loads.

The main attraction of the A5 Pro is its size. At just 112mm (4.5in) square and 0.47L in volume, it takes up almost no space on a desktop, and ships with an adapter that can attach it to the VESA mount on the back of a monitor if it’s not already being used to hold the screen up.

Design score: 4/5

Features

• Plenty of ports
• None particularly fast

There's not a great deal going on with the A5 Pro, its main feature is its compactness. However, Geekom has fitted it with about as many ports as can possibly be accommodated along the sides of its casing. Sadly, none of them is Thunderbolt or USB4, but the 10Gbps USB 3.2 ports that are there are still fast enough for most file transfers from external SSDs and card readers.

There's an internal SD card reader too, though it’s slightly awkwardly placed on the side of the machine rather than at the front. The 2.5G Ethernet port also gives it the capability to hook into high-speed network storage if you’ve got that sort of thing set up in your studio, and while the Wi-Fi implementation is only Wi-Fi 6, that’s likely good enough for most uses.

With two full-size HDMI ports and the ability to output video through its Type-C ports too, the A5 Pro can be the centre of a multi-monitor setup. It would be amazing if it could be powered over USB-C too, giving it the potential to be a more portable solution when paired with a portable monitor (though isn’t that just a laptop?) but instead there's an external power brick with a dedicated socket on the back of the PC.

Feature score: 3/5

Benchmark scores

We test every one of our laptops using the same benchmarking software suite to give you a thorough overview of its suitability for creatives of all disciplines and levels. This includes:

• Geekbench: Tests the CPU for single-core and multi-core power, and the GPU for the system's potential for gaming, image processing, or video editing. Geekbench AI tests the CPU and GPU on a variety of AI-powered and AI-boosted tasks.
• Cinebench: Tests the CPU and GPU's ability to run Cinema 4D and Redshift.
• UL Procyon: Uses UL Solutions' Procyon software suite to test the system's ability for AI image generation in Stable Diffusion, its Microsoft Office performance and its battery life in a looping video test.
• Topaz Video AI: We use Topaz Video AI to test the system's ability to upscale video and convert video to slow-motion.
• PugetBench for Creators: We use the PugetBench for Creators benchmarking suite to test the system's ability to run several key tasks in Photoshop and Adobe Premiere Pro, as well as its performance when encoding/transcoding video.
• ON1 Resize AI: Tests the system's ability to resize 5 photos to 200% in a batch process. We take the total time taken to resize the images and divide by 5.

Performance

• Enough for 2D
• But not for 3D

We can immediately see from the Geekbench 6 results that the A5 Pro isn’t going to trouble top-table machines such as the Mac Studio or various gaming laptops. Where most CPUs post scores above 2000 in the single-core test, and the best get more than 3000, the A5 manages 1976. Interestingly, this is still enough to put it above the 13th-gen Intel Core i7 in the MSI Modern 15 F13MG, and beats laptops from other big names such as Acer and ASUS.

The consensus on all of these machines is that they’re great for light creative work, but aren’t going to stand up to heavy rendering, and that’s exactly what we see from the A5 Pro’s integrated GPU, which isn’t at the absolute bottom of the table in Geekbench’s GPU workout, but is pretty close to it. It also performed poorly in AI tasks - not surprising for a chip without a dedicated NPU and only a few GPU cores - failing to complete many of the tasks put to it.

In Photoshop, it performs reasonably well, completing the benchmarks but taking longer to do it than many other machines we’ve tested. In Premiere Pro, it’s the same story: the A5 Pro was capable of running most of the tests, but took a long time to do it and failed at the end when dealing with 4K raw footage. Even when it’s thrashing away at video encoding, however, it never gets particularly noisy, with Geekom claiming it runs at below 30dB, the sort of noise produced by a fridge.

What’s also notable about the A5 Pro is the small amount of power it uses. Watching a power meter while using it, we saw an average pull of just 65-70W running the PC, an LED light, a monitor (which was taking most of the power) and charging a phone. Sometimes it could drop down into the 50s. If you’re working with a limited power budget (and you might consider pairing it with the Eizo Flexscan FLT if you’re working off the grid with a solar-charged battery, for example) it’s an interesting option, as while it draws power constantly, it’s lower than that used by many laptop chargers.

Performance score: 2/5

Price

At £599 or $669, the A5 Pro is a fairly cheap prospect, and if you’re looking to outfit a lot of low-power workstations, Geekom offers bulk discounts and frequent sales. You have to consider the extra cost of a monitor, mouse and keyboard to go with the A5 Pro, however, so lower-end laptops may be better value depending on your use-cases.

Value score: 3/5

Who is it for?

• Office workers

While it can handle 2D design and photo editing, this isn’t a particularly powerful PC, and might work best as a backup unit or one dedicated to being a media server or office machine.

Buy it if...

• Size matters
• As does power draw
• You don’t need a GPU

Don't buy it if...

• You want to render
• Or use AI locally
• A laptop would work better for you

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