Geekom IT13 Max review: Max by name, but restricted by nature

The mini PC is essentially a laptop with its battery and screen removed, and it has many advantages for a studio context. They’re small, so they don’t take up valuable desk space that could instead be filled with increasingly larger monitors, graphics tablets or 3D printers. They’re also energy efficient, and often reasonably priced, so you can pick up several if you’re kitting out a new workspace. What they tend to lack, however, is graphics processing power, preferring to use their CPUs’ integrated graphics cores rather than anything from Nvidia.

Geekom is a prolific mini PC maker, and its IT series are Intel-powered machines suited to office and light creative work. The lack of a graphics card and huge amounts of RAM may slow it down when it comes to high-res video or GPU effects, but for a little box it holds up reasonably well, and has a lot of USB ports to play with.

Key specifications

Design, build and display

• Small and unobtrusive
• Internal serial connections

Mini PCs like this tend to be rather functional in their design. When you don’t have much space to play with, yet still want to cram in a surprising number of ports and make it fit on desks, you’re going to build a rectangular box rather than something chapped like an aardvark. And that’s exactly what we have here, in a case that’s exactly the same shape as just about every other mini PC the Bloq has reviewed, though slightly larger than Geekom’s A5 Pro (and smaller than the Minisforum MS-01, which can take a small graphics card like the Nvidia RTX A1000).

Still, it’s a very friendly-looking little computer, with its rounded corners and easily accessible front USB ports. Unlike Apple’s Mac Mini, there's an on button in a sensible place too, while underneath there's a baseplate that can route cables to the internal four-pin RS‑232 and RS‑485 headers if you’re using it to control factory machines, run a building control network, or plug it directly into a CNC machine that connects that way. There's a VESA mount adapter in the box that allows you to give it a piggyback on the back of a monitor, for a really space-efficient setup.

It’s always tempting to label a PC like this as a Mac Mini alternative, and the current M4 Mini does have a model that’s about the same price as the IT13 Max. The Mini is ever so slightly smaller in both width and depth, though they’re both exactly the same height, and is lighter than the IT13 Max too, so if those dimensions really matter to you, Apple is the way to go.

Design score: 4/5

Features

• Lots of USB and other ports
• Expandable storage

Something that immediately strikes you about the IT13 Max when you take it out of the box is that it’s absolutely loaded with ports. You get two HDMI and two USB4 ports that can be connected to monitors (and the latter to a GPU dock, maybe), and it can drive four 4K displays or one 8K display. You also get dual 2.5GbE networking ports, the latest Wi-Fi 7, and a load of USB 3.2 sockets, one of which is an always-on charging port. Around the side there's an SD card slot, but if you want to add more storage, you’re going to need to get your screwdriver out. Users of docking stations or monitors with a laptop-charging USB-C port may be interested to know that one of the USB4 ports supports PD power input, so you can remove the power brick from behind your desk and run the PC that way. The power brick itself is actually quite small and inoffensive, but it’s great to see this functionality being implemented.

Being able to take the bottom off a mini PC and poke around in its guts is nothing new; Apple was doing it way back in 2005 with the G4 variant of its Mac Mini, into which you could stick a new hard drive or some new RAM. Whip the baseplate off the IT13 Max, and you can access the second M2 slot for adding an extra SSD, but the RAM is soldered to the mainboard and can’t be changed. The RAM is one of this PC’s main drawbacks, as it’s available in just two configurations: one with a 1TB SSD and 16GB RAM, the other, which we have here, with a 500GB SSD and 24GB RAM. That’s it, no more.

Curiously, Geekom plasters the IT13 Max with stickers telling you, in type almost too small to read, not to connect it to the internet during setup. This is very unusual for a Windows 11 machine, and means you set up a local account rather than signing straight into a Microsoft one. This may make it useful for anyone who wants a device they can air-gap from the internet and still use Windows on, but before it’s connected, the Start menu is a very blank and empty place, so you’ll need your offline software ready to install.

Feature score: 4/5

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

• Limited RAM options
• Older CPU, integrated graphics

The Core Ultra 9 185H is a chip we’ve seen a lot of in the PCs Creative Bloq reviews. It’s in Geekom’s own Geekbook X14 Pro, the Samsung Galaxy Book 4 Ultra and the 2024 edition of the ASUS Zenbook Duo. The year is the important part there: this is a first-gen Core Ultra processor, from the Meteor Lake days, that was released in the last quarter of 2023. It’s been overtaken by second- and third-generation chips since then, but with its 16 cores (capable of 22 simultaneous threads as Intel hung on to Hyper-Threading for its P cores back then) and 5.1GHz turbo frequency, it’s still got the goods for most office and light creative tasks. Its main drawback is its integrated GPU, which is only half as good as that in the third-gen chips, but which can still play Crysis.

You’ll wonder, in fact, what’s going to hold it back the most? The eight Arc graphics cores or that 24GB of RAM. Maybe the 35 total TOPS for AI applications?

In practice, it’s a decent little machine that actually beats the laptops equipped with the same processor in our tests, probably because it’s thicker and the fan can get a bit more air moving - it’s certainly well-equipped with vents around the sides, where the SD card slot is an island in a sea of grille.

It turns out to be a reasonably good machine for creative work, and especially image editing. In the PugetBench Photoshop benchmark, it sits between the HP Omen Max 16 and the ASUS ProArt P16, two much more expensive machines with dedicated GPUs. The fact that it manages to beat the ASUS PX13 GoPro Edition in this test is remarkable.

Likewise, in the Cinebench 2024 multi-core rendering test, it beats the MacBook Air M5 - this will be solely down to having more cores - and the Zenbook Duo with the same CPU, but comes in slightly lower than Geekom’s own IT15 mini PC, which uses a second-gen Ultra 9. It’s not a big gap though, unlike the chasm between the IT13 and Geekom’s A9 Max, with its thundering AMD Ryzen AI 9, in this test.

Overall, the more mature tech here acquits itself respectably, though video editing and AI apps certainly make it sweat - the restricted RAM pool may well be at fault here as much as the integrated GPU.

Performance score: 3/5

Price

The two versions of the IT13 Max are the same price, £999/$1,399, and with that extra M2 slot and the USB4 ports, the 24GB version might well be the best choice, as you can add extra storage but not RAM. The M4 Mac Mini with 24GB of RAM is almost exactly the same price, but only has 256GB of storage, so the IT13 Max is undercutting Apple a bit here.

Value score: 3/5

Who is it for?

• Office workers and students

The lack of graphics power is going to put off a lot of people with greater pixel-processing needs, but the IT 13 Max flies through office apps and can handle Photoshop and InDesign jobs well enough.

Buy it if...

• You’re doing image editing or graphic design
• You’re limited for space
• You have lots of USB peripherals

Don't buy it if...

• You want to do video or AI
• Or play the latest games
• Or don’t want to be tied to a desk

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