My latest video review is of the new GMKTec EVO-X1. It’s built around AMD’s Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 processor and is clearly aiming for the higher end of the mini PC market—not just in terms of performance, but price as well. At the time of testing, this unit retailed for about $892. It’s not cheap, but high-performance mini PCs generally don’t come with low price tags.
The unit I looked at came with 32GB of LPDDR5X RAM running at 7500 MHz. That memory is soldered on, which is a limitation of this AMD chipset for the best performance, so it’s not upgradeable. There is a 64GB version available (compensated affiliate link), and I’d recommend picking the one that best suits your needs up front.
Physically, the EVO-X1 is nicely compact and has a clean design with subtle RGB lighting. The lighting is barely noticeable unless you’re in a dark room.
On the storage side, there are two NVMe slots—both PCIe 4.0—which allow for some flexibility. The one I tested came with a 1TB drive, and you can have a maximum of 4TB in each slot for a total of 8TB. Great for dual booting operating systems.
Up front, there’s an OCuLink port which can allow using a desktop GPU or any PCIe card with the right breakout board. There’s also a 40 gigabit USB4 port, which supports Thunderbolt 3 devices, including GPUs. In a previous video, I tested the system running both an OCuLink and Thunderbolt GPU simultaneously, which was an interesting capability for a device this size.
Additionally it has two 10Gbps USB-A ports on the back, two more on the front, HDMI and DisplayPort outputs, and dual 2.5Gb Ethernet ports, both powered by Intel controllers. That said, Wi-Fi performance was not great. It does support Wi-Fi 6, but I saw significantly lower throughput compared to other Wi-Fi 6 devices in the same physical location. Wired Ethernet is definitely the better option here.
Booting into Windows 11 Pro (which comes pre-activated on most GMKtec systems), the system idled at around 8.4 watts of power consumption—pretty efficient. But the fan was active even at idle. Under load, the fan noise ramps up noticeably. Cooling is aggressive, which helps prevent thermal throttling, but it comes at the cost of constant fan noise. If quiet operation is a priority, this may not be the best choice.
Web browsing was smooth, as expected. The system handled 4K 60fps YouTube playback with a handful of dropped frames. Video editing in DaVinci Resolve is doable, especially for simpler tasks like cross dissolves and basic effects. Once I started layering on more intensive effects, some lag was noticeable, but for basic YouTube-style content creation, the performance was quite serviceable.
Since AMD is positioning this processor as an “AI” chip, I ran a local language model using the DeepSeek 8B parameter model. It worked well enough, though it relied solely on the CPU—not the internal GPU or NPU—so performance was a bit slower than on systems with dedicated GPU acceleration. Still, for light AI workloads, it’s passable.
Gaming was a surprisingly solid experience. Cyberpunk 2077 ran at around 55 fps on low settings at 1080p. No Man’s Sky managed to hit 60 fps most of the time, also at 1080p and low settings. These results are particularly impressive considering everything was running on integrated graphics. Advanced retro emulation should also be well within its wheelhouse.
I also gave Linux a spin using the latest version of Ubuntu. Everything worked right out of the box—video, audio, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi. Performance was consistent with what I saw on the Windows side, and with the two NVMe slots, dual-boot setups are easy to configure.
So overall, I walked away impressed with the performance and expandability of the EVO X1, even if the fan noise was hard to ignore. It’s not for everyone, especially given the price, but it has a lot to offer for those who want serious performance in a small form factor—and don’t mind a little whirring in the background.