GEEKOM is back with another AMD Mini PC that first came out in 2023 but has since seen a refresh last year, and now a third revision and a new CPU, which they are calling the "2026 Edition". Anyway, since they offered it for review, I decided to put it through its paces.
With that out of the way, first a disclaimer: GEEKOM provided this sample without any editorial input or review pre-approval. Now some specifications:
| GEEKOM A5 Pro 2026 Edition | ||
|---|---|---|
| Dimensions | ||
| Weight | 652 g | |
| CPU | AMD Ryzen™ 5 7530U (6C, 12T, 16 MB Cache, 2.0 GHz ~ 4.5 GHz) | |
| Graphics | AMD Radeon Graphics (Vega 7) @ 2000MHz 448 shading units/stream processors (12 CUs), 8 ROPs | |
| NPU | No | |
| Memory | 2x8GB Dual-channel DDR4 3200 MT/s Kingston SODIMM | |
| Storage | 1 x M.2 2280 PCIe Gen 4x4, Wodposit 1 TB (Up to 2 TB) 1 × M.2 2242 SATA 3.0 SSD, up to 1 TB | |
| Operating System | Windows 11 Pro 25H2 | |
| Bluetooth | Bluetooth 5.2 | |
| Ethernet | 1x Realtek Gaming 2.5GbE Controller | |
| Wireless LAN | Realtek 8852BE M.2 Wi-Fi 6 LAN card | |
| Rear I/O ports | 1 x Ethernet RJ45 2.5 Gbit/s | |
| Front I/O ports | 2 x USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A (10 Gbps) 1 x 3.5 mm headphone jack 1 x Power Button | |
| (Bio) Security | No | |
| SD Card slot | Yes | |
| Kensington Lock | No | |
| Power | 19V/3.42A, (65W External PSU) | |
| Warranty: | 3 years | |
| MSRP | $669 (discount price at the end of the review) | |
Introduction
The A5 Pro is powered by the in Q1 2023-released AMD Ryzen 5 7530U using the Zen 4 (Phoenix) architecture. Targeted at gaming (up to 720p) and productivity laptops but widely used in mini-PCs, too, the 7530U features 6 cores (12 threads thanks to SMT support) running at up to 4.5 GHz.
On the graphics front, the 7530U includes the even older Vega integrated GPU with a max GPU frequency of 2000 MHz across 7 cores. You"ll be lucky if you can game at 720p on low settings here, as you"ll see in our benchmarks later on. Other highlights include DDR4 memory at 3200 MT/s, WiFi 6, 2.5GbE Ethernet, Bluetooth 5.2, a slot to put in your memory cards, and a Kensington Lock.
AI PC?
No.
The packaging is a familiar experience. The box lid cover can be lifted off revealing the A5 Pro sitting in a foam "shelf", below that is a small booklet of documentation. Below the top shelf, there is a cardboard divider, which, when removed, reveals the other components, such as the power brick and lead, HDMI cable, a bag of screws, and the VESA mount plate.
What’s In The Box
- 1 x GEEKOM A5 Pro 2026 Edition Mini PC
- 1 x HDMI Cable
- 1 x VESA Mount
- 1 x Power Adapter
- 1 x bag of screws
- 1 x User Guide
- 1 x Thank You card
Design
The A5 Pro"s design is basically the same as others in the A series, right down to the ports (on the rear), because on the front, there are two Type A USB ports. It is a similar weight and retains a good heft to it; while not being heavy, it isn"t light either, thanks to its all-metal chassis. It definitely gives off a premium and balanced feel to it. All the edges and corners, except for the bottom edges of the Mini PC, are rounded, so it is comfortable to hold and move around. It weighs around 652 grams; all of that weight is thanks to the all-metal frame and housing.
Although the A5 Pro also includes two USB Type-C ports, unfortunately, these are still located on the back of the Mini PC. I can only imagine this decision was made to make the front of the A5 Pro look more uniform; however, having the option for Type-C and USB Type-A on the front of the Mini IT11 is what made it great. The Mini PC still totals five USB3 Gen 3.2 ports and one USB 2.0 port.
As far as looks go, it has a fully silver grey exterior, and it"s not a fingerprint magnet. GEEKOM does not say what materials are used for the exterior other than a "reinforced full-metal chassis" exterior. The product page claims that the A5 Pro can withstand over "200kg of pressure without bending," but we wouldn"t recommend loading heavy objects on top of it anyway; it supposedly gives protection against accidents and falls. It doesn"t feel cheap and isn"t flimsy either, and even when the base is removed, it remains sturdy.
Like other Mini PCs I have tested, it"s physically possible to directly attach four screens to the A5 Pro using the two full HDMI 2.0 ports, along with the two USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports.
Regarding connectivity, around the back, there is one 2.5 GbE port, two Type-C 3.2 Gen 2 ports, two HDMI 2.0 ports, along with one USB 2.0 port and a barrel port for power. Around the front, there are four USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports, a 3.5mm headphone jack input, and the Power button.
Although the specs say that you can affix a Kensington lock to the A5 Pro, such a lock is not present.
Teardown
No review I do would ever be complete without some sort of teardown.
Opening the A5 Pro is a bit finicky:
- Remove the four rubber feet (with a flat screwdriver or Stanley knife
- Unscrew the four Phillips screws
- Unscrew four more Philips screws holding the metal plate in place
- Carefully lift the metal plate off, making sure not to disconnect the WiFi antenna cable.
As you can see from the above images, which can be enlarged when clicked on, there is ample room to manage and expand the SODIMMs and 1 TB SSD, so you can swap them out for something else if you want. There"s also an additional 42mm M.2 (B-key) SATA connector.
Usage
BIOS
The A5 Pro includes an AptiBIOS, which is not completely locked down; however, there is very little in the BIOS to manage (1) (2). There is no Advanced tab, so no tweaking for you! You can only manage the Security and Boot order. The memory reports the correct (DDR4) 3200MT/s speed, and everything else looked in order, though. You can access BIOS by mashing the Delete key during boot.
Setting up the A5 Pro
On first boot, you are prompted to complete the setup of Windows 11 Pro, meaning you do not have to fork out for a license, which is nice. After the setup is finished, I am happy to report that it does not come with any bloatware installed. The OOBE also installs several updates to Windows 25H2 26200.7642.
Before starting with benchmarks, I checked Windows Security, which gave several alerts, which ended up being because OneDrive was not setup and because I was not logged in with a Microsoft account (unsure how these two things affect PC security but hey ho,) after dismissing them I checked Device Security > Secured-core PC (which gave an alert that not all features were enabled) and saw that Memory Integrity was disabled out of the box. Memory Integrity being disabled appears to be a default setting for GEEKOM Mini PCs. I enabled it anyway and restarted.
I also disabled Copilot and Edge browser Startup boost so that Edge wasn"t running in the background during benchmark tests, and I disabled OneDrive from startup programs via Task Manager.
Sleep
When using Sleep mode on the A5 Pro, the power button blinks, and it"s quite bright. I would find this distracting on my desk or in my field of view. I"ve tested other PCs where the Sleep mode was more of a soft pulse than an alerting "blip, blip, blip," so that"s one thing I would recommend either as a firmware update or a future Mini PC. Of course, not putting it in Sleep mode would also correct the problem.
Benchmarks
With that out of the way, and because people like that sort of thing, I ran some benchmarks and compared them with a couple of other GEEKOM Mini PCs, one with a Ryzen 9 8945HS, and the other with a Ryzen 7 8745HS. The A5 Pro is running Windows 11 Professional 25H2 build with the latest updates, and the latest supported AMD Graphics and Chipset drivers (26.1.1 and 8.02.18.557).
For the benchmarks, I used Cinebench 2024, 7-Zip, AS SSD, and CrystalDiskMark. 3DMark, PCMark 10, Procyon (Windows ML for CPU and GPU, and AMD Ryzen AI for NPU) was provided to Neowin by UL Solutions; Primate Labs Inc. provided us with commercial versions of Geekbench 6, and Geekbench AI.
3DMark Time Spy tests gaming capability with DX12 graphics performance. PCMark tests are a mix of CPU and real-world productivity tests, such as using an office suite, web browsing, light photo/video editing, and making conference calls. Cinebench stresses the entire CPU as it is a multi-threaded rendering test. Geekbench is a synthetic benchmark that is great for a quick look at the potential performance across a wide range of workloads.
I also used HWiNFO to monitor hardware sensors and temperature readings.
| GEEKOM A5 Pro Ryzen 5 7530U | GEEKOM AX8 Max Ryzen 7 8745HS | Geekom A7 Max Ryzen 9 7940HS | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 3DMark: Time Spy Steel Nomad Light Steel Nomad Fire Strike Wild Life | 1,275 1,081 196 3,242 2,140 | 3,033 2,611 468 7,557 17,208 | 1,864 1,620 261 4,656 10,002 |
| PCMark 10: Standard Extended test | 6,349 5,183 | 6,985 6,835 | 7,729 6,530 |
| Procyon: Windows ML CPU | 60 80 - | 165 186 - | 104 142 - |
| Geekbench 6: Single Multicore Compute (OpenCL) | 1,977 7,010 14,461 | 2,587 12,882 29,068 | 2,561 9,824 26,782 |
| Geekbench AI | Single, Half, Quantized | Single, Half, Quantized | Single, Half, Quantized |
| ONNX CPU ONNX DirectML OpenVINO NPU | 2321, 1130, 3681 2843, 3775, 2185 2917, 2942, 4860 | 4457, 1980, 8695 6938, 10587, 5339 6184, 5998, 17357 | 3344, 1674, 7492 5097, 9145, 3698 5090, 5098, 15839 |
| Cinebench 2024: Single85 Multicore | 85 398 | 103 912 | 106 832 |
| 7-Zip | 56,634 | 104,321 | 87,236 |
Geekbench AI scores are in the following order (left to right): Single Precision, Half Precision, Quantized.
As was to be expected, the AMD Ryzen 5 7530U falls below the rest of the stack, no surprises here perhaps, considering it"s based on an aged Zen 3 design.
As we often do, we have included comparative charts through which the differences are easier to visualize. The benchmark chart comparisons were provided by Sayan Sen.
We have the PCMark 10 Extended test first, and here the new A5 Pro was the slowest of the bunch. This is a mixed workload PC usage test that mainly assesses the CPU, but does also leverage the on-board graphics at times.
Next, we have Cinebench 2024, which is a rendering test that takes up all available CPU threads. Interestingly, again, the 7530U inside the A5 Pro is in last place, and by some margin too.
Next, on 7-Zip, where AMD Ryzen processors typically dominate, the 7530U inside the Geekom A5 Pro barely manages to tie the Intel NucBox K15"s 185U.
Following our CPU testing benchmarks, we move on to GPU testing.
We used 3DMark tests to get an idea of how capable the Vega 7 iGPU on the AMD 7530U is. We start off with Fire Strike. This is a DX 11-based synthetic benchmark, which makes it a good gauge for those still playing older titles.
Again, the Vega 7 iGP really shows its age here, as it half the performance of the Radeon 680M graphics and even gets beaten by Intel"s 4-core Xe.
Next, we have Steel Nomad Light, which is much more modern and is powered by DirectX 12. The outcome, though, is the same, as again, RDNA2-based 680M is twice as fast as Vega 7. The presence of Vega also means hardware-accelerated decoding of codecs like AV1, which is a popular online video container, is not supported.
Gaming
As we have already established from the synthetic tests, the A5 Pro has a pretty weak iGPU that does not come close to any decent on-board iGP, let alone a dedicated GPU; so it goes without saying that expectations should be checked in this department; when looking for an equivalent, it falls just below the pretty old GT 1030 (nine years old now) dedicated GPU in terms of performance.
Final Fantasy XV
To gauge the capability of the Vega 7 in a real game, we ran the standalone Final Fantasy XV Windows Edition Benchmark on different resolutions at the Standard Quality preset to see what kind of gaming performance one can expect from the onboard GPU.
The full scores are below, and are based on the settings detected for the game, which recommended 720p at Standard quality.
As you can see in the chart above, the Vega 7 was the slowest of the bunch, and even compared to Intel 4 Xe Arc iGP, it got progressively worse as the resolution was increased, signaling that the raw processing power of AMD"s final GCN (Graphics Core Next) form is simply outclassed by the newer architectures.
Next up, I tested browsing performance using Speedometer 3.1. Speedometer provides a value and also a range showing the lowest and highest scores after three runs, as indicated in the chart above by the two scores for each browser. There"s barely any daylight between Edge and Chrome, however Edge edges out Chrome on the low and Chrome bests Edge on the high, leaving Firefox in the dust by around 5.1 points on the low, and 5.8 behind on the high, respectively, while Edge, with -0.5 on the low and -0.2 on the high, is slightly ahead of Chrome for the winner.
Disk performance
I also tested the SSD"s capability using AS SSD and CrystalDiskMark.
| AS SSD | CrystalDiskMark |
|---|---|
The Wodposit 1TB WPBSN4M8-1TGP is rated for 7000/6000 MB/s read/write, and in previous tests we"ve done, you"ll find it holds true to its word. Search for it in other benchmarks, so you can"t really go wrong here. However, here it is used in a Mini PC that only offers PCIe 3x4, so those are the maximum speeds you can get here. With SSD pricing the way it is at the moment, you might be better off selling it and purchasing a true (cheaper) PCIe 4x4 SSD instead to make a few bucks off it.
3DMark Storage Benchmark
Next, I ran the Storage Benchmark, which is a component test that measures the performance of the Wodposit SSD, particularly for gaming, using real-world gaming-related activities like loading games and recording gameplay. As you can see, this SSD falls quite well below the average of all those tested.
Heat
Despite running all of the above benchmark tests, the A5 Pro did not get hot (or even warm) to the touch, and no annoying noises were coming from the single fan that cools the unit. The Highest CPU temperature recorded was during the PCMark 10 Extended benchmark test, where the CPU Core reached 81.5 °C.
Infrared thermal imaging
| Top | Bottom | Front |
|---|---|---|
Despite all this, the outer shell never exceeded 34 °C while I was pointing my FLIR ONE Gen 3 thermal camera at a hotspot on the bottom while running a 3DMark Fire Strike test. The bottom of the Mini PC even showed a more uniform temp across the whole plate, while on the top, it was more concentrated towards the back.
Power draw
During my testing, I also kept an eye on the power draw using a Green Blue energy meter.
| In Standby | in Sleep | Windows 11 25H2 idle |
|---|---|---|
As you can see above, when powered off, it drew a consistent 0.5W in Standby. In Sleep mode, I was seeing around 4.0-4.5W. When turned on and idle with no apps opened and just sitting in the Windows desktop, the draw was around 4.3W, which was slightly lower than in Sleep mode for some reason.
| Cinebench 2024 | CrystalDiskMark (peak) | 3DMark Fire Strike |
|---|---|---|
Next, I measured the maximum power draw when running the Cinebench 2024 test, which relies mostly on CPU access. I also measured power usage during a CrystalDiskMark test and saw a peak of 38.2W, and finally, a peak of 35.2W was observed when running the 3Dmark Fire Strike benchmark.
Conclusion
It has been a while since I"ve reviewed a true Mini PC, and with that, I mean one that fits in the palm of your hand. I"ve said it time and time again, I love these Mini PCs. However, they simply aren"t gaming PCs, though, so you will not be able to enjoy graphically intensive games on them. For that, you need a dGPU along the likes of the mobile Nvidia 4060, AMD 7600 (XT), or better. However, the A5 Pro is not even suited for light 3D gaming. I think its purpose here is mainly for use as an office workstation. You can even screw it to the back of a screen if it has VESA support with the included mount plate.
As I"ve said before, in a world that is apparently too stingy for phone manufacturers to include a power lead and charger for their flagship phones, GEEKOM has provided all of the cables and tools necessary to get started straight away, along with a Windows 11 Pro license and a booklet with instructions on how to access the internals.
When it comes to Mini PCs, the market is saturated with crap, so you really have to be on the lookout and study the specs properly. One trick I have seen often is Mini PCs utilizing old tech, sometimes up to four generations behind. This Mini PC will let you connect to four displays, whereas cheaper solutions will be limited to two screens.
The good
Overall, we have a tiny, quiet and rather cool Mini PC that includes a really good underutilized Wodposit SSD, and all the ports to operate four external monitors, and it has a premium metal build.
The bad
Okay, it lacks Wi-Fi 7, which should only trouble people who have moved to it or plan to very soon. In addition, the benchmarks will tell you more than I can put into words. With its DDR4 memory and PCI 3.0 X4 SSD lanes, it harks back to pre-2023 times.
I"ll also say again, I still would prefer to see Type-C around the front of Mini PCs, so I will continue to dock a point for that omission. I also think that these brands should do a better job of making user documentation and support more easily accessible from the product page. Although GEEKOM"s support pages are extensive, they are buried in a "Download Center" footer link.
Would I recommend?
If discounted below MSRP, and you don"t care about gaming, then yes.
Where to buy
Assuming you"ve made it this far, at an MSRP of $669, the A5 Pro is not cheap, even if we consider that GEEKOM currently has it discounted by $90, bringing the price down to $569 on the official website.
Below, there are even more savings with coupons and discounts in the U.S., and U.K., bringing the price down a bit more.
- GEEKOM A5 Pro on the official U.S. website for $569 (was $669)
- GEEKOM A5 Pro on Amazon U.S. for $569 (was $659)
- GEEKOM A5 Pro on official UK website for £518 (was £599)
Use the coupon code NEOA5PRO to get an extra 7% off the above prices
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