GEEKOM A6 Mini PC review: better memory, more storage, still affordable at under $429

GEEKOM is back with another Mini PC, this time the A6, which includes a Ryzen 7 6800H, which came out in the summer of 2022, with a base clock of 3.2 GHz, a Turbo Boost of 4.7 GHz, and a default TDP of 45W. The Ryzen 6000 series mobile APUs are part of AMD's Rembrandt (Zen 3+) series refresh that was announced at CES 2022.

Oddly enough, GEEKOM placed the A6 in its A series of mini PCs, which are supposed to support AI natively; although others in the series include an NPU, the A6 does not. Below is a quote from the buyer guide from the official website:

The A series is crafted as the AMD Ryzen Mini PC with its advanced Ryzen Al processors, featuring exceptional aesthetic appeal, engineered to unleash its gaming capabilities and power of creative tasks fully.

GEEKOM UK even has a dedicated page on the 6800H CPU, and nowhere in it is anything mentioned about having support for AI. You might agree with me that the term AI has become a bit of a marketing ploy by manufacturers, and the oversell is a bit sad. It seems to be a spiritual successor to the A5 that we reviewed in 2023, which makes more sense to me.

Below are its full specifications.

GEEKOM incorrectly states on its specifications that the A6 includes a Kensington Lock, but upon inspection, it is clear that it does not. I passed this info on to my contact. The A6 has just one configuration, including DDR5 memory and a beefy 1TB Kingston PCIe 4.0 Gen 4 SSD; a Windows 11 Pro license is also pre-loaded.

We've already reviewed others in the A series, more recently the A8 and A7, which include this updated shell (versus the A5); it is exactly the same external build, so if you are familiar with those reviews, you can skip this section.

The packaging has the same style as the A8. The box is completely white, and upon opening the box, you will find the A6 sitting in a cardboard mold above a small envelope that contains a Thank you card and booklet that has guidance on all of the controls, how to access the A6 to swap out the SSD or memory, and safety information in several European languages.

Upon removing the cardboard mold, another cardboard compartment contains the power lead, HDMI cable, VESA plate, and a bag of screws. Everything is shielded by its own plastic bag, which is brave in this day and age!

What’s In The Box

• 1 x A6 Mini PC
• 1 x Power Adapter
• 1 x HDMI Cable
• 1 x VESA plate and bag of screws
• 1 x Envelope with booklet and Thank you card

Just like with the A8, there's a VESA mount option. In short, you have everything you need to get started.

Design

The exterior is exactly the same as the A8, along with the supporting screw holes for the VESA mount, so my description of it does not change much from that review, but as a reminder, I still think it looks pretty cool. It is made from what GEEKOM calls "aviation-grade aluminum alloy." It essentially encases the entire PC so that there is no detachable lid. The top is completely flat, with the GEEKOM logo slightly indented and in reflective silver, centered on the top of the Mini PC.

All of the edges are rounded off, so there are no sharp edges, and it definitely has a premium feel to it. The A6 is light as well; it's just 450 grams with a volume of just under a half liter at 0.47L, so it won't weigh you down when carrying it from place to place.

The front of the A6 includes two USB 3.2 Gen 2 type A ports, and again, I would have liked to have seen at least one Type C port. More and more devices are shipping with Type C connectors and come with cables that are Type C end-to-end. It's also not possible to connect a screen on the front, which is a bit of an inconvenience.

GEEKOM also claims on the product page that the A6 series underwent the following tests prior to production:

• Vibration Test
• Drop Test (unspecified height)
• High-Temperature Test
• Cold Temperature Test
• Humidity Test
• Altitude Test

Again it's disappointing that there is no more information about the above tests, I have again asked my contact if GEEKOM plan to clarify any data points that customers can look in on, and will update when if I hear back on this.

The low noise claims (up to 45dB) are again missing from the A6's product page. Maybe GEEKOM was proven wrong by some reviewers, and they decided to omit it from the A6's features; all the same, I have asked my contact why they left it out but did not receive a response.

However, GEEKOM came with a new cooling system called the IceBlast 1.5 Cooling System last year, which might be affecting noise levels:

GEEKOM's self-developed cooling system "IceBlast 1.5" brings a brand-new experience with low noise and high airflow to dissipate heat faster, maintain high performance and say goodbye to hot panels.

I can confirm the A6 generally did not get hot to the touch beyond a bit of warmth on the top of the Mini PC during the Cinebench 2024 test and barely made any noise that I could hear.

As far as looks go, it is completely silver, and thanks to the shell being made from one piece of aluminum, there are no joints to be seen on the sides or up top where you would normally find a "lid" that can be removed to access the internals. It goes without saying that thanks to the aluminum finish, it isn't a fingerprint magnet. The top GEEKOM logo is a nice touch, too; it looks and feels like premium hardware.

Teardown

Accessing the A6 is exactly the same as the A8. First of all you have to remove the four rubber feet which are glued on, a small flat head screwdriver is enough for the job. Under that you will find four of the smallest screws that are used in computers, they are essentially the same ones used to hold down a NVMe M.2 SSD drive. Upon removing the four screws, you can then detach the plastic cover, which exposes another metal cover that is also fastened with four of the same screws. In total, eight screws.

Again, as I discovered with the A8, the Wi-Fi antenna is taped to the bottom plastic cover and routed through and taped to the metal plate (bottom left photo above), and with only about 1 centimeter left at the corner screw hole, However, remembering this, I was able to remove the tape on the metal plate before removing it from the mini PC which resulted in the cable having enough length to stay attached to the plastic cover, with me being able to remove the metal plate free of any wires.

This is one area you will have to be careful with when managing the SSDs or memory. On a positive note, the four rubber feet also have "flaps" or "wings" that can be inserted into tiny slots as you reattach them, meaning the rubber feet do not rely entirely on the weak sticky glue to stay in place.

Yes, unlike with the A8, it is possible to add an additional SSD (2242 M.2) inside the A6, so if you plan to expand the memory or internal storage, you'll need to be really careful with that Wi-Fi antenna wire.

Usage

BIOS

The A6 uses an AMIBIOS, which is similar to what HP, Dell and other PC manufacturers use to lock down customization of the machine's values, like CPU or memory over/underclocking, as well as power management. However, the BIOS here is not locked down, and you can configure it to your heart's content.

WINDOWS

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. After the setup was finished, I discovered I was on build 22631.3296 and only had to install a few drivers and updates that included the January 2025 Patch Tuesday update (KB5050009), the KB5050575 Setup update, and the KB5048779 OOBE update. In addition, GEEKOM does not contain any bloatware on their PCs, so that is always a bonus.

The A6 supports up to 4 screens at 8K @ 30Hz through the single USB 4 and USB 3.2 Gen 2 (DP 1.4) ports or 4K @ 60Hz over the two HDMI 2.0b ports. However, I also used my ZSCMalls 17.3" FullHD 144Hz portable screen, which was also powered by one of the rear USB Type C ports.

Regarding connectivity, there are two HDMI 2.0b, a USB 3.2 Gen 2, and USB 4 Gen 3 Type C ports, one USB 2.0 port, an RJ45 2.5 GbE Ethernet port, along with a barrel port for power on the back. Around the front, there are two more USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports and a port for a 3.5mm headphone jack. Unfortunately, there is no Type C on the front. For audio output, I linked my Edifier 360DB over Bluetooth, and I did not experience any noticeable audio delays.

As you can see from the above images, there's no Kensington lock option here, which is a shame. The entire top and sides are one piece of aluminum with ample venting on the sides for air cooling.

The above image should show a bit more clearly how small this thing is. It is even smaller than the slim and lightweight Mini Air12, which also can't be expanded with a 2.5-inch SSD, and it pales in comparison in size to the Beelink SER6 Max.

Benchmarks

Before I started running benchmarks, I ensured that Windows 11 and drivers were up to date. At the time of testing, the A6 was running Windows 11 Professional 24H2 build 26100.2894, and I also upgraded to the latest available Adrenalin 24.12.1 WHQL certified driver (Nov 2024).

With that out of the way, and because people like that sort of thing, I ran some benchmarks and compared it to others in the GEEKOM A Series, alongside its spiritual predecessor, the A5.

For our benchmarks, UL Solutions provided us with Professional (commercial use) licenses for 3DMark, PCMark 10, and Procyon. In addition, we used a (sponsored) licensed version of Geekbench 6, along with free-to-use Cinebench 2024 and 7-Zip.

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. Finally, Geekbench is a synthetic benchmark that is great for a quick look at the potential performance across a wide range of workloads, and 7-Zip for compression and decompression speeds..

¹ Geekbench 6 was used; previous tests used Geekbench 5
² Cinebench r2023 was used

The highest temperature recorded during benchmarking was in Time Spy at 87.7C, which was unsurprisingly the lowest score recorded in the A series. I ran the Time Spy test three times and recorded the highest score.

Another weird anomaly was that it bested the newer A7 in the Procyon WindowsML test that relies on the CPU, the same anomaly can be seen with the Geekbench single core test, although I ran Geekbench 6 here, and the others in the A series used Geekbench 5, which may account for the difference.

However, as you might see from the Timespy and Compute scores, don't think you can replace your gaming desktop with this, you'd still need a dedicated GPU if you intended to do much of any gaming on it.

Next up, I tested browsing performance using Speedometer 3.0. Speedometer provides a value and also a range showing the highest and lowest scores after three runs as indicated in the chart above by the two scores for each browser. It's clear to see that it was a toss-up between Chrome and Edge.

I also tested the SSD's capability using AS SSD and CrystalDiskMark 8.0.5.

Despite running all of the above benchmark tests, the A6 did not get hot to the touch, more like warm, and there were no annoying noises coming from the single fan that cooled the unit.

Conclusion

As with all the Mini PCs I've reviewed in the past couple of years, the A6 isn't a gaming PC. You will not be able to enjoy graphically intensive games on it. Still, it is suited as something like an office workstation with a mixture of light gaming, or perhaps a good solution for a student or office worker without a permanent desk, affording the ability to pack this away after every use. This thing also doesn't take up much room in your bag if you need to move it from place to place.

When you're spending hundreds of dollars to replace the job of a full-sized PC, you're going to want it to replicate as much of the capability as possible, aside from the obvious lack of GPU prowess.

As I said earlier, the decision ultimately comes down to what you're willing to pay for the options you need. This Mini PC will let you connect up to four displays, all operating at 4K @ 60Hz, whereas cheaper solutions might be limited to just two screens.

Coupon code

It's available right now at $50 off for $449 on the official website or Amazon. You can also use the NEOWINA6 coupon on checkout at both stores to receive an additional 5% discount.

If we compare this directly with the A5, which is definitely in the same class, then this A6 Mini PC, which includes a Ryzen 7 6800H processor, 32GB of 4800MT/s DDR5 memory, and a 1 TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe with Windows 11 Pro installed on it, is pretty good value for money. It's a generative update, DDR5 vs DDR4, 1TB SSD vs 512GB, and the newer Zen3+ vs Zen 3 CPU. It's only slightly more expensive than the asking price back in 2023 ($399 vs $426.45), too, but that is likely to do with the more expensive DDR5 memory. What it comes down to is that they both have an MSRP of $499.

Once again, this loses a point for the weird design choice with the Wi-Fi antenna, making it almost impossible to access without the cable detaching from the Wi-Fi PCIe card, which cannot be removed to reattach the wire, and another point for not having a USB Type C port on the front, and for sticking with HDMI 2.0b for some reason. Finally, half a point for the misleading marketing as an AI-capable PC.

If you don't care about the AI aspect (and let's be honest, you will not find a certified CoPilot PC with a minimum of 45 TOPS or more in this price bracket anyway). What you have is a Mini PC capable of powering virtual machines, or perhaps running your Home Theater solution, or for what it is intended, a flexible office-class mini PC that isn't going to take up much room in your bag. Let's also not forget that you can connect up to four screens.

The price is right for what you get: a sturdy, modern, and well-built mini PC.

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