GMKTec NucBox EVO-X1 Pro mini PC review

GMKTec NucBox EVO-X1 Pro: 30-second review

Unless you specifically want an Intel-powered NUC, AMD-powered machines typically offer more power and features for less money.

A classic example is the GMKtec EVO-X1 Pro AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 470 AI Mini PC, which uses the latest Zen 5 architecture and Gorgon Point silicon to deliver plenty of processing power for a wide range of applications.

Alongside its strong performance, it also supports ample memory, at least 16TB of storage, and an excellent port selection. This NUC offers USB4 and OCuLink ports, dual 2.5GbE LAN ports, and triple (HDMI, DisplayPort and USB-C) screen outputs.

GMKtec has a habit of refreshing a good idea before anyone finishes praising the last version, and the EVO X1 Pro is a prime example.

It keeps the compact box that arrived with the original EVO X1 in late 2024. Inside, it swaps in AMD's Ryzen AI 9 HX 470. It also moves to WiFi 7 and ships with 64GB of soldered memory.

That raises two questions. Is the step up from the cheaper HX 370 model worth paying for? And does AMD's platform still hold its ground now that Intel's latest mobile chips are turning up in mini PCs?

My review answers some of those questions, but it also poses a few I hadn’t considered. Based on some blistering performance, the GMKtec EVO-X1 Pro should be on any list of the best mini PCs, but are there more cost-effective options?

GMKTec NucBox EVO-X1 Pro: Price and availability

• How much does it cost? From $1150
• When is it out? Shipping now, but limited stock
• Where can you get it? You can get it directly from GMKtec

GMKtec's US store lists the EVO X1 Pro at $1,599.99 for the 64GB and 1TB build. A 2TB option is also shown at $1,769.99. At the time of writing, every configuration showed as sold out, and a banner warned that prices would rise soon.

The page also shows a struck-through reference price of $2,299.99. Treat that with a pinch of salt, because I’m confident that GMKtec has never sold any of these at that price.

For those with less cash to splash, there is a single SKU of an HX370 model with 32GB of RAM and 1TB of storage for $1,149.99. Please note that the memory on this machine is soldered, so you can’t get the HX370 model and add extra memory later. And the same is true of the HX470 SKUs, because while the platform can address up to 256 GB, you can’t add any more to the existing hardware.

UK buyers have a separate GMKtec store, which doesn’t list this hardware yet. But based on dollar pricing, around £1250 for the review specification SKU seems believable.

Warranty is listed as one year on the US store, although I think UK and EU retail laws would insist on longer warranty periods.

The obvious competitor for this system is the MINISFORUM AI X1 Pro-470, which uses the same platform but a slightly different port and slot arrangement. For the same 64GB+1TB spec as the review hardware, MINISFORUM wants $1655, another $55 more than GMKtec.

But the memory in the X1 Pro-470 is socketed, enabling it to be upgraded, with the caveat that the memory is running at a slightly slower speed. Because of the memory slots, MINISFORUM also offers this system barebones for only $727, if you have spare DDR5, M2 storage and a Windows Pro license. And it comes with a two-year warranty.

The Beelink SER10 MAX AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 470 is another socketed memory offering, but it's $1699 for the 64GB+1TB model.

The Geekom A9 Max 2026 Edition also has 32GB of RAM and 2TB of storage, with an asking price of $1519. It also has a socketed memory system and can be loaded up to 128GB.

Among these mini systems, the EVO-X1's asking price is roughly in line with the alternatives, but all of them use socketed memory, trading a little speed for greater flexibility.

• Value: 4 / 5

GMKTec NucBox EVO-X1 Pro: Specs

GMKTec NucBox EVO-X1 Pro: Design

• Metal enclosure from the original EVO-X1
• Easy access
• No memory upgrades

The chassis is unchanged from the original EVO X1. Dimensions are 110 by 107 by 63mm, and it weighs around 590g. Systems like this are often shorter vertically but wider in other directions, but this is a nice size for the desktop or for mounting on the rear of a monitor using the provided frame.

GMKtec describes a dual fan layout, with one fan for the processor and a second for the system. The original EVO X1 drew complaints about fan noise, but I found this model extremely quiet even under benchmarking stress. That said, the air it ejects from the sides is noticeably warm when in performance mode.

The front of the EVO X1 Pro has dual USB-A, a single USB4 and a single OCuLink port, along with a 3.5mm audio jack and the illuminated power button.

And, on the back, there are two 2.5GbE LAN ports, two more 10GBps USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports and both HDMI 2.1 and DisplayPort 2.1. If you use the USB4 port with an HDMI adapter on the front, you can easily run three monitors off this system.

I’d have preferred the OCuLink port was on the back, but the port selection is good.

One minor complaint is the port labels. These do exist, with each port having a label, but some need more detail. All the USB-A ports are merely labelled ‘USB’, and the LAN ports don’t get a speed or a port number; they’re just ‘LAN’.

Internal access is something of a tease. At first, it suggests you can get inside without tools, just by rotating the threaded feet. Once you remove these, the metal outer casing covering the bottom, top, and left side detaches, revealing that a screwdriver is indeed required.

Four more screws later, the fan housing comes off, giving access to the storage area.

You can only change the storage here, since the memory is soldered on the mainboard. There are two 2280 M.2 Gen4 x4 slots, one of which is occupied with a pre-installed drive.

Two equally fast slots are useful, since you can easily clone the Windows installation to a new NVMe drive in the second slot. The largest size that’s typically available is 8TB on a 2280-sized drive, so you could place 16TB inside this tiny computer.

You might even be able to get more. I noticed that the M.2 slot that is used for the WiFi 7 and Bluetooth electronics can also be modified to accept larger than 2230 modules. That M.2 slot might be Gen4 x2 or even x1, and you'd give up wireless connectivity, but you might be able to add a third drive using it.

Overall, this was a good enclosure when it was the original X1, and the system in this model uses it effectively.

• Design: 4 / 5

GMKTec NucBox EVO-X1 Pro: Features

• Gorgon Point Silicon
• LPDDR5 Memory
• Full PCIe lane usage

The HX 470 belongs to AMD's Ryzen AI 400 family, codenamed Gorgon Point. It is a refresh of the Strix Point chip that powers the HX 370. The core layout is the same, with four full Zen 5 cores and eight smaller Zen 5c cores.

The gains are modest. Boost rises by 100MHz. GMKtec lists the Radeon 890M at 3.1GHz rather than 2.9GHz. The NPU moves from 50 to 55 TOPS.

It feels like AMD needed to polish the Strix Point design, ran out of time before it launched, and then made those tweaks for the Gorgon Point generation.

AMD's own figures give a default power limit of 28W, configurable between 15W and 54W. GMKtec's 65W performance mode is therefore a system-level tuning claim rather than a standard AMD specification. This 4nm chip copes well at 65W, even if, in benchmarks, it threw copious amounts of warm air.

The caching on this chip is 12MB L2 and 24MB L3. That’s 1MB of L2 per core to handle immediate, low-latency instruction and data retrieval. The L3 cache is not a single monolithic block; it divides its cores into a dual-CCX layout, servicing both the Zen 5 and the Zen5c cores.

One aspect of this design that people will either love or hate is that memory is soldered. The advantage of this is fast memory speeds, but it removes any upgrade path. The 64GB configuration is generous for local AI models and heavy multitasking. But it is also a financial commitment, and it assumes you won’t want more at some stage.

The M.2 slots are less controversial. Dual PCIe 4.0 x4 slots are rare in a box this size, mostly because of the limitations of free PCIe lanes. The HX 470 has sixteen PCIe 4.0 lanes, so the M.2 slots take half the available lanes. Since the OCuLink also comes from the same lane pool and uses four lanes, that leaves only four unused.

Thankfully, the USB controllers are native to the processor and do not steal from the general-purpose PCIe lanes, so that probably leaves enough for the shorter 2230 slot for Wi-Fi and the two 2.5GbE LAN ports.

OCuLink is a critical feature for enthusiasts who either want more GPU power or to run LLMs locally. GMKtec warns that the port is not hot-swappable, so you need to connect everything with the machine powered down, and then power the external device before activating the mini PC.

What I like about this system is that it doesn’t leave PCIe bandwidth unused, and with the 65W power profile, it's getting as close as it can get.

• Features: 4.5 / 5

GMKTec NucBox EVO-X1 Pro: Performance

Rather than comparing the EVO-X1 Pro to another AMD system, I thought it would be more interesting to compare it to the EVO-T1 from the same brand, which uses Intel silicon.

There is relatively little to separate these systems, since they both use LPDDR5 memory, although the T1 uses socketed SODIMMs (5600 MT/s) versus the unsocketed 6400 MT/s LPDDR5 memory on the X1 Pro.

What isn’t detailed above is that the power peak of the X1 Pro is 65W, where you can set the T1 to use 80W. In both these tests, I set ‘performance mode’ in the BIOS, to get the best speeds and on the X1 Pro I set the memory allocated to the 890M GPU to 8GB.

For those interested, I allocated 16GB of RAM to the 890M and boosted 3DMark Steel Nomad Light to 3361, which probably wasn’t worth losing 8GB of RAM for.

Given how close the performance of these two systems is, it’s worth considering the price difference. Things are slightly complicated by changes since launch on the T1, where it isn’t offered with 64GB as a standard SKU. It can be bought with 32GB+1TB for $1,279.99 or 96GB+2TB for a whopping $2,199.99.

Since you can add memory, you could get the T1 with no memory or storage for only $829.99, then add 64GB of RAM (2x 32GB SODIMM) and an NVMe drive. With a Lexar 32GB DDR5 SODIMM costing around $290 and a typical 1TB Gen4 drive being about $160, the upgrade to match memory and storage will cost you an extra $740, bringing the total system (without Windows) to about $1570, or $30 less than the X1 Pro cost, but without a Windows license.

The advantage of the Intel T1 is that you can upgrade it to 96GB, if you have that sort of cash, and it does have more inherent AI power with 99TOPS in total. However, the NPU on the AMD platform is far superior to that on the Intel, and if it wasn’t for the ARC 140V GPU, the Intel wouldn’t be better.

Conversely, the X1 Pro is less flexible, with no memory upgrades beyond the 64GB provided, but it’s more power-efficient with a 28W base TDP versus 45W on the T1.

Overall, the T1 is the machine for single-threaded tasks, and the X1 Pro is ideal if you run multi-core and multi-threaded code.

So is the X1 Pro worth the asking price? That depends on whether you need the memory. If you don’t, I’d recommend the EVO-X1 Pro with the HX 370 processor, as it's much better value than either its bigger brother or the Intel T1.

If you want an AMD NUC that’s more powerful than this, you'll want one that uses AMD Ryzen AI 395 Max or Ryzen AI Max+ PRO 495 silicon. And, the new Intel Panther Lake machines are also twice as quick as this, but all these options cost much more.

• Performance: 4 / 5

GMKTec NucBox EVO-X1 Pro: Final verdict

A year ago this system would have been closer to $1000, and might have been much easier for me to recommend. Now, with silly memory and storage costs, it's hardly an impulse purchase, is it?

That said, there is relatively little wrong with this hardware, though I’m genuinely disappointed that GMKtec is offering only a single year of warranty on a system I’d expect to last at least five years. Geekom is offering three years on their equipment.

When you factor in the price and the warranty, I’d be inclined to ask anyone buying one if they would be impacted by having the HX 370 SKU with 32GB of RAM, because that’s $450 less for a machine that will perform almost identically, unless you need more RAM.

It comes in the same well-engineered enclosure, and you can expand storage the same way.

I can only hope memory prices start to drop soon, because we need more systems like this with 64GB, or more, and more plausible pricing than we’re seeing currently.

The EVO-X1 Pro is a great mini system, but it desperately needs to be cheaper so that more people can experience this lovely mini PC.

Should you buy a GMKTec NucBox EVO-X1 Pro?

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