GMKtec Gaming PC K11 AMD Ryzen 9 8945HS 8C 16T Up to 5 2GHz 32GB DDR5 RAM 1TB

This is specifically for the K12 with the Ryzen 7 H 255. Honestly, not a bad deal. The CPU is pretty good for its class, and has very acceptable integrated graphics. The H 255 is seemingly only sold to the chinese market, has no real documentation officially (as of the time of writing), and is essentially a recycled die from better chips that didn't meet the cut so to speak (at least as far as I can find), but I don't see any of those as a real problem; die recycling is perfectly fine if it actually works and is stable, and AMD is usually pretty good at the latter... and it makes me feel a little better that AMD can save something that would otherwise end up being e-waste. Despite the borderline unofficial nature of the CPU, I have not experienced any performance issues, instability, or crashes of any kind after a few weeks. Note that I updated the BIOS and microcode immediately after receiving the unit, and I suggest everyone do the same. The unit itself is from GMKtec, which is a chinese company. However, there were some (good) surprises in the box that tells me they actually cared about the end user experience, though possibly only just enough to make sure that the average joe blow didn't immediately return it because they got pissed off at something that would honestly be Microsoft's fault (eg. the horrendous OOBE for Windows). I choose to believe they actually care though, and somewhat reinforcing that, my email to them was answered the next day (I'll get to what the contents of that was later). The specs of the unit, aside from the CPU which is pretty good itself, are actually darn incredible. OCuLink is a quasi-rare connector, but an *extremely* welcome one! That significantly improves the unit's lifespan and enables mostly modern gaming, provided you genuinely do the research into how to use it (remember, don't plug or unplug it when the PC is on!), though it can already handle light-medium gaming with just the integrated graphics. Though I have not tried the OCuLink port yet, I have no reason to believe it doesn't work or anything like that. USB4 is also extremely welcome, and I can confirm that it not only works, but it follows best practices of how to implement the protocol. Since the port does do PCIe tunneling, it should work with all Thunderbolt 4 appliances out of the box. GMKtec could have taken the cheap way out and omitted this detail, but they did not. Absolutely incredible to have both of these available. There are also, seemingly (I have not opened the unit up yet, no reason to), three M.2 slots, one at Gen4x4 and two at Gen4x2, which is perfectly fine in terms of speed and great in terms of how many slots they offer. I cannot think of any other mini PC with this level of overall connectivity. You lose out on some external USB connectors that would otherwise be present, but USB4 seriously more than makes up for it. The dual 2.5G LAN ports are just the whipped cream on top of all this. Though, not all can be as good. There is no S3 power state support in the firmware, so you're stuck with shutting down the computer, hibernating it, or relying on Microsoft's absolutely abysmal "implementation" of sleep in the form of modern standby (S0). This was confirmed in my aforementioned email to GMKtec's support. Oh well, I have the whipped cream but miss out on the cherry. This may be an oversight on GMKtec's part, but it may also be difficulty getting S3 implemented with OCuLink. Don't know exactly how that works. I'm tempted to knock a star off for this, since S3 is a very, very nice power state to have available, but it's something I'm personally not terribly concerned about, especially with everything else so good. Please, if you're reading this GMKtec, add it in a BIOS update! Would love to see it! There may also be an issue with the TPM, specifically in regards to when the firmware tells the OS to initiate S0 sleep (eg. from the power button short pressed). In such an event, when the computer resumes from S0 the TPM will either fail or lock up. This may be an issue with Windows, or with the TPM, or with just my unit, and it requires a reboot to clear it up. Either way, my way around it is to leave the unit turned on or to just shut it down, but again it's not a concern for me personally, and YMMV. Overall, I would recommend this unit. Though I have not opened it to inspect the internals, nor tested the OCuLink connector yet, I see great value in this unit, and I imagine I will keep it around for a very long time, getting significant usage out of it. I would give it 4.5 stars if that were possible, but for Amazon I will leave it at 5. Read more

This is a very neat little box of a computer, and if you know what you plan to do with it, I think it's a pretty good value. Basic setup is extremely simple, literally just plug in your mouse/monitor/keyboard and the power supply and turn it on. It booted with zero issues into the normal Windows 11 setup. For some reason the manufacturer recommends that you do not use a LAN cable when you first start the computer, but I was never planning on using it on anything but wifi, and it worked fine over wifi, so that is not a problem for me. Although I am planning in the future to install Linux on this machine, I was grateful that it came with minimal Windows 11 bloatware (just the windows standard stuff). Although initial setup was very fast, as soon as it connected to the internet it discovered that it had a year's worth of Windows updates to install, which takes a while, so the second time you restart the computer, expect it to go through a long update process (10-15 mins). I had no trouble hooking up Bluetooth peripherals (in my case a controller). If you are planning to use this computer for general purpose web browsing/word processing/light home server use/etc, you will have zero problems. For general purpose tasks, this computer is great. It's extremely snappy when browsing the web, downloading files, and running programs like Steam or Discord. I think advertising this as a gaming PC is a bit of a stretch-- there's only so far integrated graphics will get you, and I suspect this computer will suffer if you try to run any truly top of the line games on it. It is great for older games, or lighter indie games. I tested it on Fallout New Vegas and Celeste and it had zero issues whatsoever. I ran a benchmark test and it performed predictably poorly compared to computers with dedicated graphics cards. You can get a little more juice out of this machine by changing the allocation of VRAM in the BIOS. It's by default set at 3GB, but I went in and bumped it up to 8 (see the options in the pictures). After doing that, I didn't notice any performance dips from reallocating away the regular RAM. The 32GB this machine comes with is very generous. Even when I was trying to stress-test this machine, it was very quiet, and putting my hand on the top of the case, it never produced a ton of heat. The best way I could describe this machine is unobtrusive-- it's really small and could easily be mounted beneath a desk to completely hide it away. The power supply it comes with is almost the same size as the computer itself. The computer comes with a mounting bracket that I think is intended to be used to mount it to the wall. My one grumble is that the 1TB of onboard storage will run out pretty quickly if you're a person with a large media library like I am. I am not sure how upgradable the storage is, but I guess I can always just attach an external hard drive if I need more storage. The display options are HDMI and DisplayPort, which is fine. I wish the audio jack were on the back of the box rather than the front, but it is what it is. It comes very well packaged, works right out of the box, and performs exactly as expected. If you have a need for general purpose computing in a small form factor, this will serve that need. Read more