Geekom Mini IT13 review: A tiny PC for all your work needs

I love mini PCs. Ever since I tried the Khadas Mind last year, I've been in love with the concept of a tiny computer that takes almost no space on my desk. I was very excited to get the Geekom Mini IT13 as a replacement, and as it turns out, it's an excellent product with some great surprises.

The Geekom Mini IT13 offers all the performance you need for office work, plus it has great connectivity and some room for upgrades if you need them. For its tiny size, you can't ask for much more, plus it looks good, too.

About this review: Geekom sent us the Mini IT13 for the purposes of this review. The company had no input in its contents.

Pricing and availability

The Geekom Mini IT13 was launched in 2023 and it's fairly widely available. You can find some configurations at Amazon and Newegg, with the full suite of options available on Geekom's own website. The PC starts at $500 for the base model with an Intel Core i5-13500H, 16GB of RAM, and a 512GB SSD.

The model I have for review is the top-tier configuration, which features an Intel Core i9-13900H, 32GB of RAM, and a 2TB SSD. This model costs $849, which is still a reasonable price for what you get. You can also save 5% using the code xdait135off at Amazon, or save $80 with the code xdait13 on Geekom's website, but only through April 15th, 2024.

Design and ports

It's tiny and sleek

Right off the bat, the Geekom Mini IT13 is a pretty great-looking machine. Unlike the deluge of silver PCs out there, it comes in a bluish-grey shade that stands out from the crowd while still being pretty subdued. It's not as vibrant in real life as the pictures make it seem, but I always appreciate having something that looks at least a little different.

It also lives up to its name. While it's not the smallest PC I've used (the Khadas Mind is much smaller by itself), it's still tiny, and it will easily fit on any desk setup. I really love mini PCs and freeing up as much space as possible on my desk instead of using a bulky desktop PC, and this PC is a great way to do that. If you want to go one step further, the base of the PC even includes a VESA mount, so you can attach the computer to the back of a monitor to keep it out of sight.

However, the hardware itself doesn't feel super special. It's not bad at all, and parts of it are made of metal, but the outer shell is made of plastic, and the PC as a whole is so light that it feels sort of cheap. That being said, it should be pretty durable, since Geekom claims it performed all kinds of durability tests, including drops and vibrations, so you shouldn't have to worry.

Plenty of ports and upgrade slots

Despite its small size, the Geekom Mini IT13 still has plenty of space for ports. On the back, it has two USB4 40Gbps ports, basically the same as Thunderbolt 4, so you can use external graphics, monitors, and other peripherals. You'll also find two USB Type-A ports (one USB 3.2 Gen 2, one USB 2.0), two HDMI 2.0 ports, and even 2.5Gb Ethernet for super-fast internet speeds.

On the front, there are two more USB Type-A (3.2 Gen 2) ports, one of which is suited for charging a phone, plus a headphone jack. There's also a full-size SD card slot on the left side, so you have quite a bit of connectivity right out of the gate.

That expandability is also found inside the PC. Both the RAM and installed SSD are replaceable. The RAM uses standard SODIMM slots, while the SSD is an M.2 2280 slot, so both are very easy to replace. But on top of that, there's an extra M.2 2242 slot if you want to add another SSD, and the bottom of the laptop also has a slot for a 2.5-inch SATA drive, so you can get a lot more storage in this tiny package. It definitely helps explain the larger size compared to the Khadas Mind or something like the Mac Mini.

Performance

All the speed you need for day-to-day use

The Geekom Mini IT13 is powered by 13th-generation Intel Core processors, and my unit in particular has a Core i9-13900H with 14 cores, 20 threads, and speeds up to 5.4GHz on the performance cores. My unit also comes with 32GB of RAM and a 2TB SSD, but even the base model has 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD, so you're pretty well equipped.

As you'd expect, the Core i9-13900H breezes through pretty much any day-to-day task, and it works wonderfully. I haven't had a single issue in terms of performance, which is what you'd expect. Browsing the web with multiple windows and tabs open (plus some messaging apps), some photo editing, and the occasional video editing all ran just fine here. Of course, it's not all a gaming PC unless you get some external graphics, but for work, this processor is excellent.

Here are some benchmarks compared to other similar machines:

As you can tell, performance is very much in line with what you'd expect from this processor. It's a notch above what you get on the P-series processors of the same generation, though compared to an Intel Core Ultra (which is the follow-up to the processor inside the Geekom Mini IT13), it falls behind a bit, especially in terms of graphics. You might be better off with an AMD-powered PC if you want to do some gaming.

I'll also mention that the SSD on this machine isn't the very best you can get. It is a PCIe 4.0 model, but it caps out at just under 5,000MB/s reads and 4,500MB/s writes. RAM is also DDR4-3200, so it's not the fastest around in terms of bandwidth, but it has pretty low latency, with AIDA64's benchmark recording around 74.7 nanoseconds.

In the end, though, the performance is great overall, and there's not really much to complain about here. You can buy a faster SSD if you want top-notch speed, but it really doesn't matter for this kind of hardware, it's just fine as it is.

Should you buy the Geekom Mini IT13?

If you enjoy tiny computers, I can't think of any major reason not to get the Geekom Mini IT13 aside from the fact that a new model with 14th-gen processors is on the way at some point. It was announced at CES 2024, though we still don't know when it will actually be available.

Regardless, the Geekom Mini IT13 is a sleek piece of hardware that handles office and productivity workloads very well and does so in a tiny package that doesn't use a ton of power. I love both of these things, since I like saving space on my desk and also saving money on my energy bill. You can also add a lot more storage or some RAM to it yourself, so there are options to keep the PC relevant for a long time. Considering its relatively low price, I think it's great.

You should buy the Geekom Mini IT13 if:

• You like mini PCs
• You're using it for office work and productivity
• You want something relatively affordable and upgradeable

You shouldn't buy the Geekom Mini IT13 if:

• You want a premium-feeling chassis
• You want to play the latest games