u/LevelPlastic4696

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Just bought my first AI mini PC last week with the Geekom A9 Max and honestly couldn’t resist doing a little review on it lol. Still pretty new to this kind of hardware stuff so if I get anything wrong feel free to correct me.

This one has the Ryzen AI 9 HX470 with the 890M graphics. Honestly the biggest thing I was curious about was thermals because mini PCs always sound great until they start cooking themselves under load.

In the default mode it stayed pretty quiet even during longer runs.

I could barely hear it sitting on my desk unless the room was dead silent.

Switching to performance mode gave me slightly better scores in PCMark but the fan noise definitely ramps up a lot more. Personally I’d probably leave it in standard mode most of the time unless I was gaming on a TV or something farther away.

Gaming performance honestly surprised me more than I expected for an iGPU. Obviously this isn’t some magical 4K machine but for 1080p it’s actually pretty solid.

A few games I tested:

Cyberpunk 2077 was getting around 60 FPS at 1080p using a mix of low and medium settings with FSR turned on.

Forza Horizon 6 stayed mostly around the low 70 FPS range at 1080p high settings which honestly surprised me a bit.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider averaged a little over 60 FPS at 1080p medium settings.

Split Fiction was running around 70-80 FPS at 1080p medium settings and felt super smooth the whole time.

FC 26 also ran really nicely at 1080p high settings and I didn’t notice any major stutters during matches.

Frametime consistency felt better than a lot of older low end gaming laptops I’ve used before. Definitely way more usable than those old MX series Nvidia GPUs.

I also messed around with some of the AI features and tried a bit of Whisper transcription stuff.

Honestly felt pretty fast for the size of the machine, but I’m definitely not an expert with any of that lol

Still though, for the size I honestly came away more impressed than I expected.

I’m not really someone who writes reviews normally so this was kinda my first attempt at doing one lol. If I got stuff wrong or missed things don’t roast me too hard.

Want to surprise my wife with something a bit different for our anniversary instead of the usual jewelry/perfume route.

Lately I’ve been considering a really nice luxury umbrella brand because she’s into elegant everyday accessories and actually uses umbrellas constantly.

I found this luxury umbrella brand while browsing, and it made me wonder - are high-end umbrellas actually considered a good luxury gift, or does it feel too practical?

Curious if anyone here has gifted or bought one and whether it felt genuinely premium in person.

ok i get it’s a movie but man they have all this high tech equipment and they’re supposed to be studying symbiotes for years yet they seemed so unprepared when things actually went south at area 51. like they really thought some glass containers and a few tranquilizers were gonna hold back an alien invasion from a cosmic god. it felt a bit like a horror movie where the "experts" are the first ones to make every dumb mistake possible while venom is the only one with a real plan. did that bother anyone else or was the action cool enough that u didn't care about the logic? i just expected a secret government base to have better security than a local zoo.

the tiny glimpses we got of the symbiote world and the hive mind in the third movie weren't enough! i’m so curious about what their "society" (if u can even call it that) looked like before knull went crazy and started hunting them. seeing the xenophages in their natural habitat or seeing more of the "imperium" would be such a cool change of pace. do u think sony will ever do a full alien-focused spinoff or are they strictly staying on earth?