GMKtec Mini PC Windows 11 Pro Intel N100 (Up to 3.4GHz) 4C/4T, Desktop Computer Dual LAN 1000Mbps 12GB DDR5 1TB Hard Drive, Micro 4K, Triple Display, WiFi6, BT5.2, Energy Efficient Nucbox G2 Black

Upfront, I am impressed with the GMKtec G2.

I have purchased a number of mini/micro PCs recently for various projects (both personal and commercial) so I feel I have some good points of reference for this unit. From a “brand” standpoint, I’ve tried a few different ones but I find myself coming back to GMKtec. I like their designs, the products are solid and well engineered, and they have a fully open/unlocked BIOS, which allows for some case-specific tweaking on my end.

I have a total of 3 comparable units: this GMKtec G2 (Intel N100, 12G DDR5-4800 RAM, 512GB mSATA), the GMKtec KB5 (Intel N5105, 8G DDR4-2933 RAM, 128GB mSATA), Kamrui AK1Plus (Intel N95, 8G DDR4-2933 RAM, 256GB mSATA).

Out of the box, the G2 scored 8.7% better than the AK1Plus and 42% better than the KB5 on Passmark PerformanceTest 9 (older version sure, but it’s what I have). The N5105 is an older generation CPU, so this difference is understandable, but still bigger than I expected. The KB5 was something I purchased for a remote monitoring PC and a digital signage project, it’s extremely capable for those tasks as well as light office type tasks. This G2 with the boost CPU and RAM push it into the range of honest general usage. You’re not really going to play any modern games on it, but any web browsing, video streaming, day to day basic usage is easily handled. It would also make a great emulation rig for a home arcade machine project or classic gaming station.

The N95 vs N100 is fairly close in overall specs, with the N95 being slightly higher TDP/power and slightly faster graphics (but less execution engines: 16 vs N100’s 24), so the main difference maker here is the memory. DDR5 4800 MT/s over the DDR4 2933 MT/s provides a solid boost in both CPU, Memory, and 2D graphics benchmarks and real world performance.

2D graphics benchmarks clock in at 628 for G2, 565 for AK1Plus, 458 for KB5; and 3D benchmarks are within 1% across all 3 chips/models (the scores are low, these aren’t made for 3D graphics).

The CPU benchmarks show the biggest difference with the N100 here coming in at 7881, the N95 in the AK1Plus model scored 7062, and the N5105 in the KB5 model scored 3660.

Now there is a tweak I did in the BIOS to boost performance and benchmark scores here to a consistent 8300, which is a 5% boost. I changed the fan settings, adjusted the power limits, and tweaked the core boost values. This does not overclock this CPU at all, but what it does do is allows the CPU to run at full strength. Raising the fan setting here is the most important to help offset heat and thermal throttling. Normal usage doesn’t cause it to throttle very often and by default the fan is quite quiet, but if you do anything that pushes all the cores for any length of time, it does heat up and then throttle.

I’ve taken mine apart to see how it fits together and the design is clever and impressive. Taking the bottom panel off shows the CPU cooler (all copper) and is where the LED ring on the bottom plugs into the motherboard. Nothing really accessible there. RAM is soldered on in chiplets, so non-replaceable, but at 12G running DDR5 you likely wouldn’t need to anyway. The top panel, which is replaceable with the included red 3D-printed option, reveals the mSATA SSD, and underneath is the WiFi/BT card. If you disconnect either WiFi antenna connection, they are a bit difficult to reconnect but must be done otherwise you’ll have terrible WiFi reception. The plastic insert sitting under the WiFi card can only be removed by disconnecting the WiFi antennas and really doesn’t reveal anything replaceable or upgradable underneath.

The form factor of the unit is nice and small, somewhat impressively so at 3.5″x3.5″x1.6″. They make the most use of the size available too, with power button on front, USB on right side, display on left side, and networking & power on the rear. This design works great for being mounted to the back of a monitor or underside of a desk/cabinet. If you’re looking for a minimalist and clean cable arrangement, you might find this layout annoying.

With dual 1G LAN ports, this box could also be repurposed as a small firewall device if you chose to install PFSense or OPNSense. You could also install Hyper-V on the included Win11 Pro install and have a dedicated port for a VM. I tested each port and got close to line speed on both simultaneously (~800-900mbps). WiFi performance was acceptable too, with an avg of 300-400 mbps on a WiFi5 connection and 600-800 mbps on a WiFi6 connection.

I was unable to test the bandwidth of the 3 USB 3.2 ports, but anything I threw at it worked just fine, included an external SSD.

Triple display support with 2 HDMI and 1 DP is nice. The DP is v1.4 but doesn’t support 8k as a limitation of the CPU itself, but triple 4k displays isn’t too shabby!

The unit pulled about 8-9W of power at idle and ramped up to about 36W at absolute max, averaging closer to 16W during normal usage. Hooking this up to even a small UPS should allow plenty of runtime in power outages if you want/need to keep this up 24/7.

The CPU cooler is well sized and designed for the CPU used. A more powerful CPU (or the ability to overclock this chip) would require a more powerful cooler.

My only slight issues with the unit are: it would have been nice to have a USB Type-C on the front near the power button, and the Realtek LAN choice over an Intel (possibly even a 2.5G) option is a bit limiting but an understandable cost measure.

As a lightweight office-use PC or Kiosk type machine, it is absolutely sufficient. As a low power, low cost, task specific project PC this is a fantastic choice with enough CPU and RAM power to take more complex tasks. Small on-premise web server or digital signage, custom Arcade emulator or classic console game emulator, running monitoring or automation software, or even lightweight Hypervisor are all fantastic choices for this unit.

First, this is a tiny package that looks attractive. They give you two lids for this MiniPC, both red and black. Both look great. They also give you a bracket to use if you want to attach this to the back of your monitor which is a nice touch to allow less wires showing, and to minimize use of desk space.
When turned on, there is a pretty blue glow at the base indicating it is on. What you may not know is that the user can select from among many colors for this lighting including Blue (default), Red, Green, Yellow, Cyan, Purple, White, or LED off. I tried all of the colors and I personally like Blue, Cyan, and Purple the most. To get to settings, it is very easy, just press “DELETE” when booting and it will go into the BIOS setup. I will save you time by letting you know that nothing needs to be changed, the default settings work well. However, in the menu is an option of the LED color as I mention above. That is about the only item that you might want to change to suit your color preference, or your mood of the day. It is easy and fast to make changes. Just be careful to not change other things unless you have a reason to and remember what you changed in case you have to back-track to reverse your change. I recommend not wasting time with the BIOS menu, except picking your favorite LED color.

I should add that the default is a deep and dark, subtle almost indigo blue which looks very classy. However, I do also like the Cyan and change to it when in the mood to.

I should mention that this box is amazingly quiet. What do I mean, well, I stress test my computers and under maximal heat stress using PRIME95 the temperature of the processor only came up to 77 degrees. The other surprise was the lack of noise. With the fan almost certainly at maximum, I cannot hear it above a quiet room’s background sound when about 3 feet or greater. And when 2 feet away, I have to focus on it in order to note the quiet fan sound.

I stress tested the box for hours and hours without a single hiccup.
Also, this box boots up very quickly. And shuts down quickly as well. It feels like it boots 5 to 10 times faster then the desktop computer I use that I custom built a number of years ago which has a Ryzen 5, 2600 and GTX1050. (That is not 5 to 10 seconds faster, it is yes, 5 to 10 TIMES faster to boot then my desktop!)

When I evaluate new computers I also like to see how installing windows goes in terms of difficulty and in terms of how well it works in the machine, since it is a custom install and not from the factory. I do this to know I can change to my preferred version of windows and to see that the computer allows for user customization since I do a lot of that and require computers that work for me, not computers where I have to work for them. (That is one reason I like Windows 10 over Windows 11.)
For this box, it comes with Windows 11 preinstalled. However, as part of my testing, I went ahead and installed Windows 10 Pro (x64) and it functions perfectly. After installing Windows it comes up with basic graphics as expected. I then use the “Snappy Driver Installer” which is available on the internet freely, to load the Intel Graphics driver, and to load the Wifi 6 driver. After that, it functions great. However, you can just use the built in Windows 11 and it will work great out of the box without what I just described. I am explaining for those who like to change things that it is not difficult. For those who just want to turn it on, it will work great with no extra work.

I performed a number of benchmarks to assess the quality and functionality of this tiny but powerful Mini-PC.
First MEMTEST passes with no errors. Then PRIME95 as mentioned above. Then I ran SuperPI (1 Million) and it completed all 1 million digits of PI in 19.56 seconds. I ran CPU-Z and it benched at 1306 multi-core, and 377 single-core.
I compared this to a prior desktop I used with Integrated graphics from AMD, the A10-7850K at 3.70 GHz. This NucBox runs faster, at 170% of that prior full size desktop computer.
Then I compared it to another full size desktop computer I built based on a more powerful AMD FX8350 at 4.0 GHz and this tiny and cute NUCBOX’s single core performance is 160% of what I used to consider as a ‘monster’ powerhouse! (Its multi core performance is less at 83%, however it is almost at the same overall multi-core speed with 4 threads as my prior desktops 8 threads using an AMD at 4.00 GHz.) I generally seek high single-core performance when considering computer merits since many tasks are focused on that. An example is SuperPI which is dependent on single core performance.
Another interesting benchmark is CINEBENCH R23. This NucBox has a single-core score of 940. I just built a game computer for my son using an INTEL i7-4790 running at 4.00 GHz with dual channel overclocked RAM. This NucBox has about the same CINEBENCH single core score as my son’s game computer and he has four fans running making significant noise, and it uses between 150 to 200 watts to do any intensive work. This NucBox with about the same single core productivity runs at idle about 7 watts, and at full load at about 27 watts. 27 watts versus 150 to 200 watts for similar single core productivity. And quiet versus four fans when under load.

My use case for this NucBox is to handle Arcade emulation, as well as general computing tasks and movie and audio quality for playing on my monitor or television. With this NucBox, I get a powerful Arcade Emulator, and a Movie box, as well as a computer that can handle the usual tasks of business applications and the Web.

I enjoy high quality sound, so I hooked up the audio output 1/8 inch jack to my preamp which sent the signal to my amplified professional stereo mixing speakers and I first thought I must have hooked it up wrong because I heard no background noise, I thought “this can’t be right”. However, when I checked the connections it was all correct. This NucBox from GMKTec has an audio output that to my ears is silent! (Of course if measured there must be some. I just do not hear it in a quiet room.) I was used to some noise from my prior desktop computers which cost hundreds to thousands more to build with their expensive parts, Yet this affordable and small but powerful NucBox sounds better then my prior big desktop computers from their motherboard sound outputs. Amazing. I do not know how the engineers at GMKTec got this right but this NucBox has surprisingly pleasant stereo audio output. Watching a movie at 4K is smooth, appears perfectly sync’ed and sounds great to my ears, (I am focused on sound quality having mixed music for years.)
The graphics output is colorful and clear. You may wonder what do I mean. I am comparing to my desktop’s AMD GeForce GTX 1050 which to my eyes just does not look as good as this NucBox. I know it is not supposed to be that way. However, when looking at my desktop, or playing Arcade games, or playing stereo music, or watching movies at 4K, this NucBox sounds better, and the display to my eyes is crisper, clearer, and brighter.

I am including some pictures of Asteroids Deluxe play (taken with a camera with some light washout) and it plays at 4K resolution smoothly, fluidly, and with excellent color, brightness, and crisp audio and sound.
In fact, when I play this game at 4K on my prior high end video card the Nvidia GeForce GTX1050 it does not play as smoothly as when I play the same game on this NucBox. Also, the audio sounds better on the NucBox. This seems counter-intuitive. However, the game I play the most, Asteroids Deluxe, is more enjoyable to play on this NucBox. I would not have guessed this. This is what using a computer is really about. You consider how you use it, and I would think the goal is overall pleasure versus cost. Here we have low cost and high pleasure in a tiny and attractive package one can place anywhere. (For sake of completeness, I also compared the audio output of this NucBox to the audio output of the HDMI from my GeForce GTX1050 and again, the NucBox just sounds better. I think the difference is big enough for most to notice if you focus on the sound quality. The audio seems to have more precision and clarity. In other words, more pleasure. I did not expect this bonus element to the NucBox.

I played movies on my 4K screen and the audio video sync appears excellent. Again a better experience then on my desktop which I had assumed prior would have proven to be superior.

See some screen pictures of Asteroids Deluxe, and CoinOps Arcade that I play using this NucBox. For my use, it does pretty much everything else as well. It is small, but its performance is “big.” And for my metric of pleasure versus cost, it is off the scale in a very good way.

Got this mini to replace an 8 year old desktop. Did a lot of research and settled on this one based on specs and price (can’t beat 50% off holiday deal!). I am not a gamer or heavy graphics /video user so for my general computing needs of using the Internet, spread sheets, word processing this little guy is awesome! Really easy set up right out of the box. Nicely packaged and has plenty of ports to connect anything you would need. The thing is silent! I have it mounted under my desk and I don’t even know it is there! Boots up in less than 20 sec and has been running great! There are some good review videos on YouTube of the G2 if you are like me and overwhelmed by all the mini computer options out there. All around solid computer at a great price! Very happy with my purchase!

Boots quickly and performs well. However, the USB ports are unable to power some devices such as external disk drives. Problem is easily handled with an externally powered USB hub.

Boots up, runs, and shuts down quickly. Pleasantly surprised; that such a small and relatively affordable computer; so far seems the best I have owned. Might not be suitable for extreme gaming; but does great at surfing the Internet, documents, voice to text, IP phone interface and basic video editing.