GEEKOM A7 mini-PC Review : Premium Phoenix in a Compact 4x4 Package

HTPC Credentials

The 2022 Q4 update to our system reviews brings an updated HTPC evaluation suite for systems. After doing away with the evaluation of display refresh rate stability and Netflix streaming evaluation, the local media playback configurations have also seen a revamp. This section details each of the workloads processed on the GEEKOM A7 as part of the HTPC suite.

YouTube Streaming Efficiency

YouTube continues to remain one of the top OTT platforms, primarily due to its free ad-supported tier. Our HTPC test suite update retains YouTube streaming efficiency evaluation as a metric of OTT support in different systems. Mystery Box's Peru 8K HDR 60FPS video is the chosen test sample. On PCs running Windows, it is recommended that HDR streaming videos be viewed using the Microsoft Edge browser after putting the desktop in HDR mode.

YouTube Streaming Statistics

The GPU in GEEKOM A7 supports hardware decoding of AV1, and we see the stream encoded with that codec being played back. The streaming is perfect, thanks to the powerful GPU and hardware decoding support - the dropped frames observed in the statistics above are due to mouse clicks involved in bringing up the overlay.

The streaming efficiency-related aspects such as GPU usage and at-wall power consumption are also graphed below.

It appears that 2.19 Wh is the wall which systems are unable to break for the overall energy consumption for the streaming workload. The A7 shows its efficiency by sharing the top spot in this benchmark with other recently released systems.

Hardware-Accelerated Encoding and Decoding

The transcoding benchmarks in the systems performance section presented results from evaluating the VCE encoder within Handbrake's framework. The capabilities of the decoder engine are brought out by DXVAChecker.

Video Decoding Hardware Acceleration in GEEKOM A7

On paper, this codec list is quite comprehensive and should cover most home consumer and digital signage requirements

Local Media Playback

Evaluation of local media playback and video processing is done by playing back files encompassing a range of relevant codecs, containers, resolutions, and frame rates. A note of the efficiency is also made by tracking GPU usage and power consumption of the system at the wall. Users have their own preference for the playback software / decoder / renderer, and our aim is to have numbers representative of commonly encountered scenarios. Our Q4 2022 test suite update replaces MPC-HC (in LAV filters / madVR modes) with mpv. In addition to being cross-platform and open-source, the player allows easy control via the command-line to enable different shader-based post-processing algorithms. From a benchmarking perspective, the more attractive aspect is the real-time reporting of dropped frames in an easily parseable manner. The players / configurations considered in this subsection include:

• VLC 3.0.20
• Kodi 21.0
• mpv 0.38.2 (hwdec auto, vo=gpu-next)
• mpv 0.38.2 (hwdec auto, vo=gpu-next, profile=gpu-hq)

Fourteen test streams (each of 90s duration) were played back from the local disk with an interval of 30 seconds in-between. Various metrics including GPU usage, at-wall power consumption, and total energy consumption were recorded during the course of this playback.

All our playback tests were done with the desktop HDR setting turned on. It is possible for certain system configurations to automatically turn on/off the HDR capabilities prior to the playback of a HDR video, but, we didn't take advantage of that in our testing.

The A7 is the most efficient of the lot, though the lower number might be contributed by the inability of the system to play back the 8Kp60 clip without extensive dropped frames.

Across all playback scenarios, the at-wall power consumption is quite low, and barely crosses the 15W mark except for the final 8Kp60 case. This contributes directly to the lower energy numbers. The GEEKOM A7 turns out to be a very efficient video playback system, though all the software needs some work for the 8Kp60 playback case.