I had to double take at this deal, thinking my eyes were deceiving me! It’s for real, though, and I’ve no idea how long for, so you’ll need to jump on it.
There are very few PCs, mini or otherwise out there right now with AMD’s incredible Ryzen AI Max+ 395 APU inside, and those that are, well they’re expensive. This deal helps, though, taking a whopping $500 off a GMKtec EVO-X2 mini PC, down to $1,499.99 right now at Amazon.
I’ve yet to actually touch anything first-hand with the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 inside. Partly that’s because actual PCs using it are still rare. It’s expensive, for starters, but my colleague, Zachary Boddy, has sampled it inside the ASUS ROG Flow Z13, and it lives up to the hype.
Also referred to as Strix Halo, its codename, the Ryzen AI Max+ 395 is a true game changer not just for AMD, but for Windows PCs as a whole.
It provides a unified memory platform, just as Apple Silicon does with the M-series chips. This is, simply put, a pool of memory for the CPU and GPU to use, and the system can intelligently allocate it where it’s needed.
This reduces latency and potential bottlenecks, and improves performance. It’s good for gaming, but it’s particularly helpful in memory intensive workloads such as local AI. With a Strix Halo chip running the show, you can run pretty large LLMs on this mini PC, having access to the sort of memory for the GPU you’d find on an RTX 5090.
It isn’t an apples-to-apples comparison — an RTX 5090 will still perform better overall because its memory is faster, and its compute power is significantly higher. But you need memory, and the Strix Halo platform gives you plenty of it to play with. It also costs about $500 less than an RTX 5090, and you get a whole PC thrown in!
Some top line specs of the chip include 16 cores with 32 threads, a 50 TOPS NPU which makes it eligible to be a Copilot+ PC and the remarkable Radeon 8060S integrated GPU.
This is the first integrated GPU from AMD that can truly boast of being desktop class, being able to go toe-to-toe with NVIDIA’s RTX 40-series graphics. That makes this a pretty fantastic little gaming box, as well has having plenty of grunt for those AI workloads.
There is another variant of the GMKtec EVO-X2 with 128GB of unified memory, but you’ll need to drop another $500. It’s also currently discounted at Amazon, at $1,999.99, but unless you absolutely need to be able to dedicate up to 96GB of memory to something such as running LLMs, you’re better off saving a heap of money and getting this one.
It’s not short on connectivity, either. It can power four displays, with dual HDMI 2.1, DisplayPort 1.4 and USB-C 4.0 ports. That’s alongside USB 3.2, 2.5G Ethernet, Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4, and a full-sized SD 4.0 card reader.
The memory isn’t upgradeable, given the platform, but you get 64GB of LPDDR5X at 8000MT/s, as well as space for a pair of PCIe 4.0 SSDs. It even looks good, standing apart from all the regular black or silver boxes we see so much of in the mini PC space.
This isn’t for everyone, and even with this discount it’s still quite expensive. But, it’s also the most affordable way to get in on AMD’s ludicrous Strix Halo platform right now, and an opportunity not to be missed.
The future of desktop PCs is here, and it’s all wrapped up in a tiny little box.
