With the lifting of AMD's ban, mini consoles and laptops equipped with the new generation of Ryzen 8040 mobile processors can finally move from behind the scenes to the foreground, just because they caught up with the Spring Festival holiday, which disrupted the shipping rhythm of new products. For example, although Geek was the first to put the K8 mini host on the shelves, the official snap-up time was not until 9 o'clock in the morning on February 20. So, at this point in time, is this product eligible for us to put it in the shopping cart in advance?
To put it simply, the Geek K8 is essentially a refreshed version of the classic predecessor K6, replacing the processor from Ryzen 7 7840HS to Ryzen 7 8845HS. At the same time, the new product has also changed to a silver gray color, although the material of the whole machine is still plastic, but in terms of visual effect, it has a little more metallic texture, as for other aspects, it seems to be no different from its predecessors.
Therefore, whether the geek K8 is worth buying depends mainly on whether the processor has gained performance and experience.
The base specifications of Ryzen 7 8845HS are almost the same as those of 7840HS, both of which are TSMC's 4nm process technology, ZEN4 + RDNA 3 microarchitecture combination, 8 cores and 16 threads, and a maximum acceleration frequency of 51GHz, integrated Radeon 780M GPU. The biggest change in this chip is that the integrated AI engine, that is, the NPU, has been optimized, the AI computing power has increased from 10TOPS (trillion times) to 16TOPS, and the total AI computing power of NPU + CPU + GPU is as high as 38TOPS (39TOPS for Ryzen 9 8945HS), which is higher than the 34TOPS of Core Ultra.
Therefore, the Ryzen 7 8845HS is a processor that can [fight in the future], which may be a bit useless at this stage, but after the local AI application ecology is improved in the future, we can look at better intelligence capabilities. In addition, theoretically, the potential bugs of the predecessors of 7840hs and 8845hs should be solved, and the use will be more stable.
Back to the geek K8 product, its barebones first price is 2499 yuan, which is 200 yuan more expensive than the 7840HS version on sale. Personally, I feel that this premium is acceptable, after all, it is a smarter and more stable core. But if you miss the first offer, when the price difference rises to more than 300 yuan, it is not as good as the more affordable veterans worth buying.
Finally, let's review the Geek K8, as well as the characteristic selling points of its predecessor K6. The three-dimensional size of this series of products is about 078L, built-in dual memory slots, dual M2 hard disk bays, and a second small fan is added in the inner layer of the top cover to assist in the heat dissipation of the memory hard disk.
The host interface is located on the front and rear panels of the fuselage, of which the front panel is successively equipped with reset holes, power switches, audio interfaces, full-featured USB4, and 2 USB-A32 Gen2 interface. On the back of the fuselage, USB-A3 is provided in turn2 Gen2 and USB20，hdmi2.0 and dp, 2 25G network port, power jack, can be connected to 3 monitors at the same time.
Overall, the Geek K8 is the first batch to hit the shelves, and it is also the most affordable mini host to upgrade the Ryzen 7 8845HS processor, supporting up to 65W power consumption, rich interfaces and strong expansion capabilities are also its pluses. If you want to feel the powerful AI computing power of the new generation of Ryzen for the first time, you can still consider loading it into the shopping cart in advance, just don't forget to buy it on February 20, it's worth buying, and it is based on the initial price of 2499 yuan. In the future, if the new 8845HS platform mini host (including notebooks) wants to be at a premium, it is still necessary to add more attractive selling points from the design and function level.
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