Slightly odd benchmark results on this system suggest it was hobbled in some way to prevent it from overtaking more expensive products. However, the feature set is fantastic for the asking price, even if it is slower than the M7 and M7 Pro in most respects.
Pros
- +
Affordable
- +
Easy internal access
- +
Dual 2.5GbE LAN and M.2
- +
Oculink
Cons
M.2 are only Gen 3
GPU underperforms the M7 or M7 Pro
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GMKtec NucBox M7 Ultra: 30-second review
Having just reviewed the GMKtec M5 Ultra, that prior investigation puts an interesting twist on the M7 Ultra now before me.
Because the M5 was built on a platform that wasn’t widely utilised, and the M7 Ultra turned out to be built on a platform from 2022 that nobody used at all.
However, don’t be put off by the older hardware, because this Ryzen 6000 series processor with Zen3+ architecture is well-suited for a mini PC. It has DDR5 support, USB4 and plenty of PCIe lanes, enabling the M7 Ultra to deliver a well-rounded and confident performance level that’s above any of the Ryzen systems that use DDR4 and the Vega 8 GPU.
It’s also got plenty of potential for upgrades, either internally with the SODIMM and M.2 slots, or externally via USB4. And it must also be one of the cheapest systems to come with Oculink, enabling the external connection of discrete graphics cards via its 64Gb/s interconnect.
Compared to a cutting-edge system, it only has eight cores (sixteen threads), the DDR5 is only 4800 MT/s, and while it is a PCIe 4.0 system, it only supports PCIe 3.0 on the M.2 slots.
Those caveats make me think that the M7 Ultra is suitable for someone who needs a little big more power, but not the performance of a Ryzen 9 or Ryzen AI machine.
For that person who does more than just basic office tasks, this might be ideal, and if they suddenly need more graphics performance, it can be added via Oculink.
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Where this system is flawed is that it’s slower than the M7 and M7 Pro that came before it. Given the silicon’s age, this isn’t going to feature in our round-up of the best mini PC systems, but with a reasonably effective platform and plenty of ports, it’s not junk either.
GMKtec NucBox M7 Ultra: Price and availability
- **How much does it cost? **From $310/£260/€300
- **When is it out? **Available now
- **Where can you get it? **Direct from GMKtec and via online retailers