GEEKOM Mini IT13 Review: Core i9-13900H in a 4x4 Package

System Performance: Miscellaneous Workloads

Standardized benchmarks such as UL's PCMark 10 and BAPCo's SYSmark take a holistic view of the system and process a wide range of workloads to arrive at a single score. Some systems are required to excel at specific tasks - so it is often helpful to see how a computer performs in specific scenarios such as rendering, transcoding, JavaScript execution (web browsing), etc. This section presents focused benchmark numbers for specific application scenarios.

3D Rendering - CINEBENCH R23

We use CINEBENCH R23 for 3D rendering evaluation. R23 provides two benchmark modes - single threaded and multi-threaded. Evaluation of different PC configurations in both supported modes provided us the following results.

In the single-threaded case, all the Raptor Lake systems perform similar to each other, with different scores being in the realm of run-to-run variations. Tiger Lake comes in last, with the Zen 2 / 3 /4 systems making up the middle. In the multi-threaded case, the AMD-based systems move up the chain. The 65W power budget and the presence of eight of high-performance Zen 4 cores ensure the lead for the Beelink GTR7 by a huge margin, but the 35W PL1 and six high-performance cores help the Mini IT13 retain its place in the top half of the pack.

Transcoding: Handbrake 1.5.1

Handbrake is one of the most user-friendly open source transcoding front-ends in the market. It allows users to opt for either software-based higher quality processing or hardware-based fast processing in their transcoding jobs. Our new test suite uses the 'Tears of Steel' 4K AVC video as input and transcodes it with a quality setting of 19 to create a 720p AVC stream and a 1080p HEVC stream.

Software transcoding performance depends on the number of available threads and the available power budget. The 35W PL1 setting keeps the Mini IT13 in the bottom half of the pack, despite the two additional cores available over systems like the Wall Street Canyon and Arena Canyon NUCs (which have four performance cores at a 40W PL1).

Hardware transcoding performance using QuickSync depends on the iGPU clock rates, which in turn depends on the available power budget for long-term tasks. The improvements over Tiger Lake ensure that the Mini IT13 is able to show a 40%+ improvement over the Panther Canyon NUC. However, against the 40W PL1 configurations in both Rocket Lake and Alder Lake, the 35W PL1 settings prove to be a detriment. This keeps the Mini IT13 in the lower half of the pack.

Archiving: 7-Zip 21.7

The 7-Zip benchmark is carried over from our previous test suite with an update to the latest version of the open source compression / decompression software.

Despite the higher core count, the Mini IT13 is let down by the 35W PL1. This pushes it below the 40W PL1 configuration of the RPL-P systems. The Beelink GTR7 with its 65W octa-core Phoenix APU is the obvious leader in the compression chart. The trend repeats for the decompression case, except that the Mini IT13 is able to have a slight edge over the ASRock Industrial NUC BOX-1360P/D5. While the compression chart sees the Mini IT13 in the lower half, the decompression case puts it right in the middle.

Web Browsing: JetStream, Speedometer, and Principled Technologies WebXPRT4

Web browser-based workloads have emerged as a major component of the typical home and business PC usage scenarios. For headless systems, many applications based on JavaScript are becoming relevant too. In order to evaluate systems for their JavaScript execution efficiency, we are carrying over the browser-focused benchmarks from the WebKit developers used in our notebook reviews. Hosted at BrowserBench, JetStream 2.0 benchmarks JavaScript and WebAssembly performance, while Speedometer measures web application responsiveness.

From a real-life workload perspective, we also process WebXPRT4 from Principled Technologies. WebXPRT4 benchmarks the performance of some popular JavaScript libraries that are widely used in websites.

The trifecta of browser benchmarks is where the single-threaded performance of the Core i9-13900H comes to fore. The Mini IT13 actually turns up on top in all three of the benchmarks despite the lower PL1 setting. The workload characteristics are such that the short bursts of high clock speeds turn out to be good - particularly for real-world web browser workloads like WebXPRT4.

Application Startup: GIMP 2.10.30

A new addition to our systems test suite is AppTimer - a benchmark that loads up a program and determines how long it takes for it to accept user inputs. We use GIMP 2.10.30 with a 50MB multi-layered xcf file as input. What we test here is the first run as well as the cached run - normally on the first time a user loads the GIMP package from a fresh install, the system has to configure a few dozen files that remain optimized on subsequent opening. For our test we delete those configured optimized files in order to force a 'fresh load' every second time the software is run.

As it turns out, GIMP does optimizations for every CPU thread in the system, which requires that higher thread-count processors take a lot longer to run. So the test runs quick on systems with fewer threads, however fast cores are also needed. The Raptor Lake systems with four cores perform the best in both cases, with the two additional cores possibly causing the Mini IT13 to slip down a bit.

Cryptography Benchmarks

Cryptography has become an indispensable part of our interaction with computing systems. Almost all modern systems have some sort of hardware-acceleration for making cryptographic operations faster and more power efficient. In the case of IoT servers, many applications - including web server functionality and VPN - need cryptography acceleration.

BitLocker is a Windows features that encrypts entire disk volumes. While drives that offer encryption capabilities are dealt with using that feature, most legacy systems and external drives have to use the host system implementation. Windows has no direct benchmark for BitLocker. However, we cooked up a BitLocker operation sequence to determine the adeptness of the system at handling BitLocker operations. We start off with a 4.5GB RAM drive in which a 4GB VHD (virtual hard disk) is created. This VHD is then mounted, and BitLocker is enabled on the volume. Once the BitLocker encryption process gets done, BitLocker is disabled. This triggers a decryption process. The times taken to complete the encryption and decryption are recorded. This process is repeated 25 times, and the average of the last 20 iterations is graphed below.

Hardware acceleration is available for the operations in all of the systems. The time taken for processing is directly dependent on the number of available cores, and within the same core count - the available power budget. It must be noted that the AMD-based systems enjoying a distinct advantage over the Intel ones in this department.