GEEKOM Mini IT13 review – Part 3: Ubuntu 22.04 tested on an Intel Core i9-13900H mini PC

We published the review of the Core i9-13900H powered GEEKOM Mini IT13 mini PC in Windows 11 Pro earlier this week and have now installed Ubuntu 22.04 and tested the machine with the Linux-based operating system in detail with benchmarks, features testing, networking and storage performance tests, power consumption, and thermal performance which we will report in this third and final part of the review.

Installing Ubuntu 22.04 on GEEKOM Mini IT13

I shrank the Windows partition by about 500 MB in Disk Management in Windows 11 (Disk 1) in order to install Ubuntu 22.04.3 in dual boot configuration.

The installation went smoothly using WiFi 6 to retrieve newer files and I could log in to the Ubuntu 22.04 desktop. But there was a trick, as I had to go to Windows first to select “Advanced Startup” and select Ubuntu on the next boot since the GRUB menu would just not show. When I first went to the BIOS I could not see any Ubuntu option, so I tried to play around with /etc/default/grub and looked for a solution on the web, but nothing seemed to work. I finally decided to go back to the BIOS to have another look.

The important part is the “UEFI NVME Drive BBS Priorities” option at the bottom as the system was set to start Windows Boot Manager first…

So I changed that to Ubuntu, and the GRUB menu is now showing up allowing me to easily select Ubuntu or Windows at boot time.

Ubuntu 22.04.3 system information

The system information in Ubuntu 22.04.3 shows the GEEKOM Mini IT13 hardware model with a 13th Gen, 20-thread Intel Core i9-13900H processor, 32GB of RAM, and 3TB of storage (2TB SSD + 1TB SATA drive) as expected.

Let’s type some commands in the terminal to get more information about the system:

inxi correctly reports six P-cores as 6-mt (multi-thread) and eight E-cores as 8-st (single-thread) with the maximum frequency reported to be 5.2 GHz or 5.4 GHz for the P-cores, and 4.1 GHz for the E-cores. It seems odd to have three different maximum turbo frequencies, but sbc-bench.sh script (see below) will report two of the P-Cores (four threads) can run up to 5.4 GHz and the rest can only go up to 5.2 GHz. The idle temperature is shown to be 27.8°C which does not seem right…

Ubuntu 22.04 Benchmarks on GEEKOM Mini IT13

Let’s install and run sbc-bench.sh:

The utility did not detect any CPU throttling, but if we look at the 7-zip benchmark we can see the first score (60981) is quite higher than the two subsequent scores (54075 and 54563). That’s because, as we’ve seen in Windows, the Core i9-13900H will run with a very high performance (and power draw) during the first few seconds, and then the power limits kick in making the CPU run at a quite lower, but sustainable, frequencies with lower CPU temperature meaning no thermal throttling has to occur. It’s winter here, so instead of running the script in a room with an ambient temperature of about 28-30°C, it was more like 25-27°C.

Let’s check the power limits of the system with powercap-info as instructed by sbc-bench.sh:

If I read that right, PL1 (Long duration) is set to 20W, and PL2 (Short duration) is set to 80W. Intel advertises the Core i9-13900H with a default TDP of 45W, and in Windows 11 it was set to 35W (PL1) and 45W (PL2) respectively.

We’ve also run Geekbench 6 64-bit.

The multi-core score is only 4.34 times higher on a 20-thread Intel Core i9-13900H processor, so while performance is better than on other mini PCs we’ve tested, CPU throttling likely occurred. You’ll find the full results at https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/3677470.

We started GPU performance testing with Unigine Heaven Benchmark 4.0.

That’s 52.9 fps and a 1,333 score at 1920×1080 resolution, or quite similar to what we got in the Khadas Mind Premium, but that should not come as a surprise since the processors in both systems feature 96EU Intel Iris Xe graphics.

For real-world testing of the internal GPU (iGPU), I played some YouTube videos starting in Firefox with a 4K 60FPS video that played smoothly with just a few frames dropped at the beginning.

I then confidently switched to an 8K 60 fps video, but this was a disaster and all I could see was a still image with the dropped frames counter going up constantly.

I thought it might be better with Chrome, but the video was really choppy with plenty of dropped frames and unwatchable.

I tried another 8K video at 60 fps, but the result was the same. So I lowered my expectations and found an 8K video at 30 fps which played smoothly in Chrome…

as well as in Firefox.

For reference, all five video samples used the AV1 video codec.

I also ran Speedometer 2.0 with Firefox 116 to evaluate web browsing performance.

The score was 273 (runs per minute) or the highest score on any of the mini PCs we’ve reviewed. It’s also useful to click on the Details button to look at the 10 iterations of the test.

The first five iterations are closer to 280 runs per minute, and the five other scores fluctuate between 240 and 284 runs probably because of the high performance when starting the test before the power limits are triggered and make the system run slower. Web browsing relies a lot on single-thread performance and the higher scores would likely be more representative since users are not constantly reloading multiple web pages…

GEEKOM Mini IT13 vs Mini IT 11 vs GEEKOM AS 6 vs Khadas Mind Premium

Let’s compare Ubuntu 22.04 benchmark results from GEEKOM Mini IT13 mini PC with the ones of GEEKOM IT11 (11th Gen Core i7-11390H Tiger Lake), GEEKOM AS 6 (AMD Ryzen 9 6900HX), and Khadas Mind Premium (13th Gen Core i7-1360P Raptor Lake). Note the earlier review where done in a room with a 28-30°C ambient temperature, while the GEEKOM Mini IT13 review was done with an ambient temperature of 25-27°C, but I’m not sure this matters that much since power limits appear to be more important than thermal limits with the Mini IT13 with its default TDP.

Here’s a quick summary of the main features of the four mini PCs.

Ubuntu 22.04 benchmarks comparison table:

Just as we noted in Windows 11, the GEEKOM Mini IT13 is the fastest mini PC we’ve tested with Ubuntu 22.04, except for memory bandwidth (likely because it’s using DDR4 instead of DDR5 memory) and 3D graphics performance where the Radeon GPU found in the AMD Ryzen 9 6900HX still outperforms the Intel Iris Xe graphics found in 13th gen Raptor Lake processors.

Storage testing

We tested the performance of the preinstalled 2TB NVMe SSD with iozone3:

Performance is excellent with 4.34 GB/s and 3.69 GB/s sequential read and write speeds respectively, only beaten by the model (WD PC SN740) found in the Khadas Mind Premium. Note that the numbers reported by iozone3 (ext-4 file system) are lower than the ones reported by CrystalDiskMark in Windows (NTFS), but that always seems to be the case.

We then connected an ORICO M234C3-U4 “USB4” M.2 NVMe SSD enclosure and formatted the drive with EXT-4 file system to double-check each of the USB port’s speed using lsusb and iozone3. For example, here are the results for the front left USB 3.2 port of the MINI IT13:

A 10 Gbps port is detected and iozone measured an 859 MB/s read speed (and 953 MB/s write) that is consistent with a 10 Gbps port, albeit on the low side.

Since the Mini IT13 also comes with two Thunderbolt 4 (USB4) ports, the drive will also be mounted as an NVMe drive instead of a USB drive, so a different tool (boltctl) is needed to check the speed on the USB-C port. Here’s the output for the left port when facing the rear panel:

A Thunderbolt 3 (40 Gbps) device is detected and iozone reports a 2,162 MB/s read speed that’s about the maximum we can achieve with this drive.

Here are the results for the Mini IT13’s front panel (left to right) in Ubuntu 22.04

• USB-A #1 – 10 Gbps – 859 MB/s
• USB-A #2 – 10 Gbps – 846 MB/s

We did the same test for the Mini IT13’s rear panel (left to right)

• USB-C #1 – Thunderbolt 3 40 Gbps – 2162.55 MB/s
• USB-A #1 (Top) – 10 Gbps – 835.14 MB/s
• USB-A #2 (Bottom) – 480 Mbps  –  44.36 MB/s (The ORICO enclosure does not support USB 2.0, so we had to connect a USB hard drive for testing)
• USB-C #2 – Thunderbolt 3 40 Gbps – 2161,50 MB/s

So everything is as advertised and no problem here. Again, the numbers for the USB 3.2 (10 Gbps) ports with iozone3 are just quite lower than in Windows 11 with CrystalDiskMark (around 1,040 MB/s).

Finally, I tested the SATA interface with a 1TB hard drive using iozone3:

127.2 MB/s read speed and 127.89 MB/s write speed seem about right for this drive.

Networking (2.5GbE and Ethernet) performance in Ubuntu 22.04

Time to switch to networking performance test for both 2.5GbE and WiFi 6 using iperf3.

Let’s start with 2.5GbE using UP Xtreme i11 mini PC (192.168.31.12) on the other side.

• Upload

• Download:

• Full-duplex (bidirectional)

Perfect! The maximum speed can be achieved even in full-duplex mode. The bidirectional test completely failed in Windows 11 Pro, so at least we know it’s not a hardware issue since it works perfectly in Linux.

When I first tried WiFi 6 it didn’t look so good:

• Upload:

But this was done from an SSH terminal and I noticed the the display was turned off, so the system might have been in some low-power mode.
But if I wake up the system and turn on the display then the results are much different…

• Upload:

• Download:

Again excellent results, and that’s the first platform that can sustain 1 Gbps+ speed with WiFi 6 in our test environment, although the Khadas Mind Premium was close with 1.40 Gbps/ 991 Mbps…

Stress test, CPU temperature, and power limits

We’ve already run a stress test on all twenty threads of the Core i9-13900H processor while checking out the package temperature and CPU frequencies reported by sbc-bench.sh script.

The chart above illustrates perfectly the behavior of the processor which we’ve seen in both Windows and now Linux. When the stress test starts the temperature jumps to close to 100C very quickly as the processor performs at its best (and draws a lot of power) for a few seconds, before dropping sharply and stabilizing at about 80°C as the CPU core frequencies are lowered to a more sustainable level. We used sbc-bench.sh in review mode and it will update every minute so it did not pick up the top frequencies, but we can see the P-cores are running at 3,000 MHz and the E-cores at 2,400 MHz as the test carries on. I forgot to stop the test overnight and the test ran for over 15 hours, and when I checked it again the system was still at 82°C and the frequencies at 3GHz/2.4GHz.

Let’s try to change PL1 to 45W and see what happens:

And what I just did had no effect at all…

That’s odd, so I’m probably doing something wrong although I don’t see any other parameter in powercap-info that could serve as PL1… As a final test, I stopped the stress test, let the system cool down for a bit, and ran GeekBench 6 again…

Those are about the same results before I tried to change the power limit, but obviously what I did had no effect whatsoever…

GEEKOM Mini IT13’s Power Consumption

I used a wall power meter to measure the power consumption of the GEEKOM Mini IT13 with Ubuntu 22.04 using WiFi 6, two RF dongles for a mouse and a keyboard, and CrowView portable monitor connected over HDMI and an external USB power adapter, unless otherwise noted.

Power consumption measurements in Ubuntu 22.04:

• Power off – 1.5 Watts
• Idle
  • 7.5 – 7.8 Watts
  • CrowView monitor connected via USB-C port – 13.5 – 14.4 Watts (the mini PC also powers the display)
• Video playback – 15.2 – 22.6 Watts (YouTube 4K60fps in Firefox)
• CPU stressed (stress -c 20)
  • First few seconds (30 seconds?) –  75 to 77 Watts
  • After that – 52.6 – 53.2 Watts

Conclusion

In either Windows 11 Pro or Ubuntu 22.04, GEEKOM Mini IT13 is the most powerful mini PC we’ve reviewed thanks to the Intel Core i9-13900H 14-core Raptor Lake processor that outperforms all other processors except when it comes to 3D graphics where the AMD Ryzen 9 6900HX SoC with Radeon Graphics 680M delivers a higher score in Unigine Heaven 4.0 benchmark. Memory bandwidth is also lower than some other mini PC notably because of the use of DDR4 memory instead of DDR5 memory.

GEEKOM Mini IT13 mini PC works well in Ubuntu 22.04, except for 8K 60 fps YouTube video playback that is unusable, but 4K 60 fps or 8K 30 fps are fine with both Firefox and Chrome which should satisfy most users. YouTube 8K 60 fps worked fine in Windows 11 Pro with Chrome, so that’s one aspect where Windows works better. But Ubuntu 22.04 is quite better for networking with iperf3’s 2.5GbE full-duplex actually going through, and higher upload and download data rates for WiFi 6 with speeds exceeding 1 Gbps. Ubuntu boots really fast on this type of system as within 3 or 4 seconds the login prompt comes up, and applications like GIMP load in less than two seconds.

The main downside is similar to our experience in Windows 11 Pro with the Core i9-13900H being limited by its power limit in such as small device, so the system does not extract all performance from the processor. It should be possible to improve performance (while increasing fan noise) by changing the PL1 power limit as we did in Windows, but changing that limit had no effect in Ubuntu. Fan noise is there, but as noted in the Windows review, it’s not excessive in most cases, except when the system starts to draw close to 80W during short peaks, but after that, the fan noise is not too annoying even in a stress test.

I’d like to thank GEEKOM for sending the Mini IT13 mini PC for review. The company sells the device for $799 on its online store where you can use the coupon code cnxsoftware40 to get a $40 discount, as well as on Amazon with the $40 discount coupon code A2MVLVHK.

Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)

Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.

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