GEEKOM GT1 Mega review with Ubuntu 24.10 – Part 3: Linux on an Intel Core Ultra 9 185H “Meteor Lake” mini PC

We’ve already had a look at GEEKOM GT1 Mega’s hardware with an unboxing and a teardown before following up with a thorough review of the Intel Core 9 Ultra 185H mini PC with Windows 11 Pro. After being interrupted by some Raspberry Pi reviews, I finally had the time to test the GEEKOM GT1 Mega with Ubuntu 24.10 to check out how well (or not) it works with a recent Linux distribution.

I’ve tested the features of the Meteor Lake mini PC in Linux, ran some benchmarks, evaluated storage and network performance, played 4K and 8K videos on YouTube at various frame rates, went through a stress test to check its thermal design, and finally measured the mini PC’s fan noise and power consumption.

Ubuntu 24.10 installation

I would usually review mini PCs with the latest Ubuntu LTS version which would currently be Ubuntu 24.04.1. However, since the Intel Core Ultra 9 185U and other Meteor Lake SoCs were launched after April 2024, and the HWE (Hardware Enablement) Kernel for Ubuntu 24.04 is yet to be released, I decided to review the GEEKOM GT1 Mega mini PC with Ubuntu 24.10 ISO image which comes with Linux 6.11 and newer packages. Ubuntu 24.04.2 will ship with an HWE stack relying on Linux 6.11 once it is released.

The Ubuntu 24.10 installation was rather straightforward: after resizing the Windows 11 Pro partition in half with the Disk Management utility, I installed Ubuntu 24.10 with a USB flash drive. The system would still boot to Windows 11 by default, so I had to go to the GT1 Mega’s BIOS, to change the boot priority and manually select “ubuntu” as Boot Option #1.

GEEKOM GT1 Mega’s Ubuntu 24.10 system information

The Settings->About window in Ubuntu 24.10 confirms that we have a GEEKOM GT1 Mega mini PC powered by a 22-thread Intel Core Ultra 9 185H CPU and equipped with 32GB of RAM. The disk capacity is somehow “unknown”.

We can get a few more details in the command line including the disk capacity (1.8TB) and Ubuntu rootfs size (865 GB):

inxi has more details:

It detects the 16 cores and 22 threads on the Intel Core Ultra 9 185H clocked at up to 4800, 5100, 3800, or 2500 MHz depending on the selected clusters. Everything else looks to be detected properly including the integrated Intel Arc Graphics, two Intel i226-V 2.5GbE controllers, the Intel Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 controller (not named, but it’s an Intel BE200 module), and the Crucial CT2000P3PSSD8 SSD. The idle temperature is just 38.8°C.

GEEKOM GT1 mega Ubuntu 24.10 Benchmarks

We’ll start Linux benchmarks with Thomas Kaiser’s sbc-bench.sh script:

7-zip shows there’s some throttling as the score decreases between runs: 71,623 -> 68,178 -> 64,074 for an average of 67,960 MIPS. The full log shows the temperature reached 100°C for a short time:

It looks like power throttling was involved here rather than thermal throttling. The CPU frequency varies a lot during the test, while it would typically stabilize at a given frequency after a while on other systems. This happened on the cpuminer test:

CPU0 P-core frequency is around 3200 to 3300 MHz, CPU12 E-Core frequency is between 2357 and 2601 MHz, and finally, CPU20 LP-core is clocked at 1600-1700 MHz under load.

Time to check the power limits:

The PL1 and PL2 power limits are set to 45W (PBP) and 70W (MTP), while PL4 (Peak power) is set to 217W, or exactly the same as in Windows 11 Pro.

We can test the CPU performance by running Geekbench 6.3.0 single-core and multi-core benchmarks.

That would be 2,605 points for the single-core benchmark and 13,728 points for the multi-core one.

Since recent high-end x86 processors all come with an AI accelerator, I’ve also run Geekbench AI which in Linux relies on the TensorFlow Lite framework and runs on the CPU by default…

You’ll find the full results on the Geekbench website.

However, running the test on the CPU is not what we are after. Contrary to the Windows version of the benchmark, Geekbench AI does not provide a GUI, but we can configure the settings through the command line. Let’s check the available options:

I could run the benchmark with ONNX or OpenVINO frameworks, but those would still run on the CPU, and there aren’t any GPU or NPU options at this time… It’s still tricky to run NPU-accelerated Linux benchmarks on Intel AI Boost unless potentially with the OpenVINO SDK and Edge Insights for Vision like I did on the UP Xtreme i11 review. But that’s out of the scope of this specific review.

Let’s now test GPU performance with Unigine Heaven Benchmark 4.0 and the Intel Core Ultra 9 185H mini PC achieved a score of 1,956 points while rendering the scene at 77.6 FPS on average at the standard 1920×1080 resolution using the built-in Intel Arc Graphics.

I also tested several 4K or 8K YouTube videos in Firefox, and they all played smoothly up to 8K @ 60 FPS.

At 4K 30 FPS, 7 frames were dropped out of 9895 after playing almost 6 minutes (Note the video did not start at 00:00, as I must have started watching it before).

I used the same video at 8K 30 FPS for about six minutes, and no frames were dropped at all…

Switching to 60 FPS at 4K resolution worked well too with just 44 frames dropped out of 20807.

The same video played at 8K 60 FPS was also smooth with only a few (66) frames dropped while playing it for nearly 6 minutes.

Let’s end the benchmarks section with a web browser benchmark: Speedometer 2.0 loaded in Firefox.

That would be 278 runs per minute.

Since Speedometer 2.0 is deprecated, I’ve also run Speedometer 3.0 to get data for future reviews.

The GEEKOM GT1 Mega mini PC achieved 19.5 points in Speedometer 3.0 in Firefox.

GEEKOM GT1 Mega Ubuntu benchmarks comparison against other mini PCs

Let’s compare the Ubuntu 24.10 benchmark results of the GEEKOM GT1 Mega against other high-end mini PC including the GEEKOM A8 (AMD Ryzen 9 8945HS) the GEEKOM A7 (AMD Ryzen 9 7840HS), GEEKOM XT12 Pro (Intel Core i9-12900H), and GEEKOM Mini IT13 (Intel Core i9-13900H) which were tested with Ubuntu 22.04 or 24.04.

Let’s look at the basic specifications of the five systems under test.

	GEEKOM GT1 Mega	GEEKOM A8	GEEKOM A7	GEEKOM XT12 Pro	GEEKOM IT13
SoC	Intel Core Ultra 9 185H	AMD Ryzen 9 8945HS	AMD Ryzen 9 7840HS	Intel Core i9-12900H	Intel Core i9-13900H
CPU	16-core/22-thread (6P+8E+2LP) Meteor Lake processor up to 5.1 GHz (P-cores), up to 3.8 GHz (E-cores), up to 2.5 GHz (LP-cores)	8-core/16-thread processor up to 5.2 GHz	8-core/16-thread processor up to 5.1GHz	14-core/20-thread (6P+8E) Alder Lake processor up to 5.00 GHz (P-cores), up to 3.80 GHz (E-Cores)	14-core/20-thread (6P+8E) Raptor Lake processor up to 5.40 GHz (P-cores), up to 4.10 GHz (E-Cores)
GPU	8 Xe cores Intel Arc Graphics	AMD Radeon 780M Graphics	AMD Radeon 780M Graphics	96EU Intel Iris Xe Graphics	96 EU Intel Iris Xe Graphics
Memory	32GB DDR5-5600	32GB DDR5-5600	32GB DDR5-5600	32GB DDR4-3200	32GB DDR4-3200
Storage	2TB NVMe SSD	2TB NVMe SSD	2TB NVMe SSD	1TB NVMe SSD	2TB NVMe SSD
Default OS	Windows 11 Pro	Windows 11 Pro	Windows 11 Pro	Windows 11 Pro	Windows 11 Pro

The benchmark results:

	GEEKOM GT1 Mega	GEEKOM A8	GEEKOM A7	GEEKOM XT12 Pro	GEEKOM Mini IT13
sbc-bench.sh
- memcpy	21,364.6 MB/s (P-core)	20,318.5 MB/s	20,406.0 MB/s	22,375.8MB/s	24,014.4 MB/s (P-core)
- memset	36,928.3 MB/s (P-Core)	62,156.7 MB/s	62,491.7 MB/s	27,398.0MB/s	26,647.9 MB/s (P-Core)
- 7-zip (average)	67,960	68,790	71,110	40,190	56,540
- 7-zip (top result)	71,623	69,297	72,496	43,783	60,981
- OpenSSL AES-256 16K	1,698,239.83k (P-Core)	1,422,136.66k	1,428,559.19k	1,661,583.36k (P-Core)	1,844,401.49k (P-Core)
Geekbench 6 Single	2,605	2,661	2,535	2,575	2,745
Geekbench 6 Multi	13,728	13,275	12,914	10,447	11,974
Unigine Heaven score	1,956	1,972	2,032	1,293	1,333
Speedometer 2.0 (Firefox)	278	298	249	298	273

The GEEKOM GT1 Mega is certainly a powerful mini PC with its Intel Core Ultra 9 185H 16-core/22-thread processor, but to be honest I was expecting a bigger gap against other models. There’s an obvious boost compared to the Intel Core i9-13900H both in terms of CPU and GPU performance, but when comparing the GT1 Mega to the AMD Ryzen 9 8945HS powered GEEKOM A8 mini PC the results are very close. The main positive is that Intel closed the large GPU performance gap against internal Radeon GPUs that existed in previous generations. Benchmark results in Windows 11 were slightly better, but not by much.

Storage and USB testing

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

That would be about 4297 MB/s sequential read speed and 4140 MB/s sequential write speed which compares to 5,039 MB/s and 4,385 MB/s respectively in CrystalDiskMark on Windows 11. Still very good performance although it’s not the best we’ve seen.

But let’s confirm the speed of the USB4, USB 3.2, and USB 2.0 ports on the GEEKOM GT1 Mega using an ORICO M234C3-U4 M.2 NVMe SSD enclosure for the USB 3.x/4 ports and a USB 3.0 hard drive for the USB 2.0 port using lsusb or boltctl to check the advertised speed and iozone3 to test the actual speed.

Here is an example with the left USB 3.2 Type-A port on the front panel:

Same with the left USB4 port on the rear panel:

And finally the only USB 2.0 port on the rear panel:

Here’s a summary for all eight ports from left to right:

• Front panel
  • USB-A #1 – USB 3.2 – 10 Gbps – Read speed: 979 MB/s; write speed: 977 MB/s
  • USB-A #2 – USB 3.2 – 10 Gbps – Read speed: 981 MB/s; write speed: 979 MB/s
  • USB-A #3 – USB 3.2 – 10 Gbps – Read speed: 982 MB/s; write speed: 984 MB/s
  • USB-A #4 – USB 3.2 – 10 Gbps – Read speed: 981 MB/s; write speed: 977 MB/s
• Rear panel
  • USB-C #1 – USB4 – Thunderbolt 3 (40 Gbps) – Read speed: 2845 MB/s; write speed: 2452 MB/s
  • USB-A #1 (top) – USB 3.2 – 10 Gbps – Read speed: 1011 MB/s; write speed: 987 MB/s
  • USB-A #2 (bottom) – USB 2.0 – 480 Mbps – Read speed: 42 MB/s; write speed: 42 MB/s
  • USB-C #1 – USB4 – Thunderbolt 3 (40 Gbps) – Read speed: 2953 MB/s; write speed: 2576 MB/s

All ports match the specifications, so all good. Regular readers may wonder why the read and write speeds for the USB4 ports are faster than in our other tests. It’s simply because I changed the NVMe SSD in the enclosure with a faster ORICO O7000 SSD. We’re not quite close to 40 Gbps speed because of overhead, but more importantly, because the JHL7440 Thunderbolt 3 controller in the enclosure only supports speeds up to 32 Gbps internally.

Networking (2.5GbE and WiFi) performance evaluation

I’ll test network performance using the iperf3 utility and a UP Xtreme i11 Edge mini PC running Ubuntu with a 2.5GbE port on the other side.

Let’s start with the left 2.5GbE port on the GEEKOM GT1 Mega with a full-duplex test:

Let’s now switch to the other 2.5GbE port on the right:

Excellent performance with maximum speed in both directions. It did not work that well in Windows 11 Pro, but maybe it’s because iperf 3.17 is not optimized for Windows.

The GEEKOM GT1 Mega ships with an Intel BE200 WiFi 7 module, but I don’t own a WiFi 7 router just yet, so instead, I tested WiFI 6 @ 5 GHz using a Xiaomi Mi AX6000 router:

• Download

• Upload

1.14 Gbps downloads and 860 Mbps uploads are decent and similar to the results the mini PC achieved in Windows 11 (1.28 Gbps DL / 859 Gbps UL).

I also quickly tested Bluetooth successfully by transferring a file from an Android 14 smartphone to the mini PC.

GEEKOM GT1 Mega Stress test in Ubuntu 24.10

In order to evaluate the thermal performance of the GEEKOM GT1 Mega under Ubuntu 24.10/Linux, I ran a stress test on the 22 threads of the Intel Core Ultra 9 185H processor while monitoring the CPU temperature and frequency with Psensor and the sbc-bench.sh script.

The CPU temperature quickly jumps to 101°C and as thermal and power limits kick in, the CPU temperature stabilizes to around 79-80°C. sbc-bench.sh reports the P-core at about 3500 MHz, E-Core at 2901 MHz, and LP-core at 1900 MHz under load.

Fan noise

GEEKOM GT1 Mega mini PC’s fan is barely audible at idle, but it’s getting noisier under heavy loads. I measured the fan noise with a sound level meter placed at around 5 centimeters from the top of the enclosure:

• Idle – 38.1 – 38.4 dBA (low-speed fan)
• YouTube 8K 60FPS video in Firefox (volume off) –  39.6 – 40.2 dBA
• Stress test on all 22 threads –  52.6 – 53.4 dBA (Note: start lower, but stabilize at those values after a few seconds)

The good news is the fan is pretty quiet when playing an 8Kp60 YouTube video since hardware video decoding for the AV1 codec appears to be enabled and confirmed by the power consumption numbers below.

For reference, the meter measures around 37 dBA in a quiet room.

GEEKOM GT1 Mega power consumption in Ubuntu 24.10

I measured the power consumption with a wall power meter:

• Power off – 1.7 Watt
• Idle – 6.2 – 6.5 Watts
• Video playback – 23.6 – 33.6 Watts (Youtube 8K 60FPS in Firefox – AV1 codec)
• CPU stress test (stress -c 22)
  • First 30 seconds – 95 – 97 Watts
  • Longer run – 62.8 – 64.2 Watts

For reference, YouTube 8K 60FPS consumed just about 25 Watts on average compared to 61.3 – 67.8 Watts on the Ryzen 9 8945HS.

During the measurements, the mini PC was connected to a 2.5GbE switch and an HDMI display with its own power adapter, one USB RF dongle for a mouse, and a Raspberry Pi USB keyboard.

Conclusion

GEEKOM GT1 Mega works great in Ubuntu 24.10 with all features working properly including 8Kp60 YouTube video playback, excellent 2.5GbE and WiFi 6 networking performance, fast NVMe storage, etc… It’s also one of the most powerful mini PC on the market.

One of the downsides is that it’s unclear how to use Intel AI Boost (NPU) in Linux from a user perspective. Drivers are there, but I could not find applications making use of it, and benchmarks like Geekbench AI do not even leverage the GPU in Linux, let alone the NPU.

We also have to compare the GEEKOM GT1 Mega against other mini PCs such as the GEEKOM A8 offering similar CPU and GPU performance with an AMD Ryzen 9 8945HS CPU. The latter is currently selling for $849 on Amazon in 32GB/2TB configuration, while the GEEKOM GT1 Mega sells at a premium on Amazon for $929.66 when using the coupon code CNXSOMEGA for a 6% discount, or on the company’s store in the US for $930 and in the UK for £939.55 when applying the coupon code CNXGT1. The higher price can still be justified if you need two 2.5GbE ports and WiFi 7 connectivity since the GEEKOM A8 only comes with one 2.5GbE port and a (MediaTek MT7922) WiFi 6E wireless module. One other advantage includes smooth 8K 60 FPS AV1 video playback on YouTube. But if you don’t have any special networking and/or 8Kp60 YouTube needs, the Ryzen 9 mini PC might meet your requirements at a slightly lower price.

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