A quiet confession from a recent ZDNET hands-on: pulling a brand-new Geekom IT15 mini PC out of its box, wiping the pre-installed Windows 11, and loading Ubuntu Budgie transformed the machine from a competent but occasionally glitchy office box into a genuinely responsive daily driver. That same conversion also exposed a brutal truth about Intel’s latest Arrow Lake silicon when squeezed into a chassis barely larger than a paperback book — impressive burst speeds collide with aggressive thermal throttling, and local AI inference remains firmly in the slow lane without an NVIDIA GPU.

Priced between $899 and $1,099, the IT15 packs Intel’s Core Ultra 9 285H 16-core processor, 32 GB of dual-channel DDR5-5600 memory, and a 2 TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD into a 117 x 112 x 45.5 mm metal-and-plastic shell. On paper, it reads like the ultimate sub-0.6-litre workstation. In sustained real-world workloads, however, the cooling solution struggles to keep up, and the CPU’s own power limits clip its wings. The result is a mini PC that excels at bursty productivity but stumbles on long-running tasks — and one that makes a far better case for running Linux than the Windows it ships with.

The Hardware: Ambitious Silicon in a Cramped Box

The Geekom IT15 centers on Intel’s Core Ultra 9 285H, an Arrow Lake-H processor with 6 performance cores, 8 efficient cores, and 2 low-power efficient cores, all sharing 16 threads. Turbo frequencies reach 5.4 GHz on the P-cores, but only during brief PL2 bursts of up to 64 watts. Geekom configures the default PL1 (sustained power limit) to a conservative 33 watts — a setting that keeps the chip cool and quiet but kneecaps multi-core throughput in any workload running longer than a minute. The integrated Intel Arc 140T GPU with 8 Xe-cores and support for ray tracing handles light gaming and display outputs for up to four 4K monitors, while a dedicated NPU labelled “Intel AI Boost” delivers 13 TOPS of INT8 performance.

Memory comes courtesy of two user-accessible SODIMM slots, populated in the review unit with 32 GB of Crucial DDR5-5600. The single M.2 2280 PCIe Gen4 x4 slot accepts speedy NVMe drives — the bundled 2 TB Crucial P3 Plus delivered over 5,000 MB/s sequential reads in CrystalDiskMark. A secondary M.2 2242 slot exists but only supports older SATA drives, and the space that once held a 2.5-inch SATA bay in the older IT13 has been omitted, leaving the IT15 with no further internal expansion. Connectivity is plentiful: two USB4 ports (one with 100 W PD input), two HDMI 2.0, front USB-A 3.2 Gen2, a full-size SD card reader, 2.5 GbE Ethernet, and an Intel BE200 Wi-Fi 7 module. The chassis accepts a VESA mount, making it an almost invisible companion for a monitor.

From the outside, the matte black ABS plastic body looks smart, though it attracts fingerprints readily. Inside, a metal frame adds rigidity, while a single small fan and a thermal pad connecting the SSD to the bottom plate handle cooling. That fan, however, becomes the star of the show — and not in a good way.

Linux: The Fix for Windows Quirks

ZDNET’s tester installed Ubuntu Budgie alongside the original Windows 11 partition and immediately noticed a smoother interface: application launches were snappier, Wi-Fi dropouts that had plagued the Windows setup vanished, and USB-C display flicker disappeared. These aren’t isolated anecdotes; they reflect a pattern where Intel’s hardware works more reliably under Linux’s mature kernel drivers than with the OEM’s Windows driver bundle, especially for newer connectivity standards like Wi-Fi 7. The 6 GHz band, however, remained inaccessible under Ubuntu during testing — a known kernel regression that will likely be patched — while 5 GHz performance was solid at over 1.25 Gbps.

Audio required a quick ALSA tweak, and the occasional peripheral quirk needed manual intervention, but the core platform — CPU, iGPU, networking, and storage — worked out of the box with an up-to-date kernel. For anyone comfortable in the terminal, the IT15 becomes a compact, near-silent Linux workstation that hides behind a display. The ZDNET reviewer concluded that the switch was “not just cosmetic,” providing a tangible bump in daily responsiveness. Windows enthusiasts may bristle, but the numbers back it up: idle power consumption dropped from 4.5 W to 4.1 W, and the lighter desktop environment simply places less overhead on the CPU.

Benchmarks: Bursts of Brilliance, Long Falls

Liliputing’s exhaustive testing fills in the performance picture. On single-threaded and short-duration loads, the Core Ultra 9 285H shines. Geekbench 6 single-core score of 3,066 beats the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 in the competing GMKtec EVO-X1 by 5%, and Cinebench R23 single-core hits an impressive 2,206 points. That translates into excellent Office productivity — the Procyon benchmark scored 7,826, outpacing even the EVO-X1 by 18%. For quick bursts, the IT15 feels every bit the powerhouse its spec sheet suggests.

But fire up a sustained multi-core test like Cinebench 2024 or a 20-minute stress-ng run, and the performance collapses. The CPU package temperature rockets to 101 °C within seconds, forcing the clock speeds to plummet from 4.1 GHz down to an average of 3.6 GHz. The sustained power draw settles at just 44 W, a fraction of the chip’s 115 W theoretical maximum. The EVO-X1, with better cooling and no immediate thermal throttling, finishes the same multi-core Cinebench 2024 test with a score of 1,156 versus the IT15’s 894 — a 29% deficit for Intel.

Gaming performance reflects the same split personality. Shadow of the Tomb Raider at 1080p low averages 55 fps on the integrated Arc graphics, but the Arc 140T routinely trails AMD’s Radeon 780M found in the EVO-X1 by 15–20%. An eGPU over USB4 (which provides only PCIe 3.0 x4 lanes) can restore some dignity — the same game climbed to 155 fps with a Radeon RX 7600 — but even then the host CPU’s throttling can limit frame times in CPU-intensive scenes. The IT15 lacks an OCuLink port, so that USB4 bottleneck is the only external GPU upgrade path.

The AI Promise vs. Reality

Intel markets the Core Ultra 9 285H as delivering up to 99 total TOPS by combining the NPU, GPU, and CPU. In practice, that figure is a sum of three separate accelerators that cannot simultaneously contribute to a single LLM workload. The 13-TOPS NPU alone is only one-third as fast as the 50-TOPS unit in the AMD HX 370, and the Arc iGPU’s 77 TOPS figure applies only to specific INT8 operations under ideal conditions. When ZDNET ran Ollama with the gemma3:1b model on CPU, token generation was “usable but noticeably slower” than a discrete GPU — leaving queries to complete in several seconds rather than instantly. The Liliputing review corroborates this: Procyon’s AI Computer Vision benchmark using OpenVINO on the NPU scored 711, versus 1,726 on the AMD NPU, exactly reflecting the 3.8× TOPS ratio. In other words, the AI capabilities are real but modest, perfectly suited for light on-device tasks like background blur or small speech models, not for running a local chatbot with a 7B-parameter model at conversational latencies.

Thermals, Noise, and the Fan That Won’t Quit

The IT15’s single fan is the weak link. At idle, the system is effectively silent, but the moment any sustained load hits, the fan ramps up aggressively, producing a whooshing noise that measured 45–46 dBA in Liliputing’s testing — louder than many full-size desktops. The BIOS offers three preset modes (Silent, Normal, Performance), but they work by adjusting power limits, not fan curves. Silent mode caps PL1 at 20 W, turning the IT15 into a glorified Celeron; Performance mode raises PL1 to 45 W but also pushes the fan even harder, and temperatures still flirt with the 105 °C junction limit. Normal mode, the default, is a compromise that leaves sustained performance well short of what the silicon can do in a larger enclosure.

For users planning to run containerized workloads, compilation jobs, or local CI/CD pipelines on the IT15, the thermal envelope is a genuine bottleneck. A stress test on all 16 cores under Ubuntu saw the CPU package bounce off 87 °C even after power limits kicked in, stabilizing around 70 °C but at greatly reduced clock speeds. In a quiet office, the fan noise would be noticeable; in a home theatre setting, it would be intrusive.

Who Should Buy the Geekom IT15 — and Who Shouldn’t

If your workload consists of email, Office apps, web browsing, coding in lightweight IDEs, and light media editing, the IT15 is an excellent machine — especially running Linux, where it pulls ahead of Windows in everyday snappiness. The three-year warranty, VESA mount, and dual 4K display support make it a neat fit for knowledge workers, home labbers, and developers who want a tiny, power-efficient Linux box that can sit tucked behind a monitor.

However, if you need high-resolution gaming, 3D rendering, or local LLM inference with models larger than 1–2 billion parameters, look elsewhere. The integrated Arc graphics are competent for e-sports titles at low settings, but the lack of a discrete GPU limits the ceiling. For AI practitioners, the 13 TOPS NPU is a nice add-on but not a substitute for a CUDA GPU. Even the up-to-64 GB memory spec (despite the chip supporting 128 GB) will constrain larger models. If your heart is set on a Geekom mini PC and you can wait, the upcoming A9 Max with an AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 is likely to address the thermal and GPU shortcomings — though it too lacks OCuLink.

The Brute-Force Verdict

The Geekom IT15 embodies a fascinating contradiction. Convert it to Ubuntu Budgie, and you’ll discover a responsive, quiet-at-idle workstation that handily outclasses its Windows self. But push the hardware with anything sustained — a multi-threaded encode, a long-running AI benchmark, a stress test — and Intel’s latest Arrow Lake silicon reveals itself to be caged by a cooling system that can’t keep up. The CPU throttles immediately, the fan screams, and the performance delta to a well-cooled AMD mini PC swings from a narrow lead to a 30% deficit.

For the right buyer — one who values compactness, productivity, and the freedom of Linux above all else — the IT15 is a compelling package, especially at its current discounted price of around $900. For everyone else, the lesson is clear: powerful silicon means little if the box around it can’t keep its cool. Intel’s 99 TOPS marketing deserves a heavy dose of skepticism, and until Geekom (or another mini-PC maker) solves the thermal equation, the IT15 remains a brilliant second-choice rather than the no-compromise champion its spec sheet implies.