GMKtec Evo-T2 review: Panther Lake for a price

Intel's Panther Lake processors have brought powerful graphics and efficient performance to laptops. Now, mini PC companies are packing them into small desktops. With the Evo-T2 GMKtec stretches the form factor by fitting it in a spacious - for mini PCs - twin fan chassis, and equipping one of the most capable of Intel’s 18A (laptop) processors with 64GB of fast DDR5. While GMKtec calls it an AI system in its marketing, the Arc B390 iGPU and OCuLink port mean that the potential gaming capabilities are one of the big focuses for this quiet, compact, and expensive device.

Design of the GMKtec Evo-T2

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The GMKtec Evo-T2 is small, of course, but is rather more portly than the typical NUC, measuring in at 6.06 × 5.94 × 2.90 inches (1.72 liters). For context, a ‘standard’ NUC like the Asus NUC 14 Essential measures 5.31 x 4.53 x 1.42 inches (0.56 liters). Its functional plastic shell is lent extra style and strength thanks to a 2 mm-thick gold-colored anodized metal shell that wraps around three sides.

I had no issues with the form or construction of the Evo-T2. I like that it has rubber feet for both horizontal and vertical orientations. There’s even a VESA mounting plate in the box, so you can attach it to the back of a monitor. If you put it behind something, it may be tricky to reach the power switch, ports, and fan-mode switch button, though.

GMKtec Evo-T2 specifications

Ports and Upgradeability

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GMKtec has made it pretty easy to open up the Evo-T2 for servicing and upgrades. However, the 64GB LPDDR5X-8533 RAM is soldered in, and that's the only option the company sells. If you need more RAM, you'll need to look elsewhere.

After taking off the wrap-around metal shell by removing three of the four thumbscrew feet by hand, you get access to the four screws that hold the two halves of the plastic case together. These are mini Philips screws, nothing esoteric, and once removed, you can lift the top-half of the case away to reveal user-serviceable areas of the motherboard.

In our photos, you can see there are two M.2 2280 slots, one with a Crucial PCIe Gen4x4 1TB SSD, the other one vacant. Then there’s an M.2 2230 slot with the wireless card installed. Those offer all your internal expansion / upgrade options. Thankfully, the case top with its integrated fan and fan controller is on a decent length of connector cable, making it easy to work inside this chassis without having to detach it. I didn’t try to disassemble the system any further, but I could see that the other side of the motherboard was fitted with a laptop-style fan and blower – which exhausts at the back of the PC, beneath the device’s rear ports.

For a very compact system, the Evo-T2 offers a good selection of fast connectivity. We’ve listed the entire number and variety of ports in the specifications table above, but there is no shortage of USB Type-A ports built-in. GMKtec has also been smart to put one of the two USB4 ports front and back, as well as a 3.5 mm audio jack front and back. The system allows for four screens to be attached directly via the pair of USB4 ports plus HDMI and DP ports, simultaneously. Then there is an OCuLink port for equipment like eGPU docks.

Lastly, two Ethernet ports are present for up to 10G wired networking. For wireless networking, there is Wi-Fi 7 on board, and Bluetooth 5.4 is also built-in – these run from an M.2 2230 card.

Productivity Performance on the GMKtec Evo-T2

Between the Intel Core Ultra X7 358H and 64GB of fast DDR5 RAM, you will have no issues with office productivity on this compact system. And this processor has the best iGPU available from Intel for accelerating certain parallel workloads too.

In our single-core CPU-stressing mini PC benchmarks suite, the Intel Core Ultra 300 chips outshined their AMD Ryzen AI 300 and 400 rivals, which is usually a good indicator for responsive performance. However, the Intel 16C/16T processors were predictably outclassed by the AMD 12C/24T chips that fill our mini PC comparison charts at this time when it comes to multi-threaded workloads.

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Focusing on the Cinebench 2026 multi-core test shows that the GMKtec Evo-T2 trailed the AMD Ryzen AI pack in this popular visual rendering test. The Panther Lake machine’s score of 4,338 was respectable, but the trio of AMD competitors were between 7.5% and 17.5% ahead.

When tasked with a spot of video transcoding using HandBrake there’s a similar story to tell, but the Evo-T2 wasn’t left in the dust, as you can see. Transcoding at 16 frames per second isn’t a disastrous result when the AMD competition achieves 17 or 18 frames per second.

During our demanding tests, the GMKtec Evo-T2 stayed admirably cool and quiet.

Gaming and Graphics on the GMKtec Evo-T2

The GMKtec Evo-T2's Core Ultra X7 358H processor includes an integrated GPU, the Intel B390, with 12 Xe cores. We've seen similar graphics arrangements in handhelds like the MSI Claw 8 EX AI+, so we had high hopes.

Before moving onto our standard synthetic and iconic PC gaming tests, I decided to run around in Far Cry 5 using the Normal preset, 1440p, and no resolution scaling. The game ran smoothly at the native QHD resolution of my primary monitor at a consistent 60 frames per second with the settings mentioned. I enjoyed a half-hour rampage in this open-world first person doomsday cult-combating adventure set in rural Montana.

Our set menu of gaming benchmarks include a trio of 3DMark synthetics and two popular AAA PC games. 3DMark Solar Bay is a great way to frame and compare cross-platform iGPU performance. Steel Nomad targets higher-end gaming PCs and tests raw graphics performance with its heavy GPU load. Finally, Speed Way is a 2025 benchmark from UL that uses DirectX Raytracing tier 1.1 for real-time global illumination and real-time ray-traced reflections. It is the most demanding test of the trio and mini PCs with iGPUs can currently only achieve single-digit frames per second performance in this test.

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GMKtec’s mini PC achieves great scores for an iGPU. For example, its Steel Nomad score of 1,624 is almost 1,000 points better than the Arctic Senza AI 370 we reviewed recently, which packs AMD’s Radeon 890M iGPU supported by a fast LPDDR5X‑8000 dual-channel memory pool.

Moving on to more real games, let’s check the data provided by the multi-scene benchmarks built into Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Cyberpunk 2077. The former scales well with processor resources and can still often look and run great on a humble iGPU. As for Cyberpunk 2077, it can really put the squeeze on even the strongest modern GPUs, so here we've used two settings to show how the GMKtec Evo-T2 can perform.

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The Shadow of the Tomb Raider High 1080p test score shows a comfortably smooth 90 FPS on average, with the low of 72 FPS, also pleasantly above the magic 60 FPS zone. Gamers might be able to squeeze a higher quality setting or move up and enjoy this title in 1440p High. This is a pretty good effort for integrated graphics.

As for Cyberpunk 2077, the Steam Deck + 1080p preset looked very fluid with only minor drops, comfortably remaining above the 60 FPS zone. Adjusting some of the graphics settings, and even applying some level of upscaling technology, using the High 1080p preset should also easily push the GMKtec Evo-T2’s average FPS from the mid-50s to over 60 but with a clear visual advantage over using the Steam Deck preset.

Power, Heat, and Noise when using the GMKtec Evo-T2

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When I left the GMKtec Evo-T2 to idle, my meter measured wattages around 13W from the wall for the whole system. In the middle of active productivity work, mixing desktop Word and having several browser tabs open, consumption increased to about 20-25W. When the system was pushed with simultaneous CPU and GPU benchmarks running, power draw seemed to peak at around 72W, measured at the wall.

System tools showed that during light activities like browsing the web and writing, the CPU temperature stayed around 44 degrees Celsius (in a 28 C room). Playing Far Cry 5 for 30 or 40 minutes, the reported CPU temperature seemed to oscillate between 80 C and 88 C. However, running a workload like Cinebench R23 multicore, the temperatures seemed to creep a smidgen higher over time, with the highest measurement I saw at 90 C.

GMKtec’s powerful Panther Lake mini PC was a quiet operator in general. My measurements from about a foot in front of the device show it runs idle at 32 dBA. Putting as much strain on the system as possible, with multiple heavy CPU and GPU tasks, the loudest volume the fans reached was 38 dBA. I didn't find the fans to be irritating. Even at the loudest levels, the sound produced is a kind of low-frequency hum.

Software and Warranty on the GMKtec Evo-T2

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The GMKtec Evo-T2 ships with Windows 11 Pro installed. Customers are warned by GMKtec’s stickers over the Ethernet ports not to connect to the internet on first boot. This may help in avoiding some long update times and let you get straight to using your new device.

GMKtec includes AI and LLM software preinstalled. A PDF on the desktop alongside several utilities guides you through selecting some local LLMs, downloading, and installing them.

The first step was to run a pre-installed utility called Herdsman, which is where you pick some LLMs based on the software recommendations for different tasks. It also offered summaries of the chosen model’s response speed, capabilities, and memory use. Straight away I hit a slight roadblock with certain pages / dialogs popping up in Chinese. With Google Translate on mobile, I managed to navigate this, but it isn’t ideal.

With the model downloads complete, I could now test out the pre-installed AIPC and GMKtec Claw software. My initial test queries were run using the Alibaba-developed Qwen3.6-35B-A3B / Balanced model. This hogged a little over 27GB of my memory, according to Windows, so the 64GB system total seemed well chosen for this LLM. Responses from queries were not slow, with metrics reporting an average Prefil speed of 500+ t/s, and Decode of 30 t/s. When asking it to “write a 500-word essay on the history of computing," it finished in 26 seconds. Watching the Windows system monitor when Qwen was busy showed that it solely relied on the GPU (using 90-95% utilization) for acceleration. The NPU was completely untaxed, and the CPU’s low ~10% utilization was probably mostly due to background tasks and housekeeping.

Other prompts I tried demonstrated that local AI was just as capable as online models at being totally wrong about a subject. Then, the agentic AI app also underwhelmed by failing in a pretty simple task I asked it to complete - checking an airline booking given the reference number.

Using Zimage Turbo (10.86GB) to generate 1,024 x 1,024 pixel images from prompts resulted in a wait of just over 20 seconds for each result. Again, this used the GPU.

These GMKtec-supplied tools may have potential, but the supplied software suite suffers from partial translations and fewer chat, reasoning, and coding models available than if you just went and downloaded the well-known LM Studio. (However, LM Studio users would also need something like ComfyUI to set up image generation models they wanted to use.)

GMKtec sells the Evo-T2 with a one-year warranty.

Configurations of the GMKtec Evo-T2

We tested the GMKtec Evo-T2 with Intel Core Ultra X7 358H, 64GB RAM, and 1TB SSD, which is listed at $1,959 on the firm’s US site. That chip is one of the best Panther Lake mobile processors with its 16C/16T CPU tile (4x P‑cores, 8x E‑cores, 4x LP E‑cores) running at up to 4.8 GHz. This is aided by Intel Arc B390 (12 Xe cores), which is muscular for an iGPU. Another section of the SoC features a dedicated NPU capable of 50 TOPS, says Intel. However, GMKtec likes to highlight that the total AI power of this Intel processor is 180 TOPS

GMKtec sells just two Evo-T2 configurations in the US, and both have 64GB LPDDR5X-8000 memory. There are two M.2 SSD slots inside, and the manufacturer provides a 1TB Crucial E100 PCIe 4x4 drive using Micron 176-layer QLC NAND pre-installed in the device we received. Windows 11 Pro is included, as are the aforementioned GMKtec local LLM software tools.

We reviewed the Evo-T2 in its $1,959 configuration with 64GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD. On the U.S. web store, there is just one other configuration, a model with the same tech specs but with an “853GB AI SSD” (Phison aiDAPTIV+) instead of the regular 1TB SSD, with an MSRP of $2,399.

Customers ordering an Evo-T2 from the U.S. are told that they won’t have to face any additional import fees, though the store suggests that you should order now because price hikes are coming.

Bottom Line

GMKtec wants to call this an AI machine, and the 64GB of RAM certainly helps towards its local LLM aspirations. But the software it preloads for local AI needs more polish. I’d say that the GMKtec Evo-T2 is far from a one-trick pony, though, and I enjoyed using it as my daily driver for a few weeks.

This mini PC easily handled all the productivity workloads I threw at it. Gaming was excellent for an iGPU – and probably only the aforementioned Ryzen AI Max+ 395 APU with Radeon 8060S graphics does better in a single package. Also, this machine is compatible with one of the best eGPU interfaces available, OCuLink, for connecting a desktop GPU of your choice if and when you feel the need. Many enthusiasts still find this interface works better than Thunderbolt 5 or USB4 v2.

GMKtec’s Evo-T2 is a quiet-running mini PC showcasing one of the best Panther Lake chips in the Core Ultra X7 358H. Having 64GB of fast memory on board feels like something of a luxury in the current climate. However, the $1,959 MSRP is just $40 less than the 64GB version of the GMKtec Evo X2 AI Mini PC with Ryzen AI Max+ 395, with integrated Radeon 8060S graphics that we reviewed in February (was $1,499, but now $1,999 with “price increase coming soon”).