Compact Vzmore AX9 Max Mini PC tested: Latest AMD APU impresses in AAA games

Over the past years, the whole Mini PC ecosystem has exploded in both quality and popularity thanks to impressive AMD and Intel SoCs that manage to deliver fast performance in small form factors. One of the latest examples of this is the Vzmore AX9 Max Mini PC with the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 470 APU. We recently tested the Mini PC in detail and came out impressed by its build quality, performance, cooling, and more. We gave the Vzmore AX9 Mini PC a laudable 85% rating.

ETA Prime has now tested the gaming performance of the Vzmore AX9 Mini PC, which nicely supplements our findings. We are going to focus solely on the gaming performance of the Vzmore AX9 Mini PC here. So, if you want to learn more about the hardware on offer, be sure to check out our review and ETA Prime’s video linked below to get a full tour of the chassis.

While the Ryzen AI 9 HX 470 utilizes the now-aging Zen 5 CPU architecture and the RDNA 3.5 GPU architecture, we can’t ignore the performance of the APU. ETA Prime shows that in AAA games like Forza Horizon 6, the Vzmore AX9 Max is a pretty fast Mini PC for gaming.

In Forza Horizon 6, the Vzmore AX9 Mini PC reportedly managed to maintain more than 60 FPS at 1080p resolution with high graphics. This is without any form of image upscaling. So, you can push the FPS much higher or play the game at 1440p using FSR 4.

Talking about AMD FSR, we see the potential of FSR 4 Frame Generation in Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart. ETA Prime reports that the game ran above 70 FPS on average at 1080p resolution and high graphics. Keep in mind that Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart is not an easy game to run. Our benchmarks show that the RTX 4060 laptop GPU could barely hold on to 60 FPS at 1080p/high without any image upscaling.

Finally, the Radeon 890M of the Ryzen AI 9 HX 470 can also run Cyberpunk 2077 at 1080p/high with FSR 4 “Quality” at 55 FPS on average. With FSR Frame Generation, the game reaches above 90 FPS.

All in all, the Vzmore AX9 Mini PC is a superb portable computer for both work and play. It is available on Amazon for $1,499 with 32 GB of DDR5 RAM and 1 TB of storage. However, if you buy the Mini PC from Vzmore’s official store and use our code NOTEBOOKAX9 at checkout, you can get the Mini PC for just $1,274.15.