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not long ago we were impressed by the size and silence of zotac's en 760 zbox

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plus and by the fact that it has about the gaming prowess of a playstation 4.

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well not to be outdone by zotac Gigabyte has

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sent us over their unbelievable brix gaming bx i5 g760 ultra compact pc kit

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it's much smaller actually more powerful

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can handle triple displays out and is just generally an amazing piece of

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computer hardware

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the Corsair flash voyager go is the easy way to move photos music and videos

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between your Android device and your pc click now to learn more

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the included accessory package is really solid you get a vase amount so you can

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mount it to the back of tv or monitor with ease you get a three and a half

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millimeter breakout mini HDMI and DisplayPort to full size cables so you

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won't need any adapters to hook the bricks up to all of your existing gear

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and finally there's a massive 180 watt power brick it's almost as big as the

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unit itself speaking of the pc itself the outside has a striking glossy black

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and green color scheme that does get covered in fingerprints quickly but at

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least is easier to clean and more difficult to scratch than some of the

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other finishes that i've seen the top has nothing but a power button and the

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sides are entirely reserved for ventilation on the front we've got a

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microphone slash headphone jack and two usb 3 ports then on the back we find two

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more usb 3 ports gigabit Ethernet power in a kensington lock and the three

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display outputs that i alluded to before one mini DisplayPort and two mini HDMI

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means support for resolutions up to 2560 by 1600 at 60 hertz or 4k 30 hertz if

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you're using it for movies on a tv ballen but the outside of the hardware

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isn't while you watch this show so let's open this baby up it comes apart easily

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just remove the four screws and lift the little handle once inside we see that

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it's a bare bones unit so while it does include a wireless ac and bluetooth 4.0

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card you will need to add your own ddr3 low voltage RAM with one or both of the

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included slots and your own storage drive or drives yes drive z

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this bad boy can handle an msata SSD and

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a two and a half inch hard driver SSD at the same time it uses a single pre-cable

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managed connector soldered to the board to enable this second drive now the pcb

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we're accessing here is actually only one of two separate stacked boards

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stuffed inside this cubic form factor so that was the motherboard and that's why

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it has all the expansion and from this angle we can kind of see the blazing

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fast core i5 4200h dual core hyper-threaded CPU mounted to the other

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side and then this one this other pcb is

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actually a discrete graphics card so we

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can just barely make out the GPU core and vram oh and did i mention that GPU

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is a desktop gtx 760 not a gtx 760m what

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did i mention it has six gigs of gddr5 clocked at five gigahertz

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anyway now that we're all calm again it's time to install Windows and take

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her for a spin the first thing i noticed when firing it up is that even at idle

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it's not very quiet to get enough airflow through the copper heatsinks for

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the CPU and GPU those dual cooling fans need to spin at a speed that makes this

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little green gaming box easily audible from 10 feet away in a quiet room that's

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a definite strike against the bricks gaming for me although not everyone

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cares that much about noise and for some folks the truly remarkable form factor

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might make up for it all right so the coolers on the loudside lineus but how

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does it perform well just because it says on the box

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that the CPU and GPU run at a certain clock speed doesn't mean that they will

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actually do that in real life if they're running too hot they will turn down

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their own performance to protect themselves this is known as thermal

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throttling and it's a real concern with notebooks and small form factor desktops

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so we need to see how well the brix holds up to some real world use to

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evaluate its cooling i started out by benchmarking just kind of dinking around

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with batman arkham origins running with all the details cranked at 1080p and no

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anti-aliasing and i noticed something almost immediately i was humming along

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pinned against my v-sync limit of 60 FPS and then my frame rate started dropping

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until it reached around 42 FPS tabbing

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out revealed that while the CPU was still doing okay running at 3.2

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gigahertz at 75 degrees mind you it was only about 30 to 60 percent loaded the

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GPU was running at 92 to 93 degrees and

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throttling down to 405 megahertz and even dipping to 203 megahertz depending

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on the intensity of the scene it was bouncing back and forth between those power states

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i realized then that for my benchmarking runs i couldn't make any assumptions

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about how this hardware was going to perform and that i needed to provide

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some points of reference for you the viewer to give you a better idea of how

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it will stack up against other comparable devices so here's what i came

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up with first i ran it against a pentium anniversary edition clocked at 3.2

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gigahertz and a desktop reference 760 to

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see how this class of hardware should perform with no throttling at all then i

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put it up against the zotac en 760. for

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both of the small form factor machines i ran each benchmark twice back to back

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and took the second result because it's quite a hot day about 30 degrees celsius

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inside this gives us a real worst case scenario for these tiny machines

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compared to each other and to a properly cooled desktop setup so that's it

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the brix gaming has impressive specs and

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if you live in an igloo it's likely to be the highest performance to volume

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ratio gaming machine anywhere but while its performance was actually

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still fairly good 1080p in current games is very playable it thermal throttled

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like a boss and ended up not performing as well as the competing lower spec mini

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pc while being significantly louder i'm

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all about pushing the envelope in terms of pc form factors but it looks like the

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world is just not quite ready for the size and gaming gusto of this brix

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gaming machine maybe if we give Intel NVIDIA another generation to refine

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things on the processor side Gigabyte can take another crack at this and it

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will be absolutely balls to the wall amazing but for now i think that you

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might be better off just building a bit of a bigger rig in dealing with the

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extra size speaking of taking a crack at

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things and crack you know what's addictive

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the one in the video description then they won't stop sponsoring me so yeah

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anyway thanks again audible for sponsoring this episode thanks to you

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guys for watching like it if you liked it dislike it if you disliked it leave a comment letting me know what you think

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of mini pcs is it worth the trade-offs

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that you make do you even care would you just rather have a massive gargantuan

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desktop the size of a fridge or we're like where's your head at in terms of

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all this stuff also don't forget to check out the video description where

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