not long ago we were impressed by the size and silence of zotac's en 760 zbox
plus and by the fact that it has about the gaming prowess of a playstation 4.
well not to be outdone by zotac Gigabyte has
sent us over their unbelievable brix gaming bx i5 g760 ultra compact pc kit
it's much smaller actually more powerful
can handle triple displays out and is just generally an amazing piece of
computer hardware
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the included accessory package is really solid you get a vase amount so you can
mount it to the back of tv or monitor with ease you get a three and a half
millimeter breakout mini HDMI and DisplayPort to full size cables so you
won't need any adapters to hook the bricks up to all of your existing gear
and finally there's a massive 180 watt power brick it's almost as big as the
unit itself speaking of the pc itself the outside has a striking glossy black
and green color scheme that does get covered in fingerprints quickly but at
least is easier to clean and more difficult to scratch than some of the
other finishes that i've seen the top has nothing but a power button and the
sides are entirely reserved for ventilation on the front we've got a
microphone slash headphone jack and two usb 3 ports then on the back we find two
more usb 3 ports gigabit Ethernet power in a kensington lock and the three
display outputs that i alluded to before one mini DisplayPort and two mini HDMI
means support for resolutions up to 2560 by 1600 at 60 hertz or 4k 30 hertz if
you're using it for movies on a tv ballen but the outside of the hardware
isn't while you watch this show so let's open this baby up it comes apart easily
just remove the four screws and lift the little handle once inside we see that
it's a bare bones unit so while it does include a wireless ac and bluetooth 4.0
card you will need to add your own ddr3 low voltage RAM with one or both of the
included slots and your own storage drive or drives yes drive z
this bad boy can handle an msata SSD and
a two and a half inch hard driver SSD at the same time it uses a single pre-cable
managed connector soldered to the board to enable this second drive now the pcb
we're accessing here is actually only one of two separate stacked boards
stuffed inside this cubic form factor so that was the motherboard and that's why
it has all the expansion and from this angle we can kind of see the blazing
fast core i5 4200h dual core hyper-threaded CPU mounted to the other
side and then this one this other pcb is
actually a discrete graphics card so we
can just barely make out the GPU core and vram oh and did i mention that GPU
is a desktop gtx 760 not a gtx 760m what
did i mention it has six gigs of gddr5 clocked at five gigahertz
anyway now that we're all calm again it's time to install Windows and take
her for a spin the first thing i noticed when firing it up is that even at idle
it's not very quiet to get enough airflow through the copper heatsinks for
the CPU and GPU those dual cooling fans need to spin at a speed that makes this
little green gaming box easily audible from 10 feet away in a quiet room that's
a definite strike against the bricks gaming for me although not everyone
cares that much about noise and for some folks the truly remarkable form factor
might make up for it all right so the coolers on the loudside lineus but how
does it perform well just because it says on the box
that the CPU and GPU run at a certain clock speed doesn't mean that they will
actually do that in real life if they're running too hot they will turn down
their own performance to protect themselves this is known as thermal
throttling and it's a real concern with notebooks and small form factor desktops
so we need to see how well the brix holds up to some real world use to
evaluate its cooling i started out by benchmarking just kind of dinking around
with batman arkham origins running with all the details cranked at 1080p and no
anti-aliasing and i noticed something almost immediately i was humming along
pinned against my v-sync limit of 60 FPS and then my frame rate started dropping
until it reached around 42 FPS tabbing
out revealed that while the CPU was still doing okay running at 3.2
gigahertz at 75 degrees mind you it was only about 30 to 60 percent loaded the
GPU was running at 92 to 93 degrees and
throttling down to 405 megahertz and even dipping to 203 megahertz depending
on the intensity of the scene it was bouncing back and forth between those power states
i realized then that for my benchmarking runs i couldn't make any assumptions
about how this hardware was going to perform and that i needed to provide
some points of reference for you the viewer to give you a better idea of how
it will stack up against other comparable devices so here's what i came
up with first i ran it against a pentium anniversary edition clocked at 3.2
gigahertz and a desktop reference 760 to
see how this class of hardware should perform with no throttling at all then i
put it up against the zotac en 760. for
both of the small form factor machines i ran each benchmark twice back to back
and took the second result because it's quite a hot day about 30 degrees celsius
inside this gives us a real worst case scenario for these tiny machines
compared to each other and to a properly cooled desktop setup so that's it
the brix gaming has impressive specs and
if you live in an igloo it's likely to be the highest performance to volume
ratio gaming machine anywhere but while its performance was actually
still fairly good 1080p in current games is very playable it thermal throttled
like a boss and ended up not performing as well as the competing lower spec mini
pc while being significantly louder i'm
all about pushing the envelope in terms of pc form factors but it looks like the
world is just not quite ready for the size and gaming gusto of this brix
gaming machine maybe if we give Intel NVIDIA another generation to refine
things on the processor side Gigabyte can take another crack at this and it
will be absolutely balls to the wall amazing but for now i think that you
might be better off just building a bit of a bigger rig in dealing with the
extra size speaking of taking a crack at
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of mini pcs is it worth the trade-offs
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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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