GIGABYTE BRIX Pro: A First Look at the Intel i7-4770R with Iris Pro HD 5200
by Ganesh T S on January 7, 2014 8:00 PM ESTThe BRIX Pro was evaluated using our standard test suite for low power desktops / industrial PCs. Note that some of the benchmarks are pretty recent (such as x264 v5.0 and 3D Mark 2013). Loaner samples haven't been tested with these new benchmarks. Therefore, the list of PCs in each graph are not the same. In the Windows Experience Index, the BRIX Pro scored 6.9, and was primarily held back by the graphics subsystem.
Futuremark Benchmarks:
Miscellaneous Benchmarks:
These benchmark numbers are downright impressive for a system in this form factor.
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johnny_boy - Friday, January 10, 2014 - link
Not too interesting really, unless you desperately need something this small with this much power, but I can't imagine who would. It's too loud and throttles. You can get a marginally larger ITX build with far better cooling, much quieter, and never throttles, and doesn't look as cheap.Laststop311 - Friday, January 10, 2014 - link
Shame about the noise level. Other than the noise this is an HTPC dream machine.boto - Friday, January 10, 2014 - link
I like Linux testing to be done. Also, please see how easily the fan can be replaced for a quieter one. I'm not interested in fanless cases since they're often bigger and very expensive.Andresen - Monday, January 13, 2014 - link
The homepage for Gigabye.com is not very accurate about the amount of eDRAM. The version for Great Britain says 128 MB (see http://uk.gigabyte.com/press-center/news-page.aspx... and the same announcement on the Danish page says 64 MB ( http://www.gigabyte.dk/media/13441 ).In any case the unit could be interesting for a small HPC setup. I hope there will be some computational tests that stress the memory bandwidth in the further coverage.
Ktracho - Tuesday, January 14, 2014 - link
It looks like my comment from a few days ago didn't get posted. I currently have a desktop computer and a small NAS box. Something like this could combine both while drastically reducing physical space and power consumption. Noise wouldn't be as critical as in a HTPC, provided it didn't make a lot of noise while performing light tasks, such as web browsing, e-mail, word processing, etc., which is the bulk of what I would do with it. I don't use my desktop PC very intensively, but there are times when I absolutely need to have it around, and being able to do more than just light tasks is definitely a plus. I'd look into using Windows 8.1 Pro under the included Hyper-V in combination with Linux or a second copy of Windows, with one VM for personal use and the other for the NAS side.As for HTPC, I'd prefer something that can also be used for gaming, so I'm thinking of taking over my daughter's mini-ITX box when she goes to college, and have one VM for HTPC use, and another VM running Windows with its own dedicated graphics card for gaming. It also has a blu-ray player, so I'd eventually be able to get rid of our PS3. In my situation, this box would not work so well for what I have in mind for HTPC.
oviano - Friday, January 17, 2014 - link
Is the noise really a huge issue I wonder, for HTPC use?Ok so maybe you need to reencode some video files or whatever from time to time and this will be presumably nice and quick (and noisy) with this vs say the NUC, but for general day-to-day use presumably it's not going to be pushed to the limit?
kgh00007 - Friday, January 17, 2014 - link
Any sign of part II yet? :-)DriesV - Saturday, January 18, 2014 - link
I just ordered mine. Couldn't wait for a final review. :-)Thermal performance under combined Prime95 and FurMark load is not very relevant, I think. You just KNOW that these units are not going to have the best cooling. The question is: will the cooling suffice for everyday (non-OC) usage? I strongly believe it will.
I'll be using mine as a networked render node (KeyShot). So I'm interested in thermal performance @ 100% CPU load in a real-life application.
jgstew - Sunday, January 19, 2014 - link
Is there a good reason for intel to release Iris Pro as OEM only? Are they worried about motherboard compatibility / specific tuning to take advantage of it, or perhaps worried about supply issues? I don't see why intel cannot release these parts at retail as well as OEM, at least eventually.lco45 - Monday, January 20, 2014 - link
Shame there's no micro format for graphics cards.I thought mITX would be a nice size reduction for my new system, but these NUC/BRIX form factor boxes are so much smaller than even the most compact mITX system.
If only there were system builder versions of these tiny pcs, especially with a mini GPU option, such as the mobile GPUs that come on gaming laptops.
Basically I want a gaming laptop without the laptop!