Gigabyte Brix Gaming BXi5G-760 Mini-PC

The fellas over at Tech Report spent some quality time with Gigabyte's Brix Gaming BXi5G-760. If the idea of a mini-PC blows your skirt up, you'll no doubt want to check this out.

The company has stuffed a discrete Nvidia GPU and an Intel Core i5 processor into a case that takes up about as much space as a dense paperback. The amount of computing power per cubic inch here is seriously impressive, at least on paper. Is the Brix Gaming good enough to replace the typical mid-tower gaming PC?

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Not to shabby, a gtx 760 and i5. It is too bad the laptop gpu interface is not more prevalent in itx / sub itx solutions. It also looks like the box gets pretty toasty. I hope this does well to drive the potential market forward.

Its good to see more SteamBoxes coming out.

I would have gone with a different name. Nobody wants their computers to end up as "brix"...

This review suggests the unit is constantly overheating and thus throtteling.

Also, the Iris Pro Brix is said to be uncomfortably loud, especially since the noise it makes is high pitched (thanks small fan) so I don't know what this 760-box will sound like.

I can't fathom why they went with the inefficient components they chose, nor can I determine how they could charge so much for so little performance.

The 47w Core i5 mobile part they chose is castrated by the "normal" mode at just 3.0 GHz, so the max turbo is meaningless You could cut power and save money by using the Core i3 2.9GHz 35w desktop chip. Same performance + less power + less money = win!

Then there's the brain-dead use of the 870M (mobile equivalent to 660 Ti), with the castrated memory bandwidth. They're most certainly paying a premium for a mobile TDP-rated part they can't really justify.

Thanks to throttling in Normal mode, the sustained clocks of 800MHz and the maximum bandwidth of 120GB/s (desktop part has 144GB/s) put performance closer to the GTX 660. That's close enough to the GTX 750 Ti to just swap them out, and you'd cut power by almost half!

So there, I would be able to solve the noise problems without massively impacting performance, and manage to drop the outrageous $800 barebones price tag down to ~$650. These fools should hire me

$800 MSRP is pretty steep for what is offered in the package. Not to mention the additional components like a ssd and ram required to get it off the ground. I feel like the manufactures have already solved a lot of the heat issues already at least in the high end gaming laptops. I mean why are they trying to stick this in a small cube? Personally it is the total volume used that matters to me. As far as components I would agree that getting the best price per performance is the way to crack this market wide open, such as the i3 chip as mentioned above. Also why is Gigabyte shying away from the AMD gpu solutions, as the 7970m/8970m/m290x is about on par with the full bore 870m not this crippled chip and as far as I can tell has a lot lower unit cost. So nice try but try harder Gigabyte

There needs to be more desktop thin m-itx performance boards as well as more high-wattage external power adapters. Also I just feel that Gigabyte should have chosen an i5 desktop T-series chip along with a 750 TI. I think that PCs as small as the Asus GR8 and Alienware Alpha are better sizes. The Gigabyte Brix 760 is simply too small to house such powerful hardware with reasonable temps and noise.

I think when Intel Skylake and the 16/20nm maxwell or volta Nvidia cards come out, I can see the market for such small PCs to start gaining steam and very well housing quite powerful hardware. Until then, I think the Alienware alpha or Asus GR8 will be better than Gigabyte's Brix PC offering.