Chuwi Announces The HiGame Mini-PC With Kaby Lake G
by Brett Howse on April 9, 2018 10:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Desktop
- Gaming
- Intel
- Mini-PC
- Thunderbolt 3
- Chuwi
- RX Vega M
- Kaby Lake-G
- 8th Gen
- KBL-G
Although we’ve mostly covered Chuwi’s laptop and tablet ventures to date, the company has just announced the HiGame mini-PC, and it’s worth a look. Chuwi is stepping out of their comfort zone a bit here with a new desktop form factor, featuring the new Intel 8th Gen Core with Radeon RX Vega: basically Kaby Lake G with Radeon Graphics. Chuwi is well-known for low-cost laptops, but this move into the PC gaming industry seems like a wise one, and their first entrant has a lot of appeal. This appears to be a redesign of the GBox Pro that they showed off at CES.
The HiGame is a 7-inch by 6-inch by 3-inch desktop, and is based around the 65 W Intel Core i5-8305G with Radeon Graphics. To keep the initial costs down, the device is configured with 8 GB of DDR4, and a 128 GB SSD, but both are upgradable. The Core i5 is a quad-core with Hyperthreading, and features a 65-Watt TDP for the CPU and GPU. The Radeon graphics feature 20 compute units with 179.2 GB/s of memory bandwidth thanks to the 4 GB of HBM2 memory. This should offer reasonable graphics performance, and Chuwi rates it about 30% quicker than a similar system with a GTX 1050 GPU.
Although compact, the HiGame doesn’t skimp on connectivity. It features five USB 3.0 ports on the rear, along with Ethernet, two HDMI 2.0 ports, and two DisplayPorts, along with a microphone and headphone jack. The front features a USB-C Thunderbolt 3 port as well, so all the bases are covered.
The design of the HiGame is industrial, and, at least in my opinion, quite stylish. Despite going into the gaming market, Chuwi hasn’t yet gone crazy with the styling, and this mini-PC should fit in well in almost any environment.
Chuwi hasn’t set a final price or availability yet, but they are aiming for around $999 as a launch price, and availability in early July. The price is a jump up from what we’ve seen from their Atom powered laptops, but the KBL-G is going to account for much of the cost.
We should be able to get our hands on this when it’s launched to provide a more comprehensive overview at that time, so stay tuned.
Source: Chuwi
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
25 Comments
View All Comments
HStewart - Monday, April 9, 2018 - link
I would not even think of buying Chuwi product for $999 - I have HiPro 8 tablet and it basically a piece of junk. I love what Intel did with EMIB but this product at this price discredits but Intel and AMD. At $99 the HiPro 8 was worth the risk - but not at $999.dgingeri - Monday, April 9, 2018 - link
So....Chibi version of an old style Mac Pro?
SaolDan - Monday, April 9, 2018 - link
LOLtipoo - Tuesday, April 10, 2018 - link
More GPU than you can get in any Mac until you get to 27" iMacCome on, Timmy ಠ_ಠ
DanNeely - Monday, April 9, 2018 - link
As much as I normally roll my eyes at small SSD + HDD setups, a 128GB SSD by itself is too small for a gaming system when a few titles have already crossed the 50GB mark. They need to either raise the minimum to a 256GB model, or bundle a 500GB/1TB HDD in with the 128GB SSD model.dromoxen - Monday, April 9, 2018 - link
Nice neat small machine but compared to say a SFF pc with i3+1050t1 the price seems too high.But it will do well ...
iwod - Monday, April 9, 2018 - link
it looks like the Mini Mac Pro CheeseGater.sing_electric - Monday, April 9, 2018 - link
I can sort of understand the pricing (since Intel is positioning its chips with Vega graphics as "premium"), but asking a customer to fork over $1k for a computer with 128GB of storage seems like a cruel joke (particularly when there's just 8GB of RAM). How much of a "gaming PC" can it be when the SSD will be 50% full after you install a couple games?Any way you slice it, $1k is a "premium" price for a desktop PC these days, and 128GB is VERY cramped. I'd have been OK even if they found room for a 2.5" drive bay and threw in a 1TB HDD alongside the SSD, but this just seems like an artificially low "entry price" - I'm getting that it'll be at least $1200 or so for the cheapest model that people will actually want to buy.
HStewart - Monday, April 9, 2018 - link
I would not just blame this on Intel - for one thing it unknown currently the price of the 8809G EMIB is but a standard 4 Core U CPU is around $300 - The Vega and 4G HGM2 memory is probably at least $100 possibly even $200 or more.I have HiPro 8 and quality of tablet is as bad as it gets - it only has 32G of ram and Windows 10 does update - I should find a way to remove the very limited Android OS for the system to gain more space - but too be honest I don't think it worth the time.
I would not say that Vega graphics is a premium - if so than it large amount cost above $300+ for CPU alone. One thing I just notice about this Chuwa is that they when cheap on CPU part - this the low end i5 part - unlikely high end component in Intel's NUC. But the cpu is better than the i5 U mobile product but less than the i7 U which is $400
https://ark.intel.com/products/124969/Intel-Core-i...
Vega graphics is not really that premium - I seen a video of XPS 15 2in1 with the fastest but not as fast in the one in NUC - do 4K at 60 FPS with GTA 5. But nothing like NVidia 1080's and nothing like the up and coming 11 series.
psychobriggsy - Tuesday, April 10, 2018 - link
Indeed, the whole point of these SKUs is to reduce board space over a discrete CPU and GPU option. So in a laptop, or NUC, they make sense. This system isn't that small, I think separate components could have been fitted in with some thought, at a lower overall price. Using this SKU does remove that effort though, which fits in with how Chewi work.