Upcoming GIGABYTE BRIX with GeForce GTX Inside
by Ian Cutress on April 23, 2014 10:11 AM EST
For the past 12-18 months, GIGABYTE’s BRIX platform has made inroads into the small form factor ecosystem with the help of Intel’s Haswell and AMD’s APUs under the hood. Ganesh recently had a look at the BRIX Pro, featuring a Crystal Well enabled Haswell processor with Iris Pro 5200 integrated graphics. We have also reported from press releases of BRIX models with discrete AMD mobile GPUs in the pipeline, resplendent in a deep red color. Naturally the next stage was to expect a green model featuring an NVIDIA GPU, at a private event in Las Vegas this week GIGABYTE has demonstrated just that.
Geoff from TR spotted this little cube at the event, sporting a 47W Core i5-4200H mobile CPU (dual core, hyperthreading, 2.8 GHz / 3.4 GHz turbo) and a GTX 760 inside. It is unclear if this is a mobile GTX 760M (768 CUDA cores at 657 MHz) or the full GTX 760 (1152 CUDA cores at 980 MHz) on a custom design. The 760M is rated ~55W and the GTX760 is rated at 170W, meaning a total chassis power output of either ~100W or ~220W. Given how loud the BRIX Pro seemed to be, one would assume that GIGABYTE has aimed towards a mobile GPU. We are awaiting confirmation from GIGABYTE on this detail, although it was reported that the device was warm to the touch during a GPU demonstration.
Aside from the core hardware, standard BRIX rules applies – two SO-DIMM slots, support for 2.5” and mSATA, 2T2R 802.11ac with BT 4.0, gigabit Ethernet, four USB 3.0 ports, dual HDMI and a single mini-DisplayPort connector. Given the size of the connectors on the image above, the BRIX GeForce Edition is a similar size to previous BRIX models.
No word on pricing as of yet, however this should hit the shelves in May. An i7 version is also said to be on the cards.
Source: The Tech Report
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Guspaz - Wednesday, April 23, 2014 - link
The Brix machines are neat, but they're generally overpriced for what they are. And this thing in particular is, well, really stupidly designed. They've taken a 170W desktop GPU (yes, it's a desktop 760) and paired it with a 47W dual-core desktop CPU, despite quad-core desktop i7 chips being available at 35W, let alone using a mobile CPU...That's a max TDP of over 200W... any guess how loud those fans will be?
Casper42 - Wednesday, April 23, 2014 - link
The Dual Core part has a higher clock speed per core though which is generally better for games.Not to mention a cost savings of $100 to $150 depending on which Quad core you meant.
schizoide - Wednesday, April 23, 2014 - link
Is it really a desktop GPU? You have proof of that? Desktop 760 is fast enough for a real steambox.Noise is likely a problem, but if it's only loud while playing games I'm not sure that I care. Guess it depends how loud we're talking about.
Guspaz - Thursday, April 24, 2014 - link
I'm going based on the assumption that both the article linked to has it as a desktop part, and in the comments someone confirmed this by talking to nVidia reps (at PAX I believe) who repeatedly insisted it was a desktop part, and lots of other articles are also reporting that it's a desktop part (with many articles expressing confusion about why somebody would put such a high-power part in an NUC).It's entirely possible that they (the journalists) are wrong... A desktop GPU in an NUC-style machine makes zero sense to me, but at the same time I've seen their Brix product lineup first-hand at PAX myself, and it's kind of nuts. It's like they're throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks, one model even has a bloody projector built into it (with the whole thing running off an external battery), the GB-BXPi3-4010. They have so many different models with different hardware that I wouldn't put it past them to try cramming something insane like a mid-power desktop GPU in there (although perhaps with a restricted TDP).
Gigaplex - Wednesday, April 23, 2014 - link
It's a mobile CPU, not a desktop one.Death666Angel - Wednesday, April 23, 2014 - link
"sporting a 47W Core i5-4200H mobile CPU (dual core, hyperthreading, 2.8 GHz / 3.4 GHz turbo) "Um, what? Is that thing super cheap? I can get an i5-4670T with a 45W TDP, 4 real cores, 2.3 to 3.3GHz clock speeds for 180€. That should eat the 4200H alive. Can someone explain that? Because I don't see it. Unless it is just so they can use the same underlying platform.
ptmmac - Wednesday, April 23, 2014 - link
This is one of those designs that is going to market too soon. The Broadwell plus Maxwell on 20 nm will produce a much better design for this machine. So it will be a stop gap until the next generation is available. I wonder when everyone is going to start admiting that Moores Law is dead. We haven't seen an increase in frequency of processors since 2004. If we had actually been seeing those increases we would have 128 Ghz processors by now. Silicon can't go above 4Ghz without melting down. Given all the other improvements in computer technology we would be seeing more progress in many areas of tech that are calculation dependant. Now we are going to see new nodes spreading apart for longer than 2 years each. During the 90's we saw node changes every 18 months and matching frequency improvements. At that pace we would have been closing in on Terahertz processors in the next year.We need to move on to a new semi-conductor and fiberoptic data connections in the next 5 to 10 years.
MrSpadge - Wednesday, April 23, 2014 - link
Moore's law talks about transistor density, not frequency. What you do with these transistors is totally up to you - but normally they're spend in a wise way to improve performance. Otherwise the company making those chips won't last long.What we really need to do is to make even better use of those transistors, as in hardware-/software codesign. And a slower pace in the hardware world gives the software guys some time to actually optimize for the current technology, rather than being 1 or 2 generations behind.
tviceman - Wednesday, April 23, 2014 - link
Not a gtx 750 ti? Gigabyte you are retarded.jb14 - Wednesday, April 23, 2014 - link
Agreed this thing is going to melt a hole through the earth, screaming like a banchee while it does so. Much cleverer cooling engineering required IMO.