Gadgetory

keep hydrated you know I mean yeah okay all right what's up guys ever hear with hurricane axe and prebuilt gaming systems are shrinking in size yet they post enough horsepower to drive modern titles at 1080p and 1440p the technology is there and we've seen them implemented in systems like the Corsair one the ACS g20 I and a few more but one of the concerns that I have with these type of systems is that there are a few factors that are generally ignored and one of them is obviously power efficiency thermal management and acoustic performance it's hard for me to recommend system that check marks those criterias so that's why you know I'm a little bit neutral on pre-built systems at this point I've seen a few good ones out there the Corsair one was ridiculously amazing the msi trident which surprised me in a lot of ways but you may recall the review of the gigabyte gaming GT it wasn't quite up to my standards it looked very ugly and it sounded like a jet fan while gaming well today I have something for you and it's another gaming system from gigabyte I want to see it right here this is the Brix vr gaming so yeah let's take a closer look at it right after a message from our sponsor it's time to try something new with the key 900m mechanical keyboard by Zalman with Cale brown switches on board macro recordings and absolutely gorgeous RGB illumination with the white frame even your dog will go nuts check it out in the description below alright before I proceed to the bread and butter of this gaming PC I wanted to quickly point out that gigabytes bricks line up normally consists of bare-bones kids meaning the end user would have to populate their own choice for memory hard drive and the operating system the gigabyte bricks vr gaming that were checking out today is no exception to that in my case that involved a few teardown procedures to get hold of the dual sodium ddr4 Ram slots which weirdly enough claims to support up to 64 gigabytes in total on their website but I find that hard to believe since there are only 32 gigabyte dual module kits available in the market at the moment the two and a half inch charger bracket was easy to access I mounted my TL 100 240 gigabyte see from OCC and just like that I was up and ready to play some games not really you see for some reason gigabyte has still not figured out a way to enable legacy support out of the box in fact we've experienced similar issues with their smaller Brix units so sadly the old-school bios didn't explicitly display that option so I reached out to their technical team or gigabyte and learned that I had to enable the boot options within the CSM configuration for legacy I'm a disappointed gigabyte I mean honestly this is targeted towards first-time users so you know they might not experience or they might not have access to the level of technical assistance that I do so you know it is something that has to be addressed in the first place at least on their website the rest of the specs includes a quad core mobile core i7 7700 HQ CPU a gtx 1060 and dual band until wireless AC there are two MDOT two slots with one supporting Intel's opt-in technology and the other being PCIe that's directly linked to the CPU so you could take advantage of nvme SSDs in the future now price-wise you're looking at around 1200 dollars for the bare-bones kit but when you factor in components like the RAM the hard drive and the operating system you could run anywhere between $39 to 1500 dollars in total for a fully functional bricks vr gaming PC let's switch gears and talk about the physical aspect of the bricks we are it's tiny and cute coming in at just over two and a half liters in volume for comparison here's a shot of it sitting next to a fully fledged GPU my DSLR camera and a ketchup bottle it's that tiny guys and as a matter of fact this can serve as an excellent option for a powerful htpc the design is simple and stealth looking plus I like the slight change of orange accents at the top right underneath you'll find subtle LED lighting which hasn't received the RGB treatment but I like the neutral white color scheme the chassis is made out of brushed aluminum which sadly is a fingerprint magnet so be mindful of that if you're looking for something that can easily blend in with your living room set up the brick's VR would be an excellent option for that it doesn't look too aggressive from my perspective but you might not feel the same way so let us know your thoughts about the design in the and stand below the i/o is fairly limited when compared to a full-size desktop PC or even some pre-built cases that I've encountered in the past as you can see there is standard DCN Gigabit Ethernet Kensington jack 3 USB 3.0 ports a single USB 3.1 type AM type-c ports dedicated headphone and mic jacks and antenna mounts for the Wi-Fi card which are included in terms of display outputs there are a pair of HDMI 2.0 ports and a pair of mini DisplayPort 1.3 ports both of which support up to 4k at 60 Hertz now let's talk about performance and honestly I'm not expecting higher frame rates at 4k or even 1440p because remember the GTX 1060 is the hallmark for 1080p gaming and you know one of the things that you also have to consider is that the bricks VR sports a mobile 7700 HQ CPUs so that could potentially be a bottleneck to unleash the GPUs to performance regardless of that how did it do well starting with Cinebench r15 running the CPU test the bricks we are scores 20 percent less than the g-20 CI that sports a 7700 desktop grade CPU this was expected since the 7700 HQ processor features less cache and lower base lose clock speeds switching to OpenGL and we see the same story with the bricks VR it trails behind the g-20 CI by a significant margin and that's once again do the lower clock frequencies on the mobile CPU remember this should translate well into gaming as modern titles love higher clock speeds I also performed our standard Premiere Pro render test exporting a one-minute 4k h.264 video and the bricks VR completed that task in just under three minutes which is respectable so it might be an excellent option for light content creation here are the results for the 3d mark 5 strike and time spy tests this gives us a rough idea as to how well the gtx 1060 when combined with a 7700 HQ cpu performs with respect to the gtx 1070 and 1080 now the other systems that you're seeing here are rocking desktop great CPUs so that's another factor that needs to be taken into account all right game time that'll be one dish down frame rates in the mid 40s which shouldn't be a surprise as I'm pushing this at Ultra settings at 1440p and this GPU is not meant for that if you tone things down to 1080p at high settings you'll definitely be able to pass the 60 happiest mark over watch at 1440p set to epic was a pretty playable experience I was able to achieve just a tad above 60 frames per second if you're looking for more you can certainly tone it down to high settings and not worry about changing resolutions I had a similar experience with doom at 1440p set to ultra the GPU was hovering around these 60 frames per second mark a few things to consider here is that this title is graphically intensive unlike overwatch but the CPU is a huge bottleneck in this situation Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon didn't go that well on the Brix VR it averaged around 37 frames per second at 1440p sector very high this is yet another demanding title and it required a lot of GPU horsepower along with a capable CPU if you don't mind switching to 1080p at medium settings they should grant you some more room for a smoother gameplay if you're planning to might intend to compute tasks on the Brix we are you might be in for disappointment I ran our standard Ida 64 stress test and the CPU got all the way up to 95 °c during load and it did throttle so be mindful of that remember there's only one single intake fan located at the bottom to draw cool air to the components and unfortunately it didn't do a good job keeping things under control now realistically if you're strictly gaming you won't experience throttling since those applications are not CPU hungry the GPU on the other hand got toasty at around 84 C which isn't too bad but if I were you I would refrain placing the bricks we are in compact spaces where airflow is restricted the system was also not quiet during my benchmarking session the fan did wrap-up all the way up to 2700 rpm sadly during idle scenarios the system was fairly audible so from an acoustic standpoint the Brix VR gets at 5 out of 10 beating here's how it sounds so my concluding talks on the Brix vr gaming PC from gigabyte is that it's an interesting addition to gigabytes Brix lineup for one very compact so you can easily blend it in within an HTTP see setup so if you're looking for something that's just a little bit more powerful for your living room then this might be an excellent option I wouldn't recommend 4k gaming or 1440p gaming on it because you definitely not going to have the highest frame rates but if you're strictly gaming at 1080p this will be an excellent companion for your TV or for your 1080p TV in your living room however from a price to performance perspective I would skip this and probably pick the msi trident 3 arctic that i reviewed about a month ago it's the same price but it comes with a desktop grade CPU and a gtx 970 and it has willget performance plus it's really quite under idle and load scenarios so that's it for me on the gigabyte Brix vr gaming pc this surely has its ups and downs for one it's compact it's beautiful and all but you know there are a few compromises that you'll need to make not one of that is obviously thermal management and of course CPU and GPU temperatures and performance this would definitely complement my living room I'm definitely going to hook this up to my HDTV I know I'm still using an HDTV but yeah let me know what you guys think about this game you please see in the comments down below what do you guys think of the design its performance with respect to the other gaming pcs that I tested I mean but with hurricane axe thank you so much for watching make sure to subscribe for more similar content and we'll see you in the next one