Gadgetory

not long ago we were impressed by the size and silence of ZOTAC CN 760 ZBOX plus and by the fact that it has about the gaming prowess of a playstation 4 well not to be outdone by ZOTAC a gigabyte has sent us over there unbelievable Brix gaming BXI 5g 760 ultra compact PC kit it's much smaller actually more powerful can handle triple displays out and it's just generally an amazing piece of computer hardware the Corsair Flash Voyager go is the easy way to move photos music and videos between your Android device and your PC click now to learn more the included accessory package is really solid you get a vase amount so you can mount it to the back here of TV or monitor with ease you get a three-and-a-half millimeter breakout mini HDMI and DisplayPort to full sized cables so you won't need any adapters to hook the bricks up to all of your existing gear and finally there's a massive 180 watt power brick it's almost as big as the unit itself speaking of the PC itself the outside has a striking glossy black and green color scheme that does get covered in fingerprints quickly but at least is easier to clean and more difficult to scratch than some of the other finishes that I've seen the top has nothing but a power button and the sides are entirely reserved for ventilation on the front we've got a microphone / headphone jack and 2 USB 3 ports then on the back we find 2 more USB 3 ports can give it ethernet power in a Kensington lock and the three display outputs that I alluded to before 1 mini DisplayPort and 2 mini HDMI means support for resolutions up to 2560 by 1600 at 60 Hertz or 4k 30 Hertz if you're using it for movies on a TV ballin but the outside of the hardware isn't why you watch this show so let's open this baby up it comes apart easily just remove the four screws and lift the little handle once inside we see that it's a bare-bones unit so while it does include a wireless AC and Bluetooth 4.0 card you will need to add your own ddr3 low-voltage Ram with or both of the included slots and your own storage drive or drives yes drives uh this bad boy can handle an M SATA SSD and a two and a half inch hard drive or SSD at the same time it uses a single pre cable managed connector soldered to the board to enable this second drive now the PCB were accessing here is actually only one of two separate stacked boards stuffed inside this cubed form factor so that was the motherboard and that's why it has all the expansion and from this angle we can kind of see the blazing-fast Core i5 4200 aged dual core hyper threaded CPU mounted to the other side and then this one this other PCB is actually a discrete graphics card so we can just barely make out the GPU core and veer an oh and did I mention that GPU is a desktop gtx 760 not a gtx 760 mm Wow did I mention it has six gigs of gddr5 clocked at five gigahertz anyway now that we're all calm again it's time to install windows and take her for a spin the first thing I noticed when firing it up is that even at idle it's not very quiet to get enough airflow through the copper heatsinks for the CPU and GPU those dual cooling fans need to spin at a speed that makes this little green gaming box easily audible from ten feet away in a quiet room that's a definite strike against the Brooks gaming for me although not everyone cares that much about noise and for some folks the truly remarkable form factor might make up for it all right so the coolers on the loud side Linus but how does it perform well just because it says on the box that the CPU and GPU run into a certain clock speed doesn't mean that they will actually do that in real life if they're running too hot they will turn down their own performance to protect themselves this is known as thermal throttling and it's a real concern with notebooks and small form factor desktops so we need to see how well the Brix holds up to some real world use to evaluate it schooling I started out my benchmarking just kind of dinking around with batman arkham origins running with all the details cranked at 1080p and no anti-aliasing and I noticed something almost immediately I was humming along pinned against my vsync limit of 60fps and then my framerate started dropping until it reached around 42 fps tabbing out revealed that while the CPU was still doing okay running at 3.2 gigahertz at 75 degrees mind you it was only about 30 to 60 percent loaded the GPU was running at 92 to 93 degrees and throttling down to 405 megahertz and even dipping to 203 megahertz depending on the intensity of the scene it was bouncing back and forth between those power states I realized then that for my benchmarking runs I couldn't make any assumptions about how this Hardware was going to perform and that I needed to provide some points of reference for you the viewer to give you a better idea of how it will stack up against other comparable devices so here's what I came up with first I ran it against a Pentium anniversary edition clocked at 3.2 gigahertz and a desktop reference 760 to see how this class of hardware should perform with no throttling at all then I put it up against the zotac en 764 both of the small form-factor machines I ran each benchmark twice back-to-back and took the second result because it's quite a hot day about 30 degrees Celsius inside this gives us a real worst-case scenario for these tiny machines compared to each other and to a properly cooled desktop setup so that's it the Brix gaming has impressive specs and if you live in an igloo it's likely to be the highest performance to volume ratio gaming machine anywhere but while its performance was actually still fairly good 1080p and current games is very playable in thermal throttling a boss and ended up not performing as well as the competing lower spec mini PC while being significantly louder I'm all about pushing the envelope in terms of PC form factors but it looks like the world is just not quite ready for the size and gaming gusto of this BRICS gaming machine maybe if we give Intel Nvidia another generation to refine things on the processor side gigabyte can take another crack at this and it will be absolutely balls to the wall amazing but for now I think that you might be better off just building a bit of a bigger rig in dealing with the extra size speaking of taking a crack at things and track you know what's addictive audible.com our sponsor for this episode audible.com is the leading source for wingnuts on the internet you can get them in any size and shape and wait a minute did you guys believe that I was just testing you audible is the leading source for audio books not wingnuts sign up for their monthly membership today to get something new and exciting to listen to while driving doing monotonous work or drifting off to sleep at night they've got an audio book on almost every topic just for a laugh I search for wingnuts and I found this book about how the lunatic fringe is hijacking America by John P Avalon to go along with my joke you know what's no joke though if you sign up with the link in the video description you can get your first audiobook for free I mean actually you can get that regardless just the thing that audible does that you don't actually have to use my link but if you do use my link the one in the video description then they won't stop sponsoring me so yeah anyway thanks again audible for sponsoring this episode thanks to you guys for watching like it if you liked it dislike it if you disliked it leave a comment letting me know what you think of mini pcs is it worth the trade-offs that you make do you even care would you just rather have a massive gargantuan desktop the size of a fridge or we're like where's your head at in terms of all this stuff also don't forget to check out the video description where we've got links for how to support us you can go ahead and you can buy this product if you tickled your fancy with our affiliate links that are down there you can buy a t-shirt you give 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