14 DAY TRIAL // Miniature personal computers have been getting really, really powerful lately, and the new BRIX from Gigabyte is about as obvious as you can get when it comes to providing evidence to that effect.
As you can see in the picture above, Gigabyte has decided to set up its Computex 2014 exhibition a day earlier than the actual start of the show.
Computex is a trade convention happening in Taipei, Taiwan, in case you haven't learned about it yet. Quite a few tech companies have congregated there.
Gigabyte has everything from super VRM boards (for graphics card overclocking) or full PCs on display at the site. We'll get to those in due time, though. For now, it's the latest BRIX mini personal computer that has caught our attention.
Powered by the H97N-WiFi mini-ITX motherboard the only thing it lacks is a PCI Express slot for video cards. The form factor could have probably allowed one, if Gigabyte hadn't made the new mainboard specifically for the BRIX. The BRIX that hardly has enough room in its small, thin case for anything taller than a couple of inches. Alas.
Every other specification is pretty overkill though. We may even say that the Gigabyte BRIX is stronger than many business and home desktop PCs out there.
For one thing, the CPU at the center of it all, the Core i7-4785T, is a quad-core Haswell refresh model with 3.2 GHz top frequency (base is 2.2 GHz).
Considering that the T in the name stands for energy efficiency, that's a big deal. Especially since the chip boasts HyperThreading, which turns the four physical cores into eight logical ones in Windows.
That's not all that the CPU has to offer though. Intel also gave its chips AVX2 instructions, and a dual-channel integrated memory controller (IMC).
Speaking of which, the IMC gets 16 GB of DDR3-1600 Crucial Ballistix Tracer high-end RAM to play with.
That only leaves storage and connectivity. The former is well represented by a Crucial M440 solid-state drive (up to 1 TB), while the latter feature set consists of video outputs (dual-link DVI and HDMI) and web/network/mobile device connectivity (Bluetooth 4.0, 802.11 ac Wi-Fi, Gigabit Ethernet) and, of course, USB 3.0 and other standard I/O.
Everything runs on the energy provided by a 120W PSU. All in all, the Gigabyte BRIX can do everything that a normal, mid-tower or tower PC can do, in many cases even better. Only high-end games are outside its grasp, since the integrated graphics chip in the CPU is a far cry from add-in video.
Now if only there were a BRIX with an AMD APU. The GPUs in those things would actually put on a good show.