HABEY BIS-6922 Fanless Ivy Bridge Industrial PC Review

Concluding Remarks

Passively cooled high performance PCs are not easy to design and bring to the market. Creating a dust-proof enclosure is also a big challenge. By successfully rising up to these two challenges, Habey manages to hit a home run with the BIS-6922. The choice of chipset and processor as well as the design of the motherboard lend themselves well to the target market. In terms of the performance of the review unit, we would have liked to see DDR3-1600 SODIMM, considering that the Ivy Bridge platform supports it officially. A SSD with higher performance wouldn't have hurt either.

The review unit was not without its problems, though. The power brick (Great Wall brand) bundled with the unit was rated for 60W DC output. Full loading of the unit drew close to 67W. Habey indicated that they don't expect consumers to fully load both the CPU and GPU and stress the power adapter to that extent. We found that the power brick also developed a very audible whine after prolonged use at medium loads. Habey later sent us a 100W power brick (a no-name Chinese OEM model) as replacement and it doesn't seem to be suffering from the whine issue as yet.

The nice aspect about Habey's BIS-6922 is the ability for consumers to customize the components extensively. Components of a particular brand / model can be requested, be it for the DRAM or the SSD or the PSU. I strongly recommend prospective customers to request a power brick from a reputable manufacturer while configuring the system (Seasonic and Delta Electronics come to mind as adapters that have held up well in our labs). Unlike most other manufacturers, Habey doesn't sell units off-the-shelf. Due to the extent of customization that most of the target market requires, an inquiry needs to be placed on their website in order to initiate a purchase order.

In conclusion, the BIS-6922 is the most powerful and efficient passively cooled PC in the mini-ITX form factor that we have seen. Other than the fact that the end user needs to be a bit careful in selecting some of the components, we have little to complain about.