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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wintermute000 - Wednesday, April 23, 2014 - link
I don't get it, if they can get laptop class components to run in a laptop chassis, why can't they get them to run in a BRIX thats physically bigger and has more cooling?irusun - Wednesday, April 23, 2014 - link
This is getting closer, but still waiting for a 2013 Mac Pro-like form factor (size-wise and quiet-wise) with an i7-4770, GTX850M (and better), upgradeable to 32GB RAM, SSD... and that's it. That may not be a "huge" market, but I'm positive there's enough of a market for some smart OEM to make money on it.Hrel - Wednesday, April 23, 2014 - link
"Given how loud the BRIX Pro seemed to be, one would assume that GIGABYTE has aimed towards a mobile GPU." - Do you mean that since BRIX systems are usually extremely quiet that it must be the mobile GPU? If so using the word "loud" to express that is very strange.However, if your implication is that the system is very loud, then why would it be the mobile GPU? Wouldn't that be indicative of the full desktop GPU?
Gigaplex - Wednesday, April 23, 2014 - link
Given how loud the older system (BRIX Pro) with integrated Intel graphics was, it's unlikely they'd use an even more power hungry desktop GPU without blowing the thermal budget in this new BRIX.NZLion - Wednesday, April 23, 2014 - link
As someone who just bought a Brix and is using it in part as a Steam machine... god DAMMIT. I wish I'd known this was right on the horizonLaststop311 - Thursday, April 24, 2014 - link
This version of the brix is almost like in the public beta phase of design. When we finally get to 2nd generation 14nm skylake with the more efficient lower voltage ddr4 and the many other power efficiency features planned and the 20nm GPU's with the GM104 chip (maxwells GTX 680/770 replacement or even possibly GM110 (maxwells GTX 780/780ti/titan replacement) (if maxwells 20nm power efficiency gets a large enough boost) these tiny little boxes will then truly be able to replace ALL 1920x1080 resolution gaming pc's, almost all 2560x1440 gaming pc's, and possibly even some 4k gaming pc's if gm110's power usage is cut enough by the 20nm maxwell architecture. and do it without sounding like a raging vacuum cleaner and without much heat buildup.All we need is another 2 years and a 14nm skylake + 20nm maxwell BRIX mini pc could be the new standard for 1080p gamers. Everyone will just want these little tiny boxes to play games at 60fps and 1080p with ultra details instead of a big massive tower since 60 fps and ultra 1080p is already maxed out performance basically. The only gamers that will want a big tower will be 120fps ultra 1080p gamers, 60-120 fps 2560x1440/1600 gamers, and 60fps 4k UHD gamers
Qwertilot - Thursday, April 24, 2014 - link
Suspect not quite. The previous version of this was struggling to cool a 65w processor properly, with no DGPU. If you go just a little bit bigger you can get cases which will cool that sort of processor purely passively, or the far from huge mac pro mentioned earlier which is very happily cooling about 5 times that amount.Some of that is better cooling design of course, but a lot of it is simply the amount of space that there (isn't) for cooling designs in machines quite this small.
jpeich - Monday, April 28, 2014 - link
Does someone know which interface communicates with the GTX card? is it minipcie? is it PCIE? which speed? NUC standard doesn´t include pcie interface as far as I know.... I am terribly curious about the guts of this little machine.fteoath64 - Monday, April 28, 2014 - link
I wished that would make the discrete graphics version twice as long so it becomes a shoebox form-factor, then the thermal issues and sound issues can really be solved plus the fact that there would be more space for a couple of two terabyte drives including the m.Sata SSD. Not that users would mount these on vesa behind the monitor, these are too bulky as they are for such mounting anyways......