GIGABYTE BRIX Pro: A Second Look at the Intel i7-4770R with Iris Pro HD 5200
by Ganesh T S on June 14, 2014 5:00 PM ESTThermal Performance & Power Consumption
A discussion of the cooling system, fan speeds and subjective noise levels can be found in the first part of our BRIX Pro review. A couple of months back, GIGABYTE came forward with a new BIOS for the BRIX Pro. After installing that, we repeated our extreme power virus test of running Prime 95 and Furmark together at the same time. As expected, the system did throttle within two minutes of starting the test (as shown in the screenshot below).
I am yet to see a system equipped with a Core i7-4770R that has been able to keep up with the CPU and GPU being loaded up simultaneously, and manufacturers contend that it is hardly a realistic use-case. While we tend to agree to a limited extent, we felt it would be worthy of further evaluation. Towards this, we kicked off a run with only Prime 95 loading up all the CPU threads.
After 30 minutes of full CPU loading, we found that the core temperatures were held below 100 C, the clock speeds remained at 3.2 GHz for the CPU (the GPU was 'idling' at 200 MHz) and there was no thermal throttling to be seen. At this point, we introduced Furmark loading into the picture. It becomes clear that the system gives preference to CPU performance. The GPU remains throttled at 200 MHz, while the CPU cores don't thermally throttle.
This is quite a relief, as there are probably no realistic workloads out there which can stress both CPU and GPU to the maximum simultaneously. To verify whether GPU performance perks up after removal of CPU load, we stopped the Prime 95 job and let Furmark continue for more time.
After more than 45 minutes, we found the GPU still clocking in at 1 GHz and running without any throttling issues. The CPU cores were idling at 800 MHz.
On the whole, thermal performance seems to have improved quite a bit with the latest BIOS release and we are actually happy to see that CPU performance just doesn't throttle as long as the GPU doesn't simultaneously ramp up with the CPU.
In terms of power consumption, we gathered the idle and load power numbers (at the wall) with the new configuration. The numbers are presented below.
The numbers vary slightly from our initial configuration (more efficient at idle, but consumes more power at load), and I believe these related to the BIOS update as well as the memory and storage subsystem changes.
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dylan522p - Saturday, June 14, 2014 - link
Fair enough. The SSD market moves so fast can't blame you on that.Yorgos - Monday, June 16, 2014 - link
It doesn't matter which is inferior when we are talking for a small percentage in performance, actually in those speeds I don't think it makes any difference. What matters is that samsung offers the best silicon in the market and has the least problems with its ssds so most of the builds will prolly have samsung instead of crucial.cubee - Saturday, June 14, 2014 - link
How much impact will DDR4 have on iGPU performance?schizoide - Saturday, June 14, 2014 - link
Alienware alpha (steam machine) will be out in a couple months for $550, which is less than the barebones Brix Pro, with no RAM or storage. The Alpha is an i3 with 4GB RAM and a "maxwell" (real 750ti-ish) GPU and a 500GB HD. It will actually be capable of 1080p gaming, and costs less. It is quite a lot larger than the brix, but still small compared to any other computer. Oh, and you get an x360 controller and a win8.1 license too.Morawka - Sunday, June 15, 2014 - link
750ti wont run 1080p but in about 1/3rd popular titles.. A 760 is really needed to run 1080p comfortably with a decent list of settings.Qwertilot - Sunday, June 15, 2014 - link
The sort of people buying this sort of thing/ a 750ti aren't setting obsessed :) 750ti well ahead of this things performance of course and about the minimum you want to be taken half way seriously as a gaming desktop.Interesting to see how close Broadwell K can get though, with the improved/larger GPU stuff and I'd presume a somewhat larger overall power budget to boot.
schizoide - Sunday, June 15, 2014 - link
Yeah pretty much this. It won't run 1080p on ultra settings in all titles, but if you turn down the options a bit they will run smoothly.tipoo - Saturday, June 14, 2014 - link
I'm curious in the lower end of the BRIX, especially for a parent computer. The one at $250 with the AMD APU. Seems like a whole lot of compute power for that much money.schizoide - Saturday, June 14, 2014 - link
The low-end brix/nucs are a lot more interesting, yeah. Either as perfectly fine little desktops, steam streaming clients, or HTPCs. The high-end ones suck, because the GPUs are not comparable to the current console generation.TiGr1982 - Saturday, June 14, 2014 - link
As a funny fact, this little box (based on Haswell i7) is faster than Core i7-4960X (Ivy Bridge-E) in single-threaded CPU performance (because the latter haxacore is based on older uarch).