GIGABYTE GB-BXi7H-5500 Broadwell BRIX Review
by Ganesh T S on January 29, 2015 7:00 AM ESTNetworking and Storage Performance
We have recently started devoting a separate section to analyze the storage and networking credentials of the units under review. On the storage side, one option would be repetition of our strenuous SSD review tests on the drive(s) in the PC. Fortunately, to avoid that overkill, PCMark 8 has a storage bench where certain common workloads such as loading games and document processing are replayed on the target drive. Results are presented in two forms, one being a benchmark number and the other, a bandwidth figure. We ran the PCMark 8 storage bench on selected PCs and the results are presented below.
Surprisingly, the combination of the Core i7-4500U and Samsung's SSD 840 EVO delivers best-in-class results. The same SSD (albeit, with an earlier firmware version) benchmarked lower even in the BRIX Pro. Of course, the SSD 840 EVO is having trouble with the old data read speeds issue - The above results are not recommending the 840 EVO in any way, but just presenting what a fresh SSD 840 EVO can achieve in conjunction with the GB-BXi7H-5500.
On the networking side, we restricted ourselves to the evaluation of the WLAN component. Our standard test router is the Netgear R7000 Nighthawk configured with both 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz networks. The router is placed approximately 20 ft. away, separated by a drywall (as in a typical US building). A wired client (Zotac ID89-Plus) is connected to the R7000 and serves as one endpoint for iPerf evaluation. The PC under test is made to connect to either the 5 GHz (preferred) or 2.4 GHz SSID and iPerf tests are conducted for both TCP and UDP transfers. It is ensured that the PC under test is the only wireless client for the Netgear R7000. We evaluate total throughput for up to 32 simultaneous TCP connections using iPerf and present the highest number in the graph below.
In the UDP case, we try to transfer data at the highest rate possible for which we get less than 1% packet loss.
The WLAN performance is good, considering that the Intel AC3160 is a 1x1 802.11ac solution with a maximum theoretical bandwidth of 433 Mbps. We are quite happy to see GIGABYTE discarding the Realtek 802.11ac solution. That said, the use of an Intel AC7260 or AC7265 2x2 solution or a Broadcom BCM4352-based WLAN card would have been even better. On the wired networking side, it is disappointing to see GIGABYTE avoid an Intel GbE LAN chipset such as the i217-V. Instead, we have a Realtek chipset (which doesn't offload the CPU as much as the Intel i21x when it comes to processing network traffic).
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kgh00007 - Thursday, January 29, 2015 - link
No mention of the i7-5500U turbo speeds?3GHz single core turbo and 2.9GHz dual core turbo, source notebookcheck.
voicequal - Saturday, February 7, 2015 - link
These were provided in a previous article.http://anandtech.com/show/8814/intel-releases-broa...
Shadowmaster625 - Thursday, January 29, 2015 - link
The only people who would pay that much money for so little performance already gave their money to apple.gr8pcguy - Thursday, January 29, 2015 - link
Doesn't it bother anyone that the box is printed with the statement "Supports 2.5" Hard Drivers"? Obviously Gigabyte needs to do a bit of QA on their package production line!Refuge - Thursday, January 29, 2015 - link
Ha! I noticed this to when I first clicked the link.Hopefully they fix the typo before full production for consumers. :P
skifiddle - Saturday, January 31, 2015 - link
to?Refuge - Thursday, January 29, 2015 - link
The Brix, now supports 2.5" Hard "Drivers"Is this some kind of new, super strong drivers for our HDD's?
And yes, this is me being sarcastic :P
tspacie - Thursday, January 29, 2015 - link
The huge iGPU BIOS carve-out intrigues me. Does the iGPU not handle allocations in shared system memory (in 4K pages) ?Pissedoffyouth - Thursday, January 29, 2015 - link
Nah, neither does AMD APUs. You lose whatever you allocate.rootheday3 - Friday, January 30, 2015 - link
the BIOS carve out is not necessary. The bios reserves a little (~32mb) for some internal data structures used by the driver (graphics page tables, memory for content protection, auxilary buffer for display frame buffer compression). Otherwise, the driver gets allocations out of system memory from the OS to map into the graphics page tables.the DVMT pre-Allocated is a hold over from Windows XP driver model and is no longer meaningful since Vista. In fact, if the OS comes under memory pressure and starts asking the driver to stick data into that "dedicated" segment, the PCI aperture copy/swizzle process used to load the data is slower than if the driver simply used OS allocations. Likewise, on standby/hibernate the OS "pages out" all the data from dedicated segment to "normal" memory which is slow... whereas for normal system allocations on iGPU, the pages are just "there" - no extra copy required.
The sole exception is a handful of games that are incorrectly coded to look for "Dedicated" graphics memory from OS API call and then make bogus decisions based on that (e.g. refuse to run=>PES, restrict available game resolution/settings =>SW:TOR, older Total War games, render incorrectly because they think they don't have room to load textures =>GTA IV). For this small set of games, having the BIOS option to preallocate memory (which the driver won't actually use) is a workaround to fool them into running correctly.