GIGABYTE GB-BXi7H-5500 Broadwell BRIX Review
by Ganesh T S on January 29, 2015 7:00 AM ESTGaming Benchmarks
Intel's integrated GPUs don't have a big name in the gaming community. Once in a while, Intel throws in a surprise. In the Haswell family, CPUs with Iris Pro graphics gave a pleasant surprise to casual gamers. In this section, we will identify whether the Intel HD Graphics 5500 in the Core i7-5500U can provide an acceptable gaming experience.
For the purpose of benchmarking, we chose four different games (Sleeping Dogs, Tomb Raider, Bioshock Infinite and DiRT Showdown) at three different quality levels. As someone focusing on HTPCs and multimedia aspects, I rarely get to process gaming benchmarks, even while evaluating GPUs. One of the aspects that I feared was spending lot of time in installing the same games again and again on different PCs under the review scanner. The solution was to go the Steam route. Unfortunately, Steam also likes to keep the game files updated. A quick online search revealed that Steam could make use of an external drive for storing the game executables and downloadable content. With the Steam drive on-the-go use-case being read-heavy, the Corsair Flash Voyager GS USB 3.0 128GB Flash Drive (with read speeds of up to 275 MBps) was ideal for use as a portable Steam drive.
Sleeping Dogs
Tomb Raider
Bioshock Infinite
Tomb Raider
All the gaming benchmarks show a clear trend - users are getting better and better gaming performance with each successive generation of Intel GPUs. The Iris Pro-equipped systems still lead the pack by quite a distance, but, the power consumption profile is quite different. For the considered games, the GB-BXi7H-5500 can provde 30+ fps only in the lowest quality settings. These results are not entirely unexpected for Broadwell GT2. Systems based on Broadwell GT3e graphics (Iris Pro) are going to be the ones targeting the gaming community.
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toshz - Friday, January 30, 2015 - link
Does anyone know what's the difference between the AC7260 and AC7265 wireless adapters?I was looking into purchasing the AC7260 to update my ultrabook (currently using AC3160) and then I saw the AC7265. Couldn't find any difference between them on Intel's site.
Thanks.
kevith - Friday, January 30, 2015 - link
Nice review, but why have you stopped opening the cases? I would be interested in one of these, but changing/adding cooling is a must.jrs77 - Friday, January 30, 2015 - link
Allthough I very much like the idea of the smallest PC possible, the NUC or the BRIX (or anything else in this formfactor) is still too expensive compared to a more powerful and better customizable mITX-system.I can build a low-powered mITX-system for $600 (i5-4590T, H97 board, 16GB RAM, 256GB SSD, 20x20x8cm case incl 90W PSU), which leaves me with money for the Win8.1 license (the one you didn't include in your price there!). Such a system, has much more value and can be strapped to the back of your screen not using anymore space than the NUC or BRIX.
zodiacfml - Friday, January 30, 2015 - link
I agree. That's what I thought of this review. The processor is just too pricey.Someone could buy a notebook with an i5-Haswell with a AMD/Nvidia GPU near that price.
piasabird - Friday, January 30, 2015 - link
If most of what you plan on doing viewing video an i3 with 4 megs of cache will work just fine.deathwombat - Friday, January 30, 2015 - link
Does the top of the box actually say "Supports 2.5" Hard Drivers"? At least have someone proofread your packaging!eanazag - Friday, January 30, 2015 - link
I agree on the networking. 2x2 Wifi would be better and Intel NIC. I dislike the Realtek NICs. With an Intel NIC there are more options from the software side, like a tiny VM server.vision33r - Saturday, January 31, 2015 - link
Intel has no pressure to improve performance.Mikad - Tuesday, February 3, 2015 - link
This is just a small thing, but it has bothered me much lately: Many of the new articles have a quite bad "featured image". For example this one: Just a picture of the box with a bad lightning. The product itself is interesting but the picture is a turn off. IMHO it would be great if you could put more effort into these pictures.Teknobug - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
Looks like gaming is out of the question, at least at 1920x1080. May as well go with an i3 or N2940 and play via Steam stream from a gaming PC.Otherwise everything else about this is awesome.