GIGABYTE BRIX GB-BXBT-1900 Review: A Bay Trail UCFF PC
by Ganesh T S on October 24, 2014 12:10 PM ESTPower Consumption & Thermal Performance
The power consumption at the wall was measured with a 1080p display being driven through the HDMI port. In the graphs below, we compare the idle and load power of the GIGABYTE GB-BXBT-1900 with other low power PCs evaluated before. For load power consumption, we ran Furmark 1.12.0 and Prime95 v27.9 together. The numbers are not beyond the realm of reason for the combination of hardware components in the machine.
As expected, the power consumption numbers closely track the performance of the system. The BXBT-1900 might be on the lower end of the performance spectrum, but it is beaten only by the passively cooled ECS-LIVA in the power consumption numbers.
The active cooling for the SoC in the system ensures that the thermal performance is good. We don't see any thermal throttling and the temperatures are well within specifications even when the system is subject to power viruses. The various clocks in the system as well as the temperatures within the unit are presented below. We start with the system at idle, followed by 30 minutes of pure CPU loading. This is followed by another 30 minutes of both CPU and GPU being loaded simultaneously. After this, the CPU load was removed, allowing the GPU to be loaded alone for another 30 minutes.
The frequency characteristics above indicate that the CPU cores clock in at the maximum turbo rate of 2.41 GHz for the entire 1 hour duration of CPU loading. With the CPU load removed, the frequency of the cores drops down to around 1.3 GHz. The GPU clock remains at a steady 800 MHz under full loading. With both CPU and GPU loaded, the core temperature is only around 65 C, quite far from the maximum junction temperature of 105 C. All in all, the thermal design is excellent, making us wonder what could be achieved with a fanless system.
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xistic - Friday, October 24, 2014 - link
How does something like this compare to an old Intel Core Duo with 4GB of RAM? I've got a headless linux box I'm looking to replace. Currently the Core Duo is overkill for what I use it for. (Team Fortress 2 MvM, jabber, Rhodecode and Teamspeak servers all with low traffic. Seriously, never get above 20% CPU and 25% RAM consumed.)kpb321 - Friday, October 24, 2014 - link
You can see for yourself at:http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1227?vs=60
Single threaded performance seems to be ~half that of a Core Duo but as the J1900 is a quad core chip it's multi-threaded performance is a little bit better.
lioncat55 - Friday, October 24, 2014 - link
While I don't have any numbers that is not the right chip. You are looking at a Core 2 Duo and not a Core Due. You are also looking at a Core 2 Duo part that has a higher base clock than the J1900 has boost.A better look would be the http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1227?vs=64. Its bast clock is 2.4Ghz.
xistic - Friday, October 24, 2014 - link
I forgot there was a difference. It's a Core 2 Duo.xistic - Friday, October 24, 2014 - link
And thank you, this answers my question.LostAlone - Saturday, October 25, 2014 - link
Personally I wouldn't be looking to spend anything to replace a headless box unless you need more performance. I mean, I know that having a tower instead of micro-box isn't ideal, but you'd be throwing away all the benefits of having a more powerful system too, like being able to handle more traffic (say you invite a bunch of people to you TS server for a specific event) and whatever else you may possibly want to do in the future.A core 2 duo is a nice chip, and certainly would be up for doing some light media serving and transcoding duties if that's what you want to do, probably the most stressful home-server activities. Maybe that's not what you want to do right now, but having the choice to add those capabilities is great.
From my point of view moving to a system this underpowered would strictly be a downgrade. It'll cost you money to do the same exact thing you are doing now, and has none of the potential for expansion.
Ratman6161 - Sunday, October 26, 2014 - link
I don't know what they will charge for this if/when it ever comes to the US but the MSRP listed in the story is more than I paid for an Ivy Bridge i3 model a couple of years ago. Could probably get an i3 for the same or not much more and would probably be a better choice unless you needed that ability to do an internal 2.5 inch drive.zepi - Friday, October 24, 2014 - link
I'm trying to read the network performance evaluation, but i can only find that your router is 5GHz prefered, but nowhere does it state if this particular Realtek supports it or not.Often in cities 2.4GHz spectrum is totally blocked and any 5GHz is faster than 3x3 2.4GHz resticted 802.11n setup.
Ofc this is not a problem in suburbs. Basically in most places i've lived over the last few years 2.4GHz is pretty much unusable with huge packet loss and speeds down to single digit megabits due to interference from neighbours. 5GHz band is less problematic as it mostly stays inside owners walls.
Ryan Smith - Friday, October 24, 2014 - link
The Realtek radio is 2.4GHz only.ganeshts - Friday, October 24, 2014 - link
This is a 2.4 GHz only single band mPCIe card. Realtek RTL8723BEWill make a note to add single or dual band nature in the table on the first page in future articles