Gigabyte’s Brix line of mini-desktops has already shown that a tiny PC can pack some serious punch. But now the company is kicking things up a notch by cramming a full-blown gaming PC into a desktop that’s not much larger than a small stack of CD cases.
The Gigabyte Brix Gaming is a 5″ x 4.5″ x 2.3″ desktop computer with an AMD A8-5557M processor and Radeon R9 M275X graphics. It’s got enough power to handle modern PC games, but it’s small enough to hold in one hand.
The Brix Gaming features HDMI and Mini Displayort, 4 USB 3.0 ports, a headphone jack, Ethernet, 802.11ac WiFi, and Bluetooth 4.0.
Gigabyte will sell this model as a barebones system. While it comes with an AMD processor, you’ll need to supply memory, storage, and operating system yourself. It has room for an mSATA solid state drive ofr a 2.5 inch SSD or hard drive and there are 2 DDR3 SODIMM slots for memory.
Bringing your own memory and storage helps you customize the device the way you see fit — but it also means you’ll have to pay full price for a Windows license if you want to install Microsoft’s operating system. Fortunately these days you don’t necessarily need Windows on a gaming machine. You can grab a preview version of SteamOS for free and run many (but certainly not all) games available for Valve’s Steam gaming platform.
via Tom’s Hardware
Hackintosh?
HOw much?
Radeon RN M275X? What? Doesn’t the A8-5557M have HD 8550G graphics?
Presumably they can work together in Crossfire.
Isn’t this the exact same thing as the MainGear Spark they showed off at CES? I guess Gigabyte probably built it for them, just seems like MainGear wont benefit much if Gigabyte is selling it on their own as well.
Whats with the move to expensive DIMM tech? SO DIMM an 8GB is around $100 make these tiny PC’s pretty pricy. Then add into that a mini Hard drive etc. Its not like you can toss in stuff you have laying around.
From the quick research I just did, an 8 GB low-voltage DDR3-1600 laptop RAM kit is $77 and an 8 GB standard voltage DDR3-1600 desktop RAM kit is just $7 less. I would gladly pay a $7 premium for the space savings.
Size. Making it big enough to fit DIMM modules would almost make it the same size as some mini-ITX or other already existing custom mini-PCs.
Desktop DIMMs (133mm / 5.25 inches) are literally too long to fit on this board!
shouldnt’ that be a msata SSD AND 2.5″ sata drive?
I wonder how it does with Borderlands 2?
Should handle it fine. BL2 isn’t really that demanding of a game.
Interesting.
It would be great to bring a 4th player into our group and this may be a low cost way to do it.