Gigabyte Brix Pro GB-BXi7-4770R Ultra Compact Barebones System Review

news · April 21, 2014

In the early stages of last year, Intel released one of the biggest

products of 2013 into the market place and no Ã¢Â€Â“ it was not Haswell.

What I am referring to here is the Next Unit of Computing, or NUC as

it is more commonly known. Part of what makes this product so special

is its ultra compact design, but on top of that, the system that's

tucked inside has a little more to offer over what one would expect

from a system of its size. When we took a look at the first generation

NUC and also Gigabyte's own first generation Brix, the results that we

got back showed the performance to be somewhat average, leaving them

at the entry-level end of the scale. Consequently, these systems are

ideal for basic home office use, but if you want a little more grunt

from your system then sadly these early units just won't cut the

mustard.

Since those reviews went live, we have seen a number of Brix branded

systems come out of the Gigabyte factories and towards the end of last

year we caught wind that there was something special on the way which

could potentially remodel the entry-level image that the first

generation systems have given us. The question is though, can we

really get desktop performance out of a unit this small? Granted this

new creation is twice as tall as the first generation Brix, but are we

getting substantially more performance as well? Bring forward the Brix

Pro GB-BXi7-4770R.

When we take a look at the spec list that the Brix Pro has on offer,

the biggest difference that we have to note is the step up to Intel's

high performance i7 Haswell CPU. Obviously we shouldn't be expecting a

4770k to be residing in a system of these dimensions, however the

4770R that we do have is actually not a million miles off what its

bigger brother has to offer. With a TDP of 65w and a core clock speed

of 3.2GHz boosting up to 3.9GHz, there is certainly a lot of poke

beneath the covers so we have got the spirit of a 4770k, although

overclocking is not present and the power envelope has been reduced to

save on the power consumption.

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