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  • arno1 - Thursday, October 31, 2013 - link

    Realtek LANs? Pass.
  • ghm3 - Thursday, October 31, 2013 - link

    This was my reaction as well. Give it an Intel NIC and the BRIX s would be a fantastic little HTPC/seedbox.
  • HisDivineOrder - Thursday, October 31, 2013 - link

    So close... yet so far away.

    Realtec anything? Only dual core? No Iris Pro?

    Gigabyte, you were close, but then you skimped. Tsk, tsk. They should have paid a little more for Intel quality LAN's, quad-cores, and the high end graphics at the high end since you can't upgrade these things.

    Then maybe they'd have an impact. Alas, no.
  • Samus - Thursday, October 31, 2013 - link

    I don't understand, isn't the network layer embedded in the H81/H87 chipset. So they just need to use an Intel PHY. That's like $2.
  • ZeDestructor - Thursday, October 31, 2013 - link

    I wonder the same every time I see a non-intel implementation....
  • tomd2 - Thursday, October 31, 2013 - link

    So you're saying GIGABYTE is charging more money for crappier components. Looking at their motherboards with H81/H87 chipsets, they mostly have Realtek NICs. I wonder why.
  • ZeDestructor - Friday, November 1, 2013 - link

    Well, take a quick look at all the Z87 boards with 32-bit PCI slots. Z87 has no support whatsoever for PCI, so EACH of those PCI ports go to a PCI-to-PCIe bridge of some sort... and yet an all PCIe board costs more....

    Pricing... it's messed up...
  • Daniel Egger - Thursday, October 31, 2013 - link

    Agree. Unfortunately my no-Realtek helped me end up with a POS Lenovo X121e laptop because that was the only light, powerful and affordable laptop at the time not having Realtek LAN. Next time I'd definitely take Realtek over anything that comes from Lenovo.
  • ZeDestructor - Thursday, October 31, 2013 - link

    Realtek WLAN? run away

    Realtak 8111 LAN? unless you have serious issues, its OK for client workloads, so stuff like torrents and HTPC will be fine. I used one variant a while ago (HP tm2 convertible tablet, Penryn era) and it took 9K jumbo frames with over 950Mbit/s speeds just fine...
  • ZeDestructor - Thursday, October 31, 2013 - link

    Oh, and for the WLAN, if I got one (the i3 looks particularly nice to me), I'd just drop in an Intel 7260AC (not even a BCM4352, linux drivers are crap afaik) card instead of whatever's bundled. Thankfully WLAN cards are still swappable across all machines...
  • petes8k - Thursday, October 31, 2013 - link

    I had some Realtek NICs not too long ago on a CentOS box. They couldn't support jumbo frames over 4 K. Hardware offloading didn't work well so a lot of stuff had to be done in software within the network stack which caused unnecessary CPU load. I don't have the board anymore. It got replaced with another board with Intel NICs instead.

    Going anything Realtek is really a hit or miss thing.
  • shiznit - Friday, November 1, 2013 - link

    reason for jumbo frames?
  • ZeDestructor - Friday, November 1, 2013 - link

    Lower CPU/NIC/switch load and less overhead. Enable it if you can, there's no real loss if you don't: most packet fragmentation is done in hardware by the Ethernet controller.
  • ghm3 - Thursday, October 31, 2013 - link

    In my experience the opposite is true. In my first HTPC build a few years ago I used an integrated Realtek NIC. In short order all traffic over the NIC would completely stop every other day or so, requiring me to disable and re-enable the NIC to restore functionality. No amount of driver changes or tweaking had any effect on this.

    So I bought an Intel PCI NIC and it worked flawlessly 24/7/365 for the next 18 months or so I used the system.

    This is far from the only problem I've experienced with Realtek NICs, just the one that's affected my own personal machines the most. I'm not saying Realteks don't have a place for casual/cheap environments, but I'll never trust a Realtek NIC and don't want them in any of my systems, most especially tiny systems that don't have expansion support to let me replace it with something else.

    Putting an Intel NIC in these and bumping the retail cost by $5 or $10 is a no-brainer to me, if someone like Asus comes along and builds a similar system with an Intel I'd gladly pay a few more bucks for it.
  • Klimax - Friday, November 1, 2013 - link

    That first issue reminds me of Atheros. On two computers it behaved same way, during large load driver failed. Used used Intel NIC and all was well... :D
  • ZeDestructor - Friday, November 1, 2013 - link

    Interesting.. I haven't used a Realtek NIC in a 24/7 environment, so I have no idea how it performs there. The issue as you said is the utter lack of consistency, and the main reason I like Intel: they have consistently reliable and feature-filled controllers at all price levels.
  • monstercameron - Thursday, October 31, 2013 - link

    what about kabini brix?
  • Shivansps - Thursday, October 31, 2013 - link

    Pointless unless they sell for $200, Gigabyte has a Richland BRIX too, thats more interesting.
  • monstercameron - Thursday, October 31, 2013 - link

    more pointless than an i3 or celeron brix?
  • Shivansps - Thursday, October 31, 2013 - link

    Yes, because a I3-3227U is already better all around than a A4-5000, the A6-5200 is slightly better on CPU. It does not justify having to do another PCB just for the 5200, we dont know what will happen about the 2955U YET, but that one is just sharing the same PCB as the bigger models, so we get it as a side effect. Gigabyte did the right thing by choosing the Intel Haswell ULV lineup and also provide a AMD Richland model for higher IGP performance. There is just no point on Kabini here.
  • XZerg - Thursday, October 31, 2013 - link

    why no eSata? That alone is a deal breaker for me as there can only be msata in the system. With BRIX s, at least that is a bit more alleviated. Note: USB3 is great but it suffers while doing lot of small IO.

    i presume these systems have the cpus soldered - Ganesh can you confirm? If not that would be great when the BRIX s is out.
  • XZerg - Thursday, October 31, 2013 - link

    i found out the cpus are bga and so soldered. damn...
  • ghm3 - Thursday, October 31, 2013 - link

    I doubt there's much demand for eSATA anymore, especially with Thunderbolt starting to mature more. 20Gbps is a nice step up from 3Gbps (unless I'm mistaken eSATA never moved to 6Gbps SATA III speeds). That much bandwidth makes daisy-chaining quite feasible without any performance hit, so I'd personally like to see wider Thunderbolt peripheral adoption.
  • ZeDestructor - Thursday, October 31, 2013 - link

    eSATA moved along. My Sabertooth Z77 has it and I use it decently often to access external disks via a dock.
  • izmanq - Thursday, October 31, 2013 - link

    i'm more interested in AMD ones, where are they ?
  • nomaddave - Thursday, October 31, 2013 - link

    These don't seem like a good value for the specs. Do I miss something here, or is it all about the convenience of the form factor?
  • ghm3 - Thursday, October 31, 2013 - link

    Convenience is almost always more costly. Mobile parts are pricey. This is basically an ultrabook in a box instead of in a laptop; the tray price alone for the i7-4300u is $398.
  • gevorg - Thursday, October 31, 2013 - link

    "This configuration (with space for a 2.5" drive)"
    How will the 2.5" drive connect, isn't this mSATA only?
  • XZerg - Thursday, October 31, 2013 - link

    read carefully... there is a BRIX "s" version which will support the 2.5" drive.

    i am hoping to see a quad core cpu in such a format with the 2.5" drive.
  • Lonyo - Thursday, October 31, 2013 - link

    Regular BRIX will only have mSATA, but the BRIX S will have a SATA port on the motherboard, possibly in addition to mSATA. There are pics floating around on the internet of the SATA port enabled "S".
  • Ikefu - Thursday, October 31, 2013 - link

    What I would really love to see is a couple I2C or SPI headers on the motherboard. Then we could have the Intel turbo charged version of a raspberry pi and do some really cool maker/robotics projects.
  • ZeDestructor - Thursday, October 31, 2013 - link

    See Quark ;)
  • azazel1024 - Thursday, October 31, 2013 - link

    Did I miss something? This is very close to Intel NUC specs, but a fair amount cheaper.

    Depending on what "Intel HD graphics" means for the Celeron version and its pricing, that one could be a perfect HTPC. A low capacity mSATA, 2x2GiB SODIMMs added in and I'd imagine you could emulate up through at least PS2 and xBox games without breaking a big sweat.

    1080p24 playback, some older games if you really want too. Netflix and Amazon will work just fine for streaming on it.

    Store everything on the network that is possible and a 32GiB or even 64GiB mSATA drive would be plenty.

    Yeah, if you want to play current PC games on it, you need much beefier specs, but then just get a "real" computer and hook it up to a TV.

    Anyway, it seems to check all the boxes I need for a HTPC. Just a question of whether or not the Vita TV will make it to US shores or not on whether I'll get something like the BRIX down the road or not.
  • Death666Angel - Thursday, October 31, 2013 - link

    "Intel HD graphics" means HD2000, so 6EUs at around 1GHz clock speed.
  • d1nn0 - Friday, November 1, 2013 - link

    The audio chip is only 2+2 channels, so I would pass - I'd like to have a 5.1 or a 7.1 quality audio chip in my HTPC.
    But for a lean PC hidden at the back of a monitor - that would be a great choice, especially with a cordless keyboard+mouse.
  • ZeDestructor - Friday, November 1, 2013 - link

    Wouldn't you pass the audio via DisplayPort or HDMI though? At that point having a shitty analog audio setup is irrelevant since you would just stream it straight to your TV/receiver instead...
  • dj_aris - Thursday, October 31, 2013 - link

    What about Iris Pro BRIX?
  • funtasticguy - Thursday, October 31, 2013 - link

    Me too! This is what I have eagerly waiting for. Some called it the Brix 2 Gaming System. I was so disappointed that no new information was made regarding the Iris Pro Brixs. Gigabyte, please tell us something soon or I will move on to something else.
  • Acarney - Saturday, November 9, 2013 - link

    Ya! I was under the impression they were going to release a unit with the i7 4770R chip, which would be the ONLY use I've seen so far of that high end Iris Pro desktop chip! I can not BELIEVE there has been zero adoption in that chip so far. I would think that would be the perfect HTPC in that it should be able to handle almost max MadVR settings, is damn near as fast as the fastest i7 Haswell, AND should be able to play most games at 1920 res with low (maybe even med) settings and games from a couple years ago with higher settings...

    I've had $1,000 set aside for a few months now since hearing about the Iris Pro Brix ready to buy it and then try to hack it into an HD-Plex fabless case (65w TDP would be no problem to cool!) and dump in one or two 4Tb hard drives and a CetoniTV 6....
  • petes8k - Thursday, October 31, 2013 - link

    Where are the fanless Haswell mini boxes?
  • DigitalFreak - Thursday, October 31, 2013 - link

    The Intel i5 NUC looks like a much better deal than the Gigabyte one. http://www.amazon.com/Intel-Power-Cable-Mini-DDR3/...

    Better CPU, HD 5000 graphics and should have an Intel NIC.
  • DigitalFreak - Thursday, October 31, 2013 - link

    http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/nuc/nuc-kit...
  • djscrew - Friday, November 1, 2013 - link

    CAN YOU DUAL SCREEN? mini displayport and HDMI
  • djscrew - Friday, November 1, 2013 - link

    nvm, question answered on their website... but I have to buy my own ram? that makes no damn sense
  • ZeDestructor - Friday, November 1, 2013 - link

    That's how barebone machines have always worked....

    Don't forget your msata SSD while you're at it.
  • Hrel - Friday, November 1, 2013 - link

    Given the specs these are about $100 too expensive...
  • coolhund - Saturday, November 2, 2013 - link

    They just dont get it.
    MORE USB PORTS!
  • romrunning - Wednesday, November 6, 2013 - link

    It has 4 USB 3.0 ports - how many more do you need??

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