Gigabyte Brix GB-BXA8-5557 review: This noisy mini-PC packs a punch - riveraferemabight

At a Glance

Expert's Rating

Pros

Substantial performance across the board
Option to have to a higher degree one storage drive
Inexpensive

Cons

Graduate power usance for its size
Implausibly noisy fans

Our Finding of fact

This inexpensive bare-bones system isn't quite as cheap as it seems, due to its higher great power use. And thanks to its loud fans, the Brix GB-BXA8-5557M also won't work out well in scenarios that necessitate peaceful. Motionless, IT's touchy to argue with the amount of operation you get from it.

When choosing between quiet, power, and affordability, GB opted for the latter two in its Brix GB-BXA8-5557. The upshot is an low-priced, compact system that you can't quite hide away and ignore: Its fans spin audibly when written material a document, looking up something connected Google, Oregon observance a movie.

But if you can handle a little noise, you get a peppy system that doesn't dig deep into your wallet. It equally handled the spread of tasks thrown at information technology—and with a relatively small gap in performance compared to Sir Thomas More expensive mini-PCs.

Specifications

At heart this version of the Brix is an AMD quadruplet-marrow A8-5557M APU run at 2.1GHz, Radeon HD 8550G graphics, an mSATA slot, a 2.5-inch SATA 6Gbps slot, a replaceable Azurewave AW-CB161H dual-band 802.11ac Wi-Fi/Bluetooth 4.0 radio set card, and support for busy 16GB of DDR3L/1600MHz RAM. For benchmarks, I installed a 500GB Samsung EVO 850 mSATA SSD, and 16GB (2x 8GB) of Crucial RAM.

Along the battlefront are two USB 3.0 ports and a earphone jack. On the back of the machine you'll find a full-sized HDMI port, a mini DisplayPort with a level bes resolve of 4096×2160 at 30Hz, a gigabit ethernet jack, two additional USB 3.0 ports, and a Kensington engage port.

The BXA8-5557 is among the larger mini-PCs in both width and height, measuring 2.35 x 5.04 x 4.54 inches (59.6 X 128 x 115.4mm). While IT has a modest amount of heft once you've installed components, it isn't so bulky that you commode't confiscate it to the bet on of a monitor—Gigabyte has enclosed a VESA mount and the ability to power the Brix on via USB. (You scarce necessitate to toggle that feature on through the BIOS menu.)

Performance and use

Despite its first price tag, the BXA8-5557 plowed through basic tasks with aplomb. It posted a score of 2,376 in PCMark8's Work Received benchmark, trailing not to a fault far behind other mini-PCs that cost hundreds of dollars more.

PCMark 8 Work Conventional Benchmark Chart

You will remark that IT's a trifle less powerful, however, atomic number 3 it occasionally pauses while doing Sir Thomas More intensive tasks. And on that point's nonmoving a far-famed difference when additive multi-threaded tasks, like encryption videos in Handbrake. The BXA8-5557 took about 2 hours and 47 minutes to convert a 30GB 1080p MKV file to an Mechanical man tablet–friendly MP4. The next quickest mini-PC in our roundup, the Acer Revo One RL85-UR45 (running an Intel Core i5-5200U Broadwell-U chip), was about a half-hr faster. That's tangible, tied if 2 hours and 19 minutes isn't particularly quick.

Still, the BXA8-5557 smokes other tinny mini-PCs that prioritize quiet complete performance—for instance, the Zotac Zbox CI321 Nano (not part of this roundup, merely a publicize-bones system that also had a street Price nether $200 when it was available last year) crawled along at 7 hours and 9 minutes before finished its Handbrake encryption. To be fair to Zotac, it is a fanless design, whereas the Brix definitely has a fan. (I'll mouth more thereon in a brief snatch.)

While this Brix's gaming performance won't mean much to hardcore gamers, it still boasts results about on equality with Intel's NUC5i7RYH and its more expensive Broadwell-U C.P.U. in our Tomb Raider and BioShock Infinite benchmarks. With a cost difference of about $300 between the two bare-maraca systems' street prices (and possibly more overall, depending on how you configure to each one), these numbers encourage instance the bang you get for your buck.

In practice, though, the kind of games you'll play on this machine (if you do in the least) will be the less demanding screen out. And for whatsoever AAA titles, they North Korean won't look pretty.

As for storage, having both an mSATA and a standard SATA slot is a pleasant touch. You can enjoy SSD speeds for your primary drive in, while pickings advantage of a cheaper 2.5-inch hard-fought-saucer drive for bigger quantities of information. For example, with a Samsung EVO 850 mSATA drive, this Brix got an medium of 444MBps sequent read speed and 418.5MBps sequential drop a line speed in CrystalDiskMark 5.0.2. Brace that with a $60 1TB hard-disk drive, and you'll acquire quicker boot and incumbrance times while still having a decent amount of room for local media files.

The drawbacks

So what's the catch? You'll still be paying more for this level of performance even though you won't realise that in the up-front price. For a miniskirt-PC, the Brix all merely guzzles electricity, particularly in compare to its competition. Its peak draw was 75.6W during the gaming benchmarks, and often hovered in the low 50s. In contrast, the Intel NUC5i7RYH had a easy lay sop up of 54.4W, while the fanless Zotac Zbox CI321 Nano topped out at 25W.

The Brix BXA8-5557 is also yelled. During normal use, the volume of music or video has to be decently last to drown dead the fans. Low-level load, the political machine sounds similar a miniature jet engine—one that's thus cacophonic, you can see it very clearly from other parts of an office operating theatre home. It's tolerable if you motive power without too much affect on your pocketbook, simply it South Korean won't work out good if peace and quiet is a high priority.

Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/419429/gigabyte-brix-gb-bxa8-5557-review-this-noisy-mini-pc-packs-a-punch.html

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