Gigabyte BRIX Pro Review

Inside the BRIX Pro - Part 2

Looking at the other side of the motherboard, all you can see is the CPU cooler. It comes with a “blower” fan that removes hot air from the BRIX Pro.

Figure 11: CPU cooler

Removing the fan, the heavy, pure copper, CPU heatsink is exposed.

Figure 12: heatsink

Removing the cooler, you can see the CPU (at the center, soldered to the motherboard) and the Intel HM87 chipset.

Figure 13: heatsink removed

The Core i7-4770R is a high-end CPU, with four cores (eight threads thanks to the Hyper-Threading technology), 6 MiB of L3 cache, 3.2 GHz nominal clock and 3.9 GHz turbo clock, and 65 W TDP.

The Intel Iris Pro Graphics 5200 GPU embedded in the processor has 40 cores running at 1.3 GHz. It has a 128 MiB eDRAM cache memory embedded, which allows it to reach 3D performance similar to discrete video cards.

The Gigabit Ethernet interface is controlled by a Realtek RTL8111G chip.

The audio is generated by the chipset using the Realtek ALC269 codec, which supports only 2+2 channels, providing 98 dB signal-to-noise ratio for the analog outputs, 98 dB signal-to-noise ratio for the analog inputs, and up to 192 kHz sampling rate for outputs and 96 kHz for the inputs, with 24-bit resolution. It is a shame Gigabyte used such a low-end codec, which limits the audio capabilities of the computer, unless you use an external audio interface.