Systems

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GIGABYTE GB-BXi7H-5500 Broadwell BRIX Review

Over the last couple of years, the ultra-compact form factor (UCFF) has emerged as one of the bright spots in the troubled PC market. Intel’s NUC and GIGABYTE’s BRIX are the most popular lineups in this category. Intel’s 14nm Broadwell family was introduced into the market with the fanless Core M-based systems. The excellent performance of units based on Core-M has evoked interest in the performance of the upcoming NUC and BRIX units based on Broadwell-U. Intel is taking its time bringing the NUCs to market after officially announcing them at CES 2015. However, GIGABYTE sent over their premium Broadwell BRIX s SKU, the GB-BXi7H-5500, earlier this week. Read on to see what Broadwell-U brings to the UCFF PC market.

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GIGABYTE GB-BXi7H-5500 Broadwell BRIX Review

Over the last couple of years, the ultra-compact form factor (UCFF) has emerged as one of the bright spots in the troubled PC market. Intel’s NUC and GIGABYTE’s BRIX are the most popular lineups in this category. Intel’s 14nm Broadwell family was introduced into the market with the fanless Core M-based systems. The excellent performance of units based on Core-M has evoked interest in the performance of the upcoming NUC and BRIX units based on Broadwell-U. Intel is taking its time bringing the NUCs to market after officially announcing them at CES 2015. However, GIGABYTE sent over their premium Broadwell BRIX s SKU, the GB-BXi7H-5500, earlier this week. Read on to see what Broadwell-U brings to the UCFF PC market.

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ASRock VisionX 471D Review – Evolutionary Upgrades for a Powerful mini-PC

ASRock has been one of the few motherboard vendors to focus on mini-PCs targeting the HTPC and portable gaming markets. Starting from the ION-based nettop days, they have consistently refreshed the mini-PC lineup in sync with Intel’s product cycle. We reviewed the Haswell-based VisionX 420D last September. Instead of waiting for Broadwell / Skylake, ASRock has taken the opportunity of falling flash memory prices to bring out a mid-generation update in the form of the VisionX 471D. With a Core i7-4712MQ and a 256 GB mSATA SSD under the hood, ASRock manages to address two important improvement aspects that we noted in our VisionX 420D review. Do the additional capabilities come with any caveats? Are there tangible improvements in real-world workloads? Read on to see how the VisionX 471D fares in our mini-PC evaluation routine.

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ASRock VisionX 471D Review – Evolutionary Upgrades for a Powerful mini-PC

ASRock has been one of the few motherboard vendors to focus on mini-PCs targeting the HTPC and portable gaming markets. Starting from the ION-based nettop days, they have consistently refreshed the mini-PC lineup in sync with Intel’s product cycle. We reviewed the Haswell-based VisionX 420D last September. Instead of waiting for Broadwell / Skylake, ASRock has taken the opportunity of falling flash memory prices to bring out a mid-generation update in the form of the VisionX 471D. With a Core i7-4712MQ and a 256 GB mSATA SSD under the hood, ASRock manages to address two important improvement aspects that we noted in our VisionX 420D review. Do the additional capabilities come with any caveats? Are there tangible improvements in real-world workloads? Read on to see how the VisionX 471D fares in our mini-PC evaluation routine.

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ECS LIVA X Review: A Fanless Bay Trail-M mini-PC

Over the last couple of years, mini-PCs in the ultra-compact form factor (UCFF) have emerged as one of the bright spots in the troubled PC market. ECS first took on this market with the help of the LIVA mini-PC. They have iterated fast to resolve some…