The brix from gigabyte is a small form factor PC with an external 19 VDC power brick and as you may have guessed from the 19 VDC power brick, basically laptop origin internals.
It’s not a “thing” so much as a range of things, and therein lies the first problem, which one do you get?
I personally do not see the point in shoehorning an intel i7 into one of these babies, if I am going to run an i7 I want a full size case with lots of PCI-E slots, because that is one huge potential issue with the brix, forget expansion and upgrades, like the laptop the only thing you’ll be changing is the HDD and RAM.
Gigabyte have a store on amazon, so I opted for the celeron based unit, model number 3150, with gigabyte supplied and fitted 120 gig ssd and 4 gig of laptop style low voltage ram, with free prime delivery it runs to 250 quid.
This is barebones, so no OS, and the 3150 is based on the intel 14nm Intel® N3150 cpu, aka celeron, 4 cores and 6 watts power dissipation, and half the benchmark speeds of an i5
And there is the first issue, people dismiss it as being too weedy to do anything with, and for sure it is too weedy to play pretty much any kind of game except solitaire, and it is too weedy for heavy CAD work, or heavy video encoding, or a bunch of other tasks.
But, you’d be surprised what you can do with a celeron, I have an earlier 2 core version running my NAS box on a asus h81 micro atx board, and it can saturate the gigabit lan on reads and writes, and I can rdp in when it is doing that and see maybe 20% cpu usage.
We are both spoiled and ruined by the “one box must do anything and everything, and fast” mentality, for dedicated applications a modern 4 core celeron and limited to a maximum 8 gig of ram is more than more than enough for many, many, many tasks.
Sadly IMHO the only dedicated task most people can come up with for these is a dedicated media server, and they are used a lot to power screens in public spaces, but for 10x arduino money you have a genuine intel x86 compatible PC that will run win10 or the linux distro of your choice while staying silent and sipping the watts.
Add a 7″ touchscreen and you have a car pc that will blow away anything you can buy, including all the android based ones, for significantly less money than them, for just one example.
My own application is controlling a piece of cnc machinery.
So the one I have bought is 56.1x 107.6 x 114.4mm in size and has onboard Intel IEEE 802.11 ac, Dual Band Wi-Fi & Bluetooth 4.0 NGFF M.2 cardUSB3 ports and so on as expected.
Part II to follow…. which will be win10 install, setup / config / lockdown, app software and observations about performance and usage etc with some rdp screens showing actual resource usage etc.
