Exclusive: Gigabyte Brix Gaming UHD Inside Pics and CPU Temps

Earlier this year, Gigabyte unveiled the Brix Gaming UHD and it looked to be the most powerful Brix mini-PC ever designed to target the gamer market. The Brix Gaming UHD is still on track to be released by the the end of the year and at IDF 2016 we were able to witness Gigabyte remove the enclosure on this Intel NUC alternative for the first time.

The Brix Gaming UHD measures in at 220 x 110 x 110 mm and comes in a sleek looking back and silver tower. Gigabyte hopes this design solves the noisy fan complaints that plagued the original Brix Gaming systems as this entire design was drawn up to improve air flow thanks to being able to use a larger fan.

Gigabyte was able to take off the cover for us on their demo system to show us for the very first time what the inside looks like! As you can see the CPU and GPU are on different PCBs that are connected with two cables and each has a large heatsink covering the chip to help keep them cool. The DDR4 memory slots and M.2 storage slot is located in the middle of the housing, so it looks like this will be a bit tricky to work on and is likely why most will be sold pre-built.

The Gigabyte Brix Gaming UHD on display at IDF 2016 was the Gigabyte GB-BNi7HG4-950 BRIX. Inside this model is an Intel Core i7-6700HQ quad-core processor with Hyper-Threading (2.6GHz base/3.5GHz boost), an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 950 GPU, 32GB (2x16GB) HyperX Impact DDR4 SO-DIMM memory running 3000 MHz and a HyperX Predator 960GB PCIe M.2 SSD. You also have an Intel Wireless-AC 8260 card for dual-band 2×2 Wi-Fi 802.11ac and Bluetooth 4.2. Not bad hardware for a device that obviously has some size constraints when it comes to what you can shoehorn inside it. It should be noted that Kingston was using a barebone version and installed their own hardware inside to showcase it. We aren’t sure what the barebone version will be priced at, but we have been told that a fully configured model with Windows 10 already installed will be around $1300. A wild guess might put a barebone model at $899 to $999 as it wouldn’t come with an M.2 PCIe SSD, DDR4 memory kit or a Windows 10 license.

Since the Gigabyte Brix Gaming UHD was running in the Kingston booth it gave us the opportunity to look at the CPU temperatures. Kingston was running MemTestPro to show the 32GB HyperX Impact DDR4 3000MHz memory kit was stable, but it also put the CPU at 100% load. We took a quick peak into AIDA64 and saw the CPU sitting at 92C.

Not exactly a cool running machine, but AIDA64 showed that it wasn’t thermal throttling and the system was running all the tests at 3.1GHz, which is well over the CPUs base clock speed. We can’t comment about noise as we were on the floor of a trade show with hundreds of people walking around.

We hope that Gigabyte can launch the BRIX Gaming UHD here soon we’ve been talking about it for months. The discrete NVIDIA GeForce GTX 950 graphics card is nice, but the GeForce 10-series is rolling out and there doesn’t appear to be an upgrade path for the graphics on this ~$1300 system. It will be interesting to see if Gigabyte rolls this PC out later this year with GTX 950 graphics or if they’ll update to GTX 1050/1060 graphics. The GeForce GTX 950 reference design has a 95W TDP rating and a GeForce GTX 1060 3GB/6GB is 120W, so we don’t think that is going to be likely for this form factor if we are hitting 92C on the CPU with basically no load on the GPU.