News - Gigabyte Brix is a powerful ultra compact HTPC

[HEXUS]

A choice of processors from Celeron to Core i7 will be available.

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[crossy]

Gigabyte going to use this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLKvponqV4Q to advertise their new gear? (ending maybe nsfw)

Then again, maybe not...

[JSanders]

Intel NUC with more options and USB3.

[sykobee]

Hmm, a couple more USB ports wouldn't go amiss. Does it have Bluetooth for a keyboard? I wouldn't mind a version using a low power AMD Richland, or a cheap ChromeOS/Linux option using an Exynos Octa.

[watercooled]

It has many of the shortcomings of the NUC, but at least they don't have Intel's marketing team picking out any half-decent features to avoid making a product people might actually want. At least you have the option of some different CPUs, but I'm not overly optimistic about price - the 'U' CPUs aren't exactly stellar value considering they're just low TDP dual cores with various features disabled.

[bledd]

They should pack these with USB ports. Yes, you can get a usb hub connected to it, but it should have at least 4 ports.

[Noxvayl]

More USB ports and the option for AMD processors please.

Two family members of mine would be happy to spend £100 on a box like this, but I doubt it would hit that price point.

[Tarinder]

I wonder if this is named after a Gigabyte employee that we know - Colin Brix?

[cjs150]

Without pricing it is impossible to know whether this is a good idea or not. Would make an excellent Windows Server for me

[watercooled]

You'd be limited to USB drives for storage though.

[cjs150]

Watercooled: with a 6TB NAS no I would not!

Windows 8 does not like NAS's (I think 7 has similar "foibles") - some juvenile designer at MS decided that everyone should be in the cloud - so I am thinking about pulling it all together with a low powered Windows server box.

[watercooled]

You wouldn't have a choice, there's no internal space for drives - all you can use is mSATA SSDs. Unless you mean a separate NAS, but then what's the server for?

Windows doesn't like it if a mapped drive is unavailable, which will delay login time significantly and cause explorer to hang if you look at the drive sideways. And then you have authentication/credentials problems, how *dare* you want to use a different login and/or password for your NAS than your Windows login! It's not terribly CPU-efficient either. Unfortunately we're stuck with it unless another decent protocol comes along

[kingpotnoodle]

Windows doesn't like it if a mapped drive is unavailable, which will delay login time significantly and cause explorer to hang if you look at the drive sideways. And then you have authentication/credentials problems, how *dare* you want to use a different login and/or password for your NAS than your Windows login! It's not terribly CPU-efficient either. Unfortunately we're stuck with it unless another decent protocol comes along

I solved all that rubbish with an Active Directory at home. No more authentication issues :-)

[watercooled]

AD can be a nightmare in and of itself though. Aside from implementation problems (and needing a 'pro' version of Windows), there's the issue with logging in if the server isn't available.

[devBunny]

"Power of a tower"? Yeah, right, if you buy a bunch of 'em and make a stack.

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_lookup.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-3537U+%40+2.00GHz&id=1845

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