Brix mini-PC Announced By Gigabyte, Featuring AMD APU

Gigabyte enters the mini-PC market with its Brix PC, having USB 3.0 standard on every Brix variant and AMD APU, compared to other competitors like Inte’s NUC.

The Brix GB-BXA8-5545 features AMD’s A8-5545M APU (based on Richland chipset), having four CPU cores clocked at 1.7GHz and can go up to 2.7GHz when in Turbo Core mode, which is not bad for a 19W part. Best of all, it features Radeon HD 8510G graphics, with 384 VLIW4 cores. Although 384 cores sounds like a lot, bear in mind that this is a ULV part, so the GPU is clocked at a relatively modest 450MHz, although it can hit 554MHz on Turbo. Basically it should be as fast as entry-level discrete cards from a couple of years ago, like the HD 5570 or GT 620.

According to early EU listings, Gigabyte has the Brix mini-PC at a price tag of €249. This makes it about 20 percent more expensive than a Jaguar A4-5000 barebones mini PC from Zotac. As for Intel NUC kits, you can get a Core i3-4010U system, i.e. a dual-core Haswell clocked at 1.7GHz with Intel HD Graphics 4400.

Sadly we still don’t know much about AMD’s Kaveri ULV plans, but thanks to better thermals we expect to see quite a few AMD-based mini PCs later this year.

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