Gigabyte Brix Gaming UHD Mini-PC Review – GB-BNi7HG4-950

By Nathan Kirsch

Gigabyte Brix Gaming UHD Performance Testing

cinebench-r15

The Gigabyte BRIX UHD Gaming PC Kit with the Intel Core i7-6700HQ pocessor and discrete GeForce GTX 950 GPU scored 99.17 FPS on the OpenGL benchmark. On the CPU side, the system was capable of 678 points on the multi-core CPU test and 136 points on the single CPU test.

  • Gigabyte BRIX BSi7H-6500 with the Intel Core i7-6500U processor scored 44.30 FPS on the OpenGL benchmark, 328 points on the multi-core CPU test and 130 points on the single CPU test.
  • Intel NUC NUC5i5RYK with the Intel Core i5-5350U processor scored 31.80 FPS on the OpenGL benchmark, 259 points on the multi-core CPU test and 107 points on the single CPU test.
  • Intel NUC NUC5PGYH with the Intel Pentium N3700 processor scored 14.18 FPS on the OpenGL benchmark, 134 points on the multi-core CPU test and 38 points on the single CPU test.
  • ECS LIVA X2 with the Intel Celeron N3050 processor scored 12.69 FPS on the OpenGL benchmark, 64 points on the multi-core CPU test and 34 points on the single CPU test.
  • ECS LIVA X with the Intel Celeron 2808 processor it scored 6.21 FPS on the OpenGL benchmark and then 66 points on the multi-core CPU test and 37 points on the single CPU test.

3dmark-skydriver

In 3DMark we scored 16,692 points in Sky Diver, the benchmark for mid-range PCs, specifically 95.64 FPS in Graphics Test 1 and 90.72 FPS in Graphics Test 2. This benchmark has a rendering resolution of 1920×1080 and uses the DirectX 11 API at feature level 11.

adia64-mem

AIDA64 v5.80 beta showed that the single channel 2133MHz DDR4 memory had 15-15-15-36 2T timings and was capable of 16,600 MB/s read and 16,072 MB/s write speeds with a latency of 70.9 ns. The Gigabyte Brix Gaming UHD Mini-PC GB-BNi7HG4-950 has two memory slots, but only one was populated and that is why we are getting ‘low’ single-channel scores. We aren’t sure why Gigabyte didn’t put two modules in for dual-channel performance results, but we tested it as the system was built and loaned to us for testing.

ciphershed

CipherShed v0.7.4.0 shows that the Gigabyte Brix S had a mean score of 3.8 GB/s on the AES Encryption test.

jetstream

We ran the JetStream v1.1 JavaSctipt on Google Chrome 54 and found an overall score of 199.11.

cdm-scores

A quick run of CrystalDiskMark v5.2.0 showed the performance of the Transcend 128GB MTS800 M.3 SATA SSD used as the primary drive as well as the WD 1TB hard drive used as secondary storage. Sequential read speeds topped out at 555 MB/s and the sequential write speed was 209 MB/s. The Random 4K read speed was 31 MB/s and the 4K random write speed was 106 MB/s. It should be noted that this M.2 SATA was released in 2014 and is an older drive that is most certainly slow compared to the newer M.2 PCIe drives that would work in both of the systems M.2 slots. One slot works with M.2 SATA/PCIe cards and the other is PCIe only. The system also has room for two 2.5″ SATA notebook drives. Our system came with one WD 1TB notebook drive installed and it had 118 MB/s read and 116 MB/s write speeds.

steam-folder

Having two drives is nice though as you can setup your steam library to hold your game titles on the secondary storage drive and it takes just seconds to get in order.

boot-speed-test

The last performance test that we wanted to run was Bootracer 6.0 to see how fast the system is able to boot Windows 1o 64-bit. We found that the Gigabyte Brix Gaming UHD Mini-PC GB-BNi7HG4-950 takes 7 seconds to get to the logon screen and it took a total of 28.7 seconds to get up and running on the desktop when using the Transcend 128GB MTS800 M.3 SATA SSD. This is not an impressive score, but is due to the older SATA drive and not the system itself.

Time to take a look at the gaming benchmarks!