Gigabyte Brix Pro Review – GB-BXi7-4770R

Gaming Performance

The Intel Core i7-4770R processor features Intel Iris Pro 5200, which is the best IGP solution that Intel has to offer. It would be an injustice to not look at how a real game title performs on this system!

Metro: Last Light is a first-person shooter video game developed by Ukrainian studio 4A Games and published by Deep Silver. The game is set in a post-apocalyptic world and features action-oriented gameplay with a combination of survival horror elements. It uses the 4A Game engine and was released in May 2013.

We wanted to see what happened in a newer game title, so we fired up Metro: Last Light and ran some benchmarks at various resolutions with the games built-in benchmark in order to get repeatable results. You can see our exact settings in the screen capture above.

Benchmark Results: The Gigabyte Brix Pro with Intel Iris Pro graphics actually was able to run Metro Last Light with DX11 Low image quality settings at some pretty decent resolutions. We tossed in a couple benchmark results with the flagship Intel NUC, which is the D54250WYKH that uses the Intel Core i5-4250U processor with Intel HD 5000 graphics. Clearly the Gigabyte Brix Pro with Intel Iris Pro 5200 graphics is superior and it looks like the higher IGP clock speeds (up to 1.3GHz) and 128MB of EDRAM really do help gaming performance.

One thing that we noticed is that sometimes the graphics performance was low and at other times it was fine. Here is a quick look at some Metro LL benchmarks runs. The first run averaged just 12 FPS and the second run run just seconds later was averaging 31 FPS. We thought it might be something to do with throttling, but then why would the second run in this scenario be faster? We also can’t find a way to replicate this issue at will. We pointed this out to Gigabyte and they are looking into it.

Let’s take a look at temperatures, power consumption, noise levels and then wrap this up!