[HN Gopher] Gigabyte Brix Pro: A Compact PC for Basic Computing ...
___________________________________________________________________
Gigabyte Brix Pro: A Compact PC for Basic Computing Needs
Author : walterbell
Score : 58 points
Date : 2021-05-15 10:17 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.overclockers.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.overclockers.com)
| butz wrote:
| Still waiting for small form factor PC with built in PSU.
| walterbell wrote:
| This is the size you're looking at,
| https://www.antec.com/product/case/isk300-150
|
| Or the rabbit hole of custom builds,
| https://smallformfactor.net/forum/
| hocuspocus wrote:
| Who would want four HDMI ports but zero (mini)DP?
| auxym wrote:
| I'm not sure why, but DP seems to be on the way out.
| Anecdotally, I haven't seen DP ports on displays or laptops
| bought in the last year or two.
| danhor wrote:
| On Laptops: It's probably because all DPs are routed through
| the usb-c connectors. No one does hdmi over usb-c, so they're
| left-over.
| aksss wrote:
| You can do usb-c to hdmi with a dongle of course, so even
| if driving an hdmi display, usb-c will do that.
| aksss wrote:
| DP is still king for graphics - better bandwidth, color
| depth, variable refresh rates, daisy chaining. The limitation
| is the cable length, where HDMI is way better, but this
| probably only matters for conference rooms and home theaters.
|
| Running laptops exclusively for years I had the same
| impression about the death of dp. Getting a rig (and high
| quality monitor) for gaming changed my mind about that.
|
| Also, as another said, dp is run out of laptops using USB-c
| and thunderbolt now. HDMI ports themselves are no longer
| needed so you won't see those on laptops much longer, either.
| hocuspocus wrote:
| All high-end monitors very much have DP ports. Same with
| graphics cards.
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| Someone who uses TVs as monitors, especially if you want 3 or 4
| it's the most economical option.
|
| On a higher-end box no DP would be criminal.
| reaperducer wrote:
| "Basic" computing is now four HDMI ports and an LTE connection.
| Good to know.
| kingsuper20 wrote:
| Probably was cheap to add and there's some commercial market
| they're aiming at.
|
| I've been down the NUC road, and sort of like these kinds of
| products, but think they're a hard sell. A person could spend
| $50-$150 (instead of $500 all-in) on eBay and get an ex-
| corporate small desktop or a Thinkpad, spend a bit more and get
| a new Mac Mini M1, or view it as a down payment on a decent
| laptop or desktop. That Brix looks like it's in the middle of a
| pretty big ecosystem of products.
|
| There's more than a few people that might as well just own a
| Chromebox. If Raspberry PI 4s were just a bit faster, the non-
| performance home hobbyists might as well go for those as
| desktops and stick with computers that are cheaper than 2-3 new
| hardbound books.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| The cheaper NUC computers are a good alternative to the
| Raspberry PI.
|
| The Raspberry seems cheaper on paper, but you have to add a
| case, power supply, some sort of storage solution and then
| suffer with the whole thing not quite working properly.
| bartvk wrote:
| These are much smaller than an ex-corporate small desktop,
| right? My Intel NUC can easily be mounted behind my monitor.
| And although this Gigabyte product may be more expensive, the
| NUC its price range starts around 150 for Celeron based
| models a.l the way up to Mac Mini levels.
| kingsuper20 wrote:
| Those corporate boxes go pretty small.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Lenovo-
| ThinkCentre-M93-i7-4765T-Win10...
|
| To me NUCs have sort of the same problem as their brethren
| in this space, you end up with too much money into them.
|
| In terms of cheap desktops, I've settled into older
| Thinkpads for now. Tolerably quiet (although I do consider
| fanless desktops now and again), cheap, they appear to be
| the kings of OS compatibility, as fixable as a laptop can
| be, built-in battery backup for the shitty power we have
| 'round these parts.
|
| At some point I'll have to modernize, but find it hard to
| spend much on computers. That's what employers/clients are
| for.
| wejick wrote:
| I believe there's this market of digital signage, and this
| looks good for that kind of display solution. I see many
| opensource software for that like https://xibo.org.uk/
| aksss wrote:
| For digital signage, a brix is overkill. A raspberry pi 3b+
| running screenly (or whatever) is A++.
| spaceisballer wrote:
| I would love to have something very low power taking up little
| space like these. Even after dropping 16gb ram and maybe a 1 TB
| m2 you are still in the $500 range. I was interested in a Mac
| Mini but if you want 16gb ram and a 513gb HD you are over $1k.
| Sure the mini will do a lot more but it's not the niche I'm
| trying to fill. I want a small low power computer running my plex
| server and for doing basic computing/surfing. Ability to play
| Roblox or Minecraft is a bonus, but I have a gaming PC for that.
| ihsw wrote:
| The Ryzen V1605B is a bottom-of-the-barrel Ryzen 1000-series
| embedded APU. There have been leaps and bounds in the past three
| years of embedded Ryzen APUs.
|
| https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/amd/ryzen_embedded/v1605b
|
| It's disappointing that Gigabyte is choosing to start the AMD
| Brix platform with such an underwhelming product offering,
| especially in the face of starting with an Intel Tiger Lake
| processor.
|
| I wonder how much Overclockers.com was paid to gush over TGL-U.
| Havoc wrote:
| Been down this route - thermals and acoustics are a nightmare.
|
| Unless you really can't spare the space for a full tower its
| better not to
| oneplane wrote:
| I'd say "it depends". Having a tiny laptop-type thermal
| solution (high TDP chip, low mass heatsink, tiny whiny fan)
| would indeed just be as annoying as a laptop, but there are
| plenty of configurations where it works just fine. The larger
| NUC-style devices (generally marketed as "this one has room for
| a 2.5" drive) with low power chips when used for light basic
| work don't really consume enough power to get hot.
|
| This is even something you can make completely passive; check
| out some of those ODMs in China that make passively cooled M
| and U series Intel PCs. Generally marketed as industrial PCs
| and software routers, they do have 18W parts that work fine in
| 35degC ambient for years and have plenty of performance. It
| really depends on what you use it for. (Qotom is one of them,
| there are a lot of white-label manufacturers, but when they
| make the boards it's pretty close to the 'actual' ODM instead
| of just another re-badge)
| walterbell wrote:
| Do any of those ODM boxes allow open firmware like coreboot?
| Protectli is one option, would be nice to have other choices.
| Hamuko wrote:
| There are definitely computers between the Brix and a full
| tower. My old computer is a full tower but my new gaming rig is
| a mini-ITX build that takes very little space on my desk and I
| plan on replacing the full tower with something like a Mac Mini
| in the future.
| alanfranz wrote:
| I would love a small MicroATX case without support for DVD-RW
| or 3.5" drives. MicroATX is inexpensive and effective (cases
| usually support standard ATX power supplies and PCIe cards
| without a riser, it's easy to mount a full-size GPU and
| common heatsinks, etc), but it seems hard to go significantly
| smaller then my own case (cm 36x36x17). But there's a lot of
| empty space in the front, so it should be very easy to get
| the depth down to 25-26 centimeters or something like that.
|
| But I couldn't find anything like that, either you get
| flatter, HTPC-like cases designed to stay horizontal, or cube
| cases (which aren't so nice IMHO, since they take more
| horizontal surface on the desktop), or you need to find a
| small mini ITX cases (which can get very small, but they may
| require SFX power supplies and can be harder to cool down).
|
| A desktop is still a nice thing to have. They can be quiet
| even when the workload is consistently high.
| tmashb wrote:
| Agreed, although it differs vastly between models, I'd say it's
| rather the opposite if you opt for passive 3d party
| heatsinks(chassis) which are plenty for Intel's NUC, even 80W
| TDP models (Iris Pro). Passive cooling for desktops is way more
| complicated. I've been using Akasa for my Skull canyon for
| years for my dead silent setup.
| walterbell wrote:
| Akasa's fanless Intel NUC cases are excellent. Hopefully they
| will create a fanless case for Ryzen NUCs, or generalize an
| Intel fanless case to support multiple port layouts.
| OakNinja wrote:
| Could turn into a decent pfSense/openSense box.
| lostlogin wrote:
| Esxi home server - it's a little under powered in terms of CPU
| cores, but it's a great little unit. I like quicksync from
| Intel for video transcoding, however it's other features make
| up for it.
| oneplane wrote:
| Any base model NUC is also 'a compact pc for basic computing
| needs', and the same goes for modern SFF and non-NUC NGFF PCs
| offered by the likes of Dell, HP and in some cases Apple (Mac
| Mini).
| 1MachineElf wrote:
| So will the Ryzen version work with ECC RAM?
| walterbell wrote:
| AsRock usually does with Ryzen, but testing is needed since
| these NUC-sized boxes are using laptop chipsets.
| absorber wrote:
| It's kind of vague and hit-and-miss though, even on non-NUC
| systems ASRock not always supports ECC. Supposedly it's
| because of AMD's (lack of) clarity about the matter
| (according to an ASRock rep, at least)
|
| This is the mail I sent them in January. Still waiting for a
| response:
|
| > (This is a pretty technical sales question)
|
| > I wanted to know about the ECC compatibility of Asrock Rack
| X470D4U > In the specifications (https://www.asrockrack.com/g
| eneral/productdetail.asp?Model=X...) it says the following:
|
| > "*For Picasso Ridge and Raven Ridge CPUs, ECC is only
| supported with PRO CPUs."
|
| > However, there is no such thing as "Picasso Ridge". There
| is however Pinnacle Ridge and Raven Ridge. Perhaps a mistake?
|
| > So I was wondering what AMD CPUs had full ECC compatibility
| (so both detection and correction)
|
| > Does the AMD Ryzen 5 1600 have full ECC support on that
| board, for example?
| walterbell wrote:
| Ryzen in general is all over the place, sometimes ECC works
| on systems even when the BIOS has not been officially
| validated to support ECC.
|
| OEMs protect market segments with higher-priced devices,
| e.g. Ryzen Pro and EPYC/Xeon, which limits where AMD can
| offer "official" support for ECC.
| fu8ur8uwr8eu wrote:
| In 2019 I purchased an ASRock iBOX-V1000 which is fanless and
| completely silent (and has Ryzen quad core with integrated Vega
| GPU) and I have run it with 32GB ECC ram with both Ubuntu 18.04
| and 20.04. Works great. Yes, the ECC works in "ECC mode" and
| Linux can see and report any detected/corrected memory errors.
| (Never seen any errors. Some people use hair dryers to heat up
| the ram to test the ECC, though.) I purchased from mitxpc:
|
| https://mitxpc.com/products/ibox-v1000?_pos=1&_sid=a0e23dd56...
| walterbell wrote:
| Thanks for real-world report on the V1000 fanless. Hopefully
| the V2000 fanless version will reach retail soon, was
| announced in 20Q4.
| ekianjo wrote:
| > Basic computing needs
|
| So they define basic as anything that's not gaming.
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| Lots of games you can play on this.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Seems fair to me.
| francis-io wrote:
| I've been using an i5 nuc for the last 5 or so years as a desktop
| pc attached to a kvm switch for a work laptop when forced by
| workplace IT.
|
| I'm still surprised how far integrated graphics can get you.
| Black101 wrote:
| The ASUS PN50 MiniPC with AMD Ryzen is great too and can handle
| more then basic computing needs:
| https://www.microcenter.com/product/630580/asus-pn50-minipc-...
| chrisandchris wrote:
| > Gigabyte has 14 Brix Pro models that vary in both size, and
| installed hardware.
|
| One of the reason I'm going to dislike this product. As I would
| like to compare 14 different models. That's going to take to much
| time.
| snarfy wrote:
| I own three. They are great little PCs. I have one setup with
| win10, cubase and ableton, another is my Ubuntu box, and one I
| was using as a file server but am now repurposing as my cnc
| control pc.
| MrFoof wrote:
| Went down a similar route for a 'mini virtualization server.' HP
| ProDesk 405 G6 with an AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 4750GE _(8C /16T, 3.1GHz
| base clock, 8 VEGA GPU cores)_, and tossed in 64GB of DDR4-3200
| and a 1TB Samsung 980 Pro. Real storage is like 55TB of RAID 1 or
| RAID 10 arrays on the network, where VM backups and snapshots
| also go _(and get shoved out to Backblaze)_ , as well as media
| and other chunky data. If you got an EliteDesk 805 you can even
| have a second M.2 socket so you can RAID1 the SSDs. Only downer
| is no 10GbE ethernet.
|
| Sits at about 12W at idle. With everything under the sun running
| it hums along at about 20-22W of power consumption. Absolutely
| silent. Plus being an APU I can even have a Plex VM happily
| transcode without breaking a sweat. AMD DASH means I also have
| full IPMI functionality as well _(not as good as Intel vPro, but
| good enough)_.
|
| 1L form factors _(incl. Mac Mini, NUCs)_ are ideal home servers
| at this point when you need much more power than a Raspberry Pi
| provides.
| pengaru wrote:
| > it hums along at about 20-22W of power consumption.
|
| > Absolutely silent
|
| Well which is it, "absolutely silent" or "humming"? Does this
| thing have fans?
| ElCapitanMarkla wrote:
| I think "hums along" here is meant more as "speeds along" vs
| actually humming.
| minimaul wrote:
| There are some nice self-build options too - eg I have
| https://www.asrock.com/Nettop/Intel/DeskMini%20310%20Series/...
| with a i7 9700 in (8c8t), plus 1x NVMe and 2x 2TB SATA SSDs for
| VM disk. Works really really well, and it's pretty much silent.
|
| NUCs are just that little bit too compromised, I think - but
| things like the hp prodesk or the asrock deskmini are a really
| nice sweet spot.
| pizza234 wrote:
| The power draw of an i7-9700 is around 100W on full load
| (107W, CPU only, according to Tom's hardware1). There are
| relatively quiet solutions, but they're in the ballpark of
| 30/35 dB, and they may not even cover the 100+W requirement.
|
| 22W of full load can be cooled with a passive cooler (large,
| but still can).
|
| [1] https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-
| core-i7-9700k-9th...
| paranoidrobot wrote:
| > Only downer is no 10GbE ethernet.
|
| I've been trying to solve this problem in the ~1L chassis size.
|
| I have two problems I'm trying to solve:
|
| - Multi-port 10GbE for a PFSense/OpnSense router replacement
|
| - Reasonable GPU for Plex Transcoding - at least two concurrent
| 4K HEVC decodes + re-encodes to 4K or 1080p (Intel QuickSync
| isn't fast enough for this)
|
| Both configurations of them have to be silent, or near silent.
|
| I think the Lenovo P330 Tiny is probably the best option here,
| as it has a PCIe Gen 3 x8 slot. The factory options let you put
| either a quad-port 1GbE NIC in, or a Nvidia Quadro P620/P1000.
|
| I think I should be able to put an Intel X710-DA4 (quad-port
| SFP+ NIC) in for my PFSense box, or upgrade to a Quadro
| P2000/2200 for the Plex transcode needs.
| geoffeg wrote:
| I've been looking for something similar, but lower power
| usage is more important to me than silence.
| Hamuko wrote:
| > _1L form factors (incl. Mac Mini, NUCs) are ideal home
| servers at this point when you need much more power than a
| Raspberry Pi provides._
|
| A Synology or a HPE MicroServer might be better since you can
| use it for storage as well without external HDDs.
| walterbell wrote:
| Storage devices are so quirky that I've given up on
| integration of SFF compute with storage.
|
| Compact storage devices make tradeoffs, which may or may not
| fit your needs, e.g. flash/SSD tier, 10GbE/2.5GbE NICs,
| memory, TPMs, low-power vs. cores. External storage offers
| more flexibility, which will increase as USB4/Thunderbolt
| become widely available and fall in price. For now, USB 3.2
| JBOD with ZFS is workable with external enclosures,
| https://oyendigital.com/multi-bay-storage
|
| Wish there was a NUC-sized device with an LSI SATA controller
| and external connector. If we're lucky, the
| https://frame.work "modular laptop" approach will be adapted
| to compact desktops based on laptop chipsets.
| MrFoof wrote:
| I don't have, "external HDDs". I have a NAS running TrueNAS,
| with a few arrays in it depending on the performance needed
| for the storage. Its primary jobs are for data processing and
| video editing (plus smaller arrays for backups and VM
| snapshots), and has multiple 10GbE network interfaces (which
| it can saturate) to facilitate that. It was also built to sip
| power when there isn't any disk activity. I have no desire
| for it to run VMs or containers. Its job is to just be
| storage.
|
| The virtualization server is one of many things that connects
| to it.
|
| There are benefits to having the storage and the
| virtualization servers separate, mostly that there's no
| single point of failure.
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| Their comparison table makes no sense. The blurb says the Intel
| option supports up to 64GB of of DDR4-3200 vs. AMD with only up
| to 32GB of DDR4-2400. The table says both options support only up
| to 32GB of DDR4-2400.
|
| Sloppy...
| walterbell wrote:
| Lenovo Tiny P330/P340 and 920 have a small PCI slot that accepts
| an Nvidia GPU with 4X mini-displayport, or a quad-port Broadcom
| NIC. Flexible and powerful 1-litre box for virtualization. wish
| there was a Ryzen Pro version.
|
| ASRock 4x4 offers the latest Ryzen mobile CPUs (4300U 4c, 4500U
| 6c, 4800U 8c) in a traditional NUC form factor. Minimal
| expansion. Includes serial port header for kernel dev.
| lavela wrote:
| > The unit can easily hide with other AV Components or not take
| up much space on the desk.
|
| Small form factor usually means dealing with an external power
| supply. I know about the benefits like taking a heat source out
| of the device, but I hate dealing with those bricks, especially
| when there are multiple externally powered devices and you don't
| have some object to let the power supplies slip behind.
|
| Are there any neat solutions for cable management in those cases?
| elcritch wrote:
| One option is to use PoE. You can have one PoE switch at your
| router and power nuc's or mini-pcs.
|
| Looks like there are a few nuc specific options:
| https://shop.poetexas.com/products/gbt-nuc You could probably
| find slim DC power bricks.
| walterbell wrote:
| The custom SFF PC community has expensive, small, AC-DC power
| supplies, e.g. https://hdplex.com/hdplex-nanoatx-power-supply-
| explained
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-05-16 23:01 UTC)