Gigabyte BRIX Gaming UHD Review With Teardown And Rebuild Action
Gigabyte BRIX Gaming UHD: Under the Hood
Given the Gigabyte BRIX Gaming UHD’s availability as a barebones unit, it is important to have easy access to the interior. Fortunately, it excels at this with an intelligent layout providing accessible internals. Care needs to be taken with disconnecting cables during teardown but is straightforward enough to accomplish with even just a shred of system PC building experience.
The process begins by removing the four inset screws from the bottom of the unit. All screws used, by the way, can be extracted with a standard #1 Phillips screwdriver.
With the screws removed, the base is held in place by plastic clips. Simply grip the foot and pull to remove.
At this point, we can optionally remove and replace the intake fan, but this is not necessary for basic drive and memory installation.
Instead, we will slide off the front panel to expose the actual internals. This panel fits very tightly, so don’t worry about the grinding feeling as it slides out.
This exposes both 2.5” drive bays. One is fully exposed on the right side, while the second is found in a pull-out bracket alongside the CPU heatsink. Heatsinks appear to comprise the majority of the system's weight.
Feel free to populate the hide-away drive bay but we suggest waiting until after the RAM is installed to populate the exposed drive bay.
We will next turn our attention to two screws at the top and bottom of the open faced bay. Remove these and then disconnect the two ribbon cables along the bottom left edge.
We can now begin to rotate out the drive bay. There are two cables connected to the underside - one will need to be disconnected to swing the bay fully open and the second can be removed as well to fully remove the bay.
The backside of the drive bay is actually the GeForce GTX 950 GPU card, which itself is hidden under a hefty passive heatsink.
At any rate, we now have access to the two SO-DIMM slots, PCI-e M.2 slot, and PCI-e/SATA M.2 slot. The M.2 slots are handily labeled, so be sure to use the slot which best matches your drive type.
We took a deeper dive look into the system during our livestream on Twitch, so be sure to check that out below, but otherwise we are go for reassembly.
Flip the GPU back into place and secure it with both screws. If you wish to populate the second 2.5” drive bay, now is the time for that. Be sure to utilize the handy integrated SATA cable routes here to keep everything looking clean. All that’s left now is to align and slide back on the side panel, then reaffix the base.
We found the Gigabyte BRIX Gaming UHD to be surprisingly repairable thanks to its all-standard screws and lack of obnoxious adhesives. There still isn’t any real route for upgrading the CPU or GPU, but these are sacrifices that need to be made for such a tiny footprint these days.
The process begins by removing the four inset screws from the bottom of the unit. All screws used, by the way, can be extracted with a standard #1 Phillips screwdriver.
With the screws removed, the base is held in place by plastic clips. Simply grip the foot and pull to remove.
At this point, we can optionally remove and replace the intake fan, but this is not necessary for basic drive and memory installation.
Instead, we will slide off the front panel to expose the actual internals. This panel fits very tightly, so don’t worry about the grinding feeling as it slides out.
This exposes both 2.5” drive bays. One is fully exposed on the right side, while the second is found in a pull-out bracket alongside the CPU heatsink. Heatsinks appear to comprise the majority of the system's weight.
Feel free to populate the hide-away drive bay but we suggest waiting until after the RAM is installed to populate the exposed drive bay.
We will next turn our attention to two screws at the top and bottom of the open faced bay. Remove these and then disconnect the two ribbon cables along the bottom left edge.
We can now begin to rotate out the drive bay. There are two cables connected to the underside - one will need to be disconnected to swing the bay fully open and the second can be removed as well to fully remove the bay.
The backside of the drive bay is actually the GeForce GTX 950 GPU card, which itself is hidden under a hefty passive heatsink.
At any rate, we now have access to the two SO-DIMM slots, PCI-e M.2 slot, and PCI-e/SATA M.2 slot. The M.2 slots are handily labeled, so be sure to use the slot which best matches your drive type.
We took a deeper dive look into the system during our livestream on Twitch, so be sure to check that out below, but otherwise we are go for reassembly.
Flip the GPU back into place and secure it with both screws. If you wish to populate the second 2.5” drive bay, now is the time for that. Be sure to utilize the handy integrated SATA cable routes here to keep everything looking clean. All that’s left now is to align and slide back on the side panel, then reaffix the base.
We found the Gigabyte BRIX Gaming UHD to be surprisingly repairable thanks to its all-standard screws and lack of obnoxious adhesives. There still isn’t any real route for upgrading the CPU or GPU, but these are sacrifices that need to be made for such a tiny footprint these days.
