Gigabyte BRIX Pro And Intel Iris Pro Graphics Review

by Dave Altavilla — Monday, April 14, 2014, 12:00 PM EDT

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Test Setup, SANDRA And Cinebench Performance

We decided to compare our Gigabyte BRIX Pro system to the closest set of desktop reference numbers we had on hand from our recent AMD Kaveri performance review. In certain scenarios, this will also compare Intel's integrated Iris Pro Graphics engine versus AMD's latest integrated APU offering with Radeon graphics. Though the desktop system are configured differently here, with 16GB of RAM (versus 8GB total in the BRIX Pro), these are similar setups with only small variations in available resources. It's not exactly apples-to-apples, these are all different platforms after all, but it's close.

HotHardware's Test Systems

System 1:
AMD A10-6800K
(4.1GHz - Quad-Core)
AMD A8-6500T
(3.5GHz - Quad-Core)
AMD A8-7600
(3.8GHz/3.3GHz Quad-Core)

Asus A88X-Pro
(AMD A88 Chipset)

2x8GB AMD DDR3-2133
(@1866 with 6700)

On-Processor Graphics
On-Board Ethernet
On-board Audio

Samsung SSD 840 Pro

Windows 8.1 x64

System 2:
Intel Core i5-4670K
(3.8GHz - Quad-Core)
Intel Core i3-4330
(3.5GHz - Dual-Core + HT)

Gigabyte Z87X-UD7 TH
(Z87 Express Chipset)

2x8GB AMD DDR3-2133
(@1600 with Haswell)

Intel HD 4600
On-Board Ethernet
On-board Audio

Samsung SSD 840 Pro

Windows 8.1 x64

System 2:
Intel Core i7-4770R
(3.9GHz Quad-Core)

Gigabyte M4HM87P Motherboard

2X4GB DDR3-1600

Intel Iris Pro Graphics 5200

On-Board Ethernet
On-Board Audio

Intel SSDMCEAC240B3 240GB mSATA SSD

Windows 8.1 X64

We started our testing with SiSoftware's SANDRA, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. We ran four of the built-in subsystem tests (CPU Arithmetic, Multimedia, Memory Bandwidth, File System).

SiSoftware SANDRA 2014

Synthetic Benchmarks

CPU and Multimedia Tests

Memory Bandwidth and Physical Disk Tests

The Intel Core i7-4470R powering the Gigabyte BRIX Pro puts up impressive numbers in terms of integer and floating point performance. Memory bandwidth is also strong with over 18GB/s available with the Haswell CPU and DDR3-1600 memory. Storage performance could be classified as a little pokey, however, with only an average of 340MB/sec in read performance across the drive but it's still plenty of throughput for just about anything you could think of throwing at a machine like this.

Cinebench R15

3D Rendering Content Creation Performance

Cinebench R11.5 is a 3D rendering performance test based on Cinema 4D from Maxon. Cinema 4D is a 3D rendering and animation suite used by animation houses and producers like Sony Animation and many others. It's very demanding of processor resources and is an excellent gauge of pure computational throughput.

With Cinebench, we see a clear lead for the Gigabyte BRIX Pro and its Core i7-4770R processor versus AMD's previous high-end A10 APU and even the newer A8 with Radeon R7 (AMD GCN) graphics. In the OpenGL test, it sails past the AMD offering with anywhere from a 17 to almost 30 percent margin and in the CPU test it dusted our entire field of competitive reference systems as well.