Gigabyte Brix S BXi7H-5500 Broadwell Mini PC Review

Futuremark's PCMark 7 is a whole-system benchmarking suite. It has updated application performance measurements targeted for a Windows 7 and 8 environments and uses various metrics to gauge relative performance. We report the overall PCMark score below.
The Futuremark score is actually quite impressive, as the Brix S is the second fastest in this particular test of these little rigs. It's amazing that this little 15w chip can outpace a system with the Ivy Bridge Core i5-3470, which is a 77w chip. Overall we'd say this test shows Intel's engineering for Broadwell to be extremely efficient, and we're sure the chip's improved onboard graphics helped out here as well.
There's not much to say about an mSATA SSD because we've seen these types of read and write speeds on SSDs for over two years now. Suffice to say this particular Intel SSD is saturating the SATA bus, so it's about as good as one can expect from an SSD these days. If we were using a PCIe M.2 SSD we would most likely see some improvement in these scores, but that would mean we'd have to sacrifice our wireless card, so that's not a tradeoff we're willing to make.
We have to say, we're mildly impressed by this little processor's performance in these CPU-intensive benchmarks. It clearly outpaces the Core i5-5250U seen in the new Intel NUC, but can't quite keep up with the quad-core CPUs, including the one in the previous Brix model. The big difference of course is that older Brix sounded like a dustbuster, while this new model quietly hums away while chewing through the benchmarks. Overall the Broadwell chip fared quite well in these tests.