Gigabyte Brix S GB-BSi5HT-6200 Ultra Compact SFF PC Review

Name: Gigabyte Brix S
Brand: Gigabyte

by Marco Chiappetta — Friday, September 23, 2016, 12:13 PM EDT

Futuremark's PCMark 7 is a whole-system benchmarking suite. It has updated application performance measurements targeted for a Windows home and office environments and uses various metrics to gauge relative performance. We report the overall PCMark score below.

Futuremark PCMark 7

Full System Testing

The Gigabyte Brix S GB-BSi5HT-6200, with the fast Kingston RAM and SSD we had installed, performed very well here. It hung with the more powerful Core i7-based Broadwell Brix, and outpaced the other desktop platforms.

PCMark 8 v2

System Level Benchmark

PCMark 8 v2 is the latest version in Futuremark’s series of popular PC benchmarking tools. It is designed to test the performance of all types of systems, from tablets to desktops. PCMark 8 offers five separate benchmark tests--plus battery life testing—to help consumers find devices that offers the perfect combination of efficiency and performance for their particular use case.

This latest version of the suite improves the Home, Creative and Work benchmarks with new tests using popular open source applications for image processing, video editing and spreadsheets. A wide variety of workloads have also been added to the Work benchmark to better reflect the way PCs are used in enterprise environments. These tests can be run with our without OpenCL acceleration. We chose to run with OpenCL acceleration enabled to leverage all of the platforms’ available CPU and GPU compute resources…

We don't have comparison numbers from PCMark 8 with the other small form factor systems we tested, but wanted to include some numbers nonetheless. The Brix S performed well here too; again it's essentially in-line with mobile Skylake platforms.

LAME MT

Audio Conversion and Encoding

In our custom LAME MT MP3 encoding test, we convert a large WAV file to the MP3 format, which is a popular, day-to-day use case for many end users, to provide portability and storage of their digital audio content. LAME is an open-source mid to high bit-rate and VBR (variable bit rate) MP3 audio encoder that is used widely around the world in a multitude of third party applications.

In this test, we created our own 223MB WAV file and converted it to the MP3 format using the multi-thread capable LAME MT application in single and multi-thread modes. Processing times are recorded below, listed in seconds. Shorter times equate to better performance.

The Gigabyte Brix S GB-BSi5HT-6200 trailed most of the pack in our custom LAME MT benchmark. It finished about in the middle of the pack in the single-thread test, but drop a few notches in the MT test.

Tags: SFF, Gigabyte, mini-PC, NUC, brix, Skylake, brix s

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com