GIGABYTE BRIX Gaming UHD GB-BNi7HG4-950 mini-PC Review
by Ganesh T S on October 28, 2016 7:30 AM ESTGaming Notebooks Compared
One of the most common comments posted in response to mini-PC reviews is that the value proposition of an equivalent notebook is much higher than that of the PC. While there are plenty of factors that might make this comparison invalid, we thought it would be interesting to see how the GIGABYTE GB-BNi7HG4-950 fares against premium gaming notebooks (as well as the Zotac ZBOX MAGNUS EN980 that we evaluated a few months back). Towards this, we borrowed a few benchmarks from our notebook reviews and processed them on the BRIX. First, we will look at some artificial benchmarks before moving on to the games themselves.
3DMark Revisited
GFXBench
Dota 2
Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor
The takeaway from these results is that the performance of the desktop-class 'GTX 950' in the GB-BNi7GH4-950 can exactly be categorized as an 'overclocked GTX 965M'. The real desktop GTX 980 in the ZBOX MAGNUS EN980 obviously comes out on top in almost all of the above workloads. On the mobile side, configurations with SLI or really powerful CPUs win out in some cases. In any case, consumers buying into this platform can expect the gaming performance to be a bit better compared to notebooks equipped with a GTX 965M.
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hojnikb - Friday, October 28, 2016 - link
Yes there are. There are a bunch of laptops using kaby lake cpus.wintermute000 - Saturday, October 29, 2016 - link
none with quad core though - all are dual core Uhojnikb - Sunday, October 30, 2016 - link
Doesn't really matter, fact is kaby lake is out.cosmotic - Friday, October 28, 2016 - link
If these articles never used the phrase 'business end' again, I would be a happy camper.Klug4Pres - Tuesday, November 1, 2016 - link
I consider myself to be a linguistic pedant, but can't see much wrong with "business end".It's a lot better than "happy camper", that's for sure, but no doubt you were being ironic.
Samus - Wednesday, November 2, 2016 - link
Booya.RaichuPls - Friday, October 28, 2016 - link
How is a GTX 950 equivalent to a GTX 965m? 768 CUDA vs 1024 CUDA...hojnikb - Friday, October 28, 2016 - link
maybe they were comparing it to the lower clocked 965m... There is a 540Mhz version, that is definitely slower than 950, despite having more cuda coresalphasquadron - Friday, October 28, 2016 - link
I know it's annoying to request reviews from a site but please if you have the time when the Zotac Magnus EN1080 comes out, a review of it would be so nice. I am sure other sites will be doing it but it is nice to see the anandtech view. I want a really small pc for living room use so I was going to get a laptop and external gpu dock when at home, but then if this new zotac is just as good as a laptop with external gpu dock, I won't have to do that and it looks small but hard to tell from the marketing pictures.coder111 - Friday, October 28, 2016 - link
What about a similar build with a Fractal Design 202 case and Radeon RX 480 or RX 470?How would it compare in terms of size or performance? Or price?