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Mini Gaming PCs — Promising, But Not Ready
An anonymous reader writes "Ars has reviewed an AMD-powered mini gaming rig made by Gigabyte. The box itself is small and solid, and it runs a pretty beefy video card for its size. The manufacturer even claims Linux support, though the device ships with Windows 8.1. Unfortunately, reality lags a bit behind their plans — Ubuntu boots OK, but driver support is a mess. SteamOS won't run at all. The box is also limited by a mediocre CPU, which is itself limited by heat and power constraints. The review says the machine was 'intriguing and frustrating in equal measure' because 'its ambition is rarely matched by its execution.' It concludes: 'With some time and some different components, a little desktop that can deliver a great gaming experience will surely follow.'"
Machine sounds sucky!
Not all conservatives are stupid,
but it is true that most stupid people are conservative.
- Hume
This is another version of game console for Linux. It will be successful in a short term? I highly doubt it.
Cute little box, but kind of expensive.
The compromises required for these tiny boxes are always going to fall short of the latest and greatest technology a desktop PC has to offer. Even now a gaming laptop is no match for a gaming desktop, and I'd expect the same of such a mini-gaming rig. They'll be great for last-gen and indie games, and as a HTPC or emulation box, but don't expect the latest titles to run at full tilt.
I think the CPU is totally fine for gaming, though the price is quitehigh.
...are called the Playstation 4 and Xbox One.
I purchased this for £120 about 5 years ago (and came with a keyboard and mouse!):
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/pro...
For its time, this was a mini PC done right.
But now, 5 years later on (when the tech should be improving) i'am yet to see a device that will replace it.
Have i simply been missing the mini PC tech scene. Is there a device similar to this?
In the mean time, i'll keep waiting for someone to do the mini PC Justice.
ps. AMD + Linux = Nasty drivers.
Too much miniaturization is dumb, unless you want a portable device. Why is it that every time you see a lower-powered version of some CPU/GPU, it is crammed into a tiny box with miserable heatsinks and whiny fans, resulting in more noise than the original higher-powered one? IMHO, it's much nicer to keep things well spaced out, for a (nearly) fanless experience.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Linux doesn't retry the EDID with the video drivers, so for multichannel monitors with the Linux box hooked up to a secondary channel, it won't negotiate the screen settings correctly.
You see this a lot when using the larger Dell monitors, and also when using Samsung televisions as monitors. The workaround is to put the device on the first input channel, which is the default selection for the monitor when there's no video input negotiation. Basically, if you aren't the active video channel, Linux tries to negotiate with what's effectively a dead port until you switch it, and the Samsung TVs like to go back to active input sources when a video channel goes out - so you end up not having it selected when it's trying to chat about the EDID, and once it's failed at that, then you switch over, you don't have the right output.
Unfortunately, some of the monitors have a primary HDMI vs. DVI input as the default input, and for those monitors, unless you use the right connector, it'll never negotiate correctly.
Someone really needs to separate the EDID negotiation out so that it can be put in common upper level code.
Too much miniaturization is dumb, unless you want a portable device.
I agree. If it was never meant to be carried around, why make it so small? Sounds like it needed a slightly larger cooling system to make it work properly.
Cooling capabilities of any device are proportional to the outside surface area of the device (where it can get rid of the heat), and this thing has too little outside surface area. Sometimes the marketing guys really should listen to the engineers.
I like small boxes. I built myself a cube sized (Cooltek Coolcube Mini) PC with an (desktop) AMD APU on an Mini-ITX board. There is room for a PCIe graphics card, but the integrated one suffices for the moment. The difference? It is upgradable. Granted, sort of until the CPU socket changes.
But how long will all these "mini gaming rigs" last? Probably a year then they end up in the closet. Sure, it works nicely for the manufacturers. You're supposed to replace them every other year. And this in times where even gaming PCs seem to last forever. Sandy bridge intels with a new graphics card and you're good to go for almost everything.
When the PS4 gets hacked, that's the way to go surely.
...Why?
What will it take for Gigabyte, as well as many other vendors, to stop using Realtek NIC/PHYs? Been waiting for several years now (since at least 2008). If you think they're acceptable, go actually look at the Linux or BSD driver innards (not sure about Linux, but on BSD the driver is filled with comments demonstrating and documenting bug after bug after bug, most of which are silicon-level and the workarounds are painful). And in their Windows driver they still haven't managed to do comply with 802.3u properly (occasionally the driver will claim 100mbit negotiation on a gigE network (shouldn't be happening with 802.3ab or 802.3-2002), rebooting rectifies the problem; Intel or Atheros NICs, connected to the same switch, never have this issue). Just use Intel or Atheros NICs! (and they use Atheros already on some of their desktop PCBs, ex. Gigabyte GA-Z77-DS3H).
They'd also be better off switching audio ICs as well, ex. CMedia CM8788 or CM8828 or some such. I just moved away from my on-board audio, driven by a Realtel ALC887, because of questionable drivers (stuttering and "clicking" during use of things like Google Hangouts; full OS re-installation made no difference, but what did was switching to a US$25 Audigy SE card).
They just haven't learned a customer will pay an extra US$5-10 for decent ICs, or they have and there's some kind of sleazy relationship between Realtek and these companies (e.g. "Okay, we agree to exclusively use your ICs for 4 years in exchange for getting them for only 15%+ over cost").
And I fully agree with what TeknoHog said in his post here, re: stop using tiny high-RPM fans (Sunon and Delta are two commonly-used brands -- that Delta blower shown in the picture runs at 4000rpm), just increase the form factor (size of the board/chassis/etc.) and use larger (ex. 92mm or 120mm) fans. Larger fan = push more air at lower RPM. The demographic these systems are marketed at are mid-range gamers, who shouldn't have a problem with a chassis that's 2x larger than what's being shown there. Silence is key, especially if this is a product potentially marketed even remotely at home theatre folk. That said, the Arstechnica "review" regarding noise just provides anecdotal evidence; there's no hard data (dB measurements) shown. Maybe SilentPCReview will get their hands on one of these?
Software-based RPM control usually won't suffice; vendors always pull this card when questioned about their products post-release. Most of these get indefinitely "stuck" in a logic loop where the temperature is just a tiny bit too high so the fan ramps up, only for the temperature to drop down 1C thus the fan slows down, but then temperature increases again and the fan ramps up, ad nauseam.
What ever it's missing it's more than made up for in the heat sink. And mayhaps more than half the products price.
It needs just one expansion slot, one PCIEx16 for a video card of my choice. An external power supply will keep the case small and locatable. I'll need USB3 and would like 1394 but can live without it. The case should have room for one SSD inside. I'll want GigE and a slot of some kind (internal is OK) for a wifi card that I will probably never install. I only need stereo audio out next to optical digital, and maybe four USB3 on the back and two on the front.
I have a bigass PC in a thermaltake shark case and it just doesn't need to be this big. I see the value of having big PCs in the world, but I don't need one. I just got the case cheap used because it had only one drive sled.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
http://pcpartpicker.com/parts/partlist/
I built this (with a couple of sales at the time) for $812 one month ago.
I supplied previous peripherals like a 32" LG 720p HDTV for the monitor as well as a MS wireless KB and Logitech M570 wireless trackball along with several types of gaming controllers.
For a budget gaming build, it kicks ass.
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Didn't AMD announce tiny almost flat PCs at the beginning of the year? What happened to those? I want to put one of those above my TV to serve as a media center and forget about all the issues underpowered android devices that are currently supposed to fill that space.
The thing I don't get is how do you make a more powerful computer with less vacuum tubes?
(Besides replacing them with transistors, in which case you end up with 0 vacuum tubes)
It does perhaps show that AMD is (hopefully) figuring out some way they can continue as a processor company.
Very much off topic, but... Has anyone else noticed the usual review structure on Ars (and I read this review at Ars yesterday)? It got the usual Ars non-Apple headline: say one (vaguely) positive thing in the headline and one negative thing (and negative to the point of cancelling out any positive)
If it's a Samsung device, it'll be like:
The New S5 Has a Lot Features, But Most of them are useless
If it's about smart watches, they all seem to read like this:
The New Pebble Has Better Aesthetics, but We're Waiting for THE WATCH (from Apple)
Apple reviews over there are almost 100% positive (and they get very defensive when people point this out.) They even maintain an Apple evangelist at all times, and their Android "Evangelist" is generally pretty negative about the droid and truly hates Samsung. Every Samsung review he writes talks about the device first and then spends the second half explaining why Samsung sucks.
It was so bad at one point, I started trying to figure out if Apple owned part of them.
Instead of being strictly married to the Linux model, Steam and AMD should have had PC-BSD options as well. The latter does a great job w/ driver support, once it is supported, since it's not tied down by GPL rules. So if any vendor wants the drivers to be closed, it can be under PC-BSD, and then they can provide the same quality of drivers that they do under Windows, and go from there. Better yet - once they've written the drivers for say, PC-BSD 9, they won't need to do it again for PC-BSD 10: the v9 drivers will run just fine
One of the problems with Gigabyte's design is that they used an inadequate heatsink/fan, which not only causes the CPU/GPU to throttle, but also makes a great deal of irritating noise. They would have been better off going with a design similar to the Akasa Euler, where the whole exterior of the case is a giant heatsink and is connected to the die with heatpipes. In all likelihood they could have gotten passive cooling better than the crappy and noisy active solution they used. Of course, it would have cost a few bucks extra in bill of materials costs, plus added engineering expense.
The much cheaper "non-gaming" editions of this make much more sense.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/...
They have VESA mount points and can be mounted on the back of a monitor:
http://assets.hardwarezone.com...
Sure the graphics aren't top-notch, but most people don't need that. They're great if you need a computer but don't have space for a tower (and also don't want the failure issues associated with a laptop).
These 'mini gaming PCs' seem kind of ridiculous... I mean, it's not even a real computer, it's like some piece of absurd custom hardware.
Last year on Black Friday, I hit up Newegg for a $70 Biostar A68I-350 Mini-ITX AMD Fusion mobo w/soldered-on APU, bundled with 8GB of G.Skill DDR3 1600 RAM. (Basically they were giving me the $40 RAM for free.) I really only intended to use it as a computer for a CNC setup... But it turned out to be such a great media PC and general gaming machine-- just about anything but the most demanding games would run reasonably well at 720p (In other words, the bulk of the non-FPS contents of my Steam account) --that I set it up next to my bed as a secondary media PC and internet terminal.
I even put it in this great little IN WIN case (IW-BQ656T) about the size of a couple of books.
It's a shame the board seems to be discontinued, or I'd have bought like two more...
Anyway, as I was saying... If I can get that much system for so little, I wonder why portable uber gaming rigs using REAL HARDWARE aren't a thing. I mean, you don't really see 'gaming-oriented' Mini-ITX motherboards out there, do you? (Well, I haven't, at least.)
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*
I've got a mini gaming PC in a box that's about the size of a "shuttle"
It runs an A10-7850k on a GA-F2A88XN-WIFI (AMD APU - CPU+GPU - on a mini-itx board). It can run all my games at decent detail (including BF4 on high at 1080p).
Win8.1 had some issues with the Catalyst drivers conflicting with other software, and Linux required the Beta drivers to run (they seem OK though).
The heat is a bit weird in this box. It'll climb *very* quickly, but once the fan ramps up it goes down quite fast as well. The stock fans really do suck though, as the base of the heatsink doesn't even have contact with the full APU surface
I basically build computers for a living so let me point out that they're utterly wrong. If you put in a Kaveri A10 with DDR3-2400, that's right, more than 2x the speed of boring original 1066, you will get acceptable gaming performance if you turn down the settings a little bit. Since they almost definitely did not do that despite it being the actual stock memory controller frequency of the chip, there's your performance problem. Going from 1600 to 2133 RAM on a Richland APU for example brings the Windows 7 speed rating from 6.1 to 6.7 instantly and that's before overclocking.
As for heat, everything they said is wrong. The golden rule is the less cubic feet you have, the less cubic feet per minute you need the fans to blow at to swap out the air out of the case every X seconds (typically 5). Small cases actually are much easier to cool with less powerful fans. You put in one single 45CFM 92mm Silenx fan in a mini-itx case and it simply will not overheat nor will you hear the fan. If the case was designed for 40mm fans only or something, it was designed by morons who need to go back to the drawing board and put in a 92mm fan.
Every AMD CPU I've ever owned (including a Phenom II 1090T) has encountered fatal heating problems. My PhenomII ended up losing 5 of its cores to overheating, and it's got a heatsink, fan, coolermaster case; pretty much everything but a liquid N cooler. I had a AMDK5 years ago, same problem. They just don't do well with heat regulation, in my experience. I'll stick with Intel. :/
It bothers me to no end the number of people and companies that just don't get GNU/Linux or free software including the people behind half the code (looking at you Linus). Yea- you'll bitch about companies not cooperating, but fail to recognize that's exactly what the problem is. They're not releasing the full specs or source which is whats creating the problem in the first place. And no AMD does NOT release the full source for its hardware. You CAN NOT utilize 3d acceleration without the non-free pieces. A wrapper is not sufficent and little more than a public relations stunt. And NVIDIA's no better. Right now only Intel's cooperative on the 3d front, but far from perfect as they haven't cooperated on the BIOS front (yes- AMD has, but AMD's not cooperative on the 3d front!!!).
Anyway. There aren't many companies that seem to get that everything needs code or specs available for proper support. Aleph Objects, ThinkPenguin, and I think one other company actually get it and have policies to this effect. If its not for them I'd probably have given up on GNU/Linux years ago. It's really sad that I should be reduced to an Apple-like awful situation where I only have one good source for hardware all because nobody else gets what the real problem is. It's one reason I don't like Apple. Your stuck buying from one company because of all the digital restrictions and propitiatory components. Then again- it's not just Apple. I also avoid Microsoft, Dell, HP, Lenovo, and Toshiba too. All of them use digital restrictions and lock-ins (think wifi in particular, you can't replace the wifi card because of DRM in the BIOS).
Think: Laptop
Talk about reinventing the wheel!