Slashdot Mirror
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.
One of the drawbacks of a desktop PC is that the standard form factor parts take up a lot more space than they need to. An expansion card can only go to a certain place. There's not a lot of choice with the PSU either. Motherboartds - even ITX ones have a minimum size.
Really the only components that actually take up significant space are the hard disk, PSU and the cooling system (for GPU and CPU). Chips themselves are tiny. If you look at the size of these on a competent rig they don't take up that much space.
...are called the Playstation 4 and Xbox One.
My desktop has an mSATA SSD in it. It's always fun to confuse people who can't find the "harddrive".
In a system like this there's no reason to say a a harddisk takes up any kind of significant space at all. It's about the same size as the northbridge and without a heatsink.
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.
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.'"
True. I was basing my views on something more comparable with a typical machine (or are SSDs considered mid-high end these days?) but since an SSD has both performance and size advantages it makes sense to assume we'll use one.
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.
Donald Trump, on a crusade to make Nixon look respectable
You should be asking, AMD CPU why?
The answer is obvious. The Brix Gaming is set up to be a GAMING PC, and because of that, is taking full advantage of AMD Fusion to get the most performance out of the smallest/low power components they can for GAMING. That means the most important factor of the rig is GPU performance, not CPU performance.
It is pretty well established by now that Arstechnica is nothing but an Intel shill, and I think this crappy review makes that very clear. 90% of the article is about testing and bashing the CPU performance, and in only one test do they actually try it for its intended purpose(GAMING), where it trounces the other competitors because of vastly superior GPU performance, but instead of continuing to test how well it performs at GAMING, they frame the results in terms of an underpowered CPU and continue more CPU tests.
What a worthless rag of an article.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
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.
That's hysteresis in engineering terms... Basically the software should set a more accurate RPM to match the temperature (so that it remains stable) and, have different temperature value triggers for going up and down in fan speed.
For example, if the temperature is rising and we hit 50C, we bump up the fan speed by a notch, but if after that the temperature starts dropping, we have to wait until it is 47C before we change the fan speed back to one step down. Ideally, the fan speeds would be chosen carefully to keep fan speed changes at minimum.
Intel sells that Next Unit of Computing box.
The drivers for AMD graphics are so shoddy that you can't reliably get full performance and quality as you can with Nvidia.
The CPU performance really just has to be "good enough" - which is probably is.
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.