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.'"

Comments

Cute, but not $815 cute

[Animats]

Cute little box, but kind of expensive.

Re:Cute, but not $815 cute

[Anonymous Coward]

Imagine if the thing were four times larger BUT actually had good components or was a much cheaper price? Who is really THAT space constrained for it to matter. You could be in a tiny apartment and it wouldn't matter.

One the one hand, I agree. On the other, this is pretty much every Early-Adopter situation in a nutshell. "Imagine if it had less [main selling point] but had more [other feature] or was much cheaper? Who is really that constrained by [main feature] for it to matter?".

I've always had full sized ATX gaming rigs, but at the moment I'm thinking about a new mini ITX build. It amazes me that the form factor which a few years ago used to get laughed at as weak can now include most mainstream CPUs and GPUs, even if cable routing is a bit of a pain. I just like the idea of compressing the power of my 50 x 50 x 25 cm ATX machine into one not much more than 30 cm cubed so it takes up less space under my desk, and that's actually big for the ITX form factor. A few years ago this wouldn't have been possible, or it would have been extortionately expensive.

"Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and weigh only 1.5 tons."

  -- Popular Mechanics, 1949

This whole "computers getting smaller" thing is not new, and while it might not be a huge market today you never know about tomorrow.

Re:Cute, but not $815 cute

[Karmashock]

Screens cost less then 100 dollars in most cases. The cost of the keyboard is literally something like 20 dollars. So... assuming all the things happen that you say... you'll see a machine that is about 120 dollars cheaper then a comparable laptop. Frankly, 120 dollars is worth those features.

What is more, the economies of scale you're hoping for won't happen because the market for laptops is a lot deeper then the market for those little computers will EVER be... ever. So what you're going to have is something like what we have now... an inferior machine at a higher cost due to inefficiencies in the supply chain and not a huge difference in the actual absolute cost of the components.

The cheapest option if that's what you're going for will be to get a desktop computer. Despite being larger the parts are more common and will ALWAYS be more common because the platform is more flexible and thus useful in multiple applications.

On top of that you can't just look at the cost of buying it and consider that the total cost. After all, these units depreciate in value over time either because components wear out or because the models themselves become inferior to newer machines. Thus there is a rate of turn over to be expected. And that turn over means either an upgrade cycle followed by a full system replacement or just a full system replacement.

These little machines don't look upgradable where as desktops clearly are upgradable. That means not only would the desktop likely cost less but it would also probably go through an upgrade cycle rather then a replacement after two to three years and that would mean a big savings on the cost of ownership over time. Furthermore, you have to consider maintenance, service, replacements, etc. Fixing a desktop isn't a big deal. Most of the parts are pretty common and the whole thing is built to be maintained. These little machines and most laptops are pretty much baked at sale. They're not especially upgradable beyond a harddrive or ram. Some of them even have the ram soldered into the board. The Lenovo X1 is an example of a machine with non-removable ram.

These little machines are a curiosity and I could see their use for lans I suppose but they're inferior to gaming laptops in that respect and gaming laptops are just so much better in general. I take mine trips all the time. Beats the hell out of watching hotel TV.

Mini gaming PCs

[Roman Mamedov]

...are called the Playstation 4 and Xbox One.

Re:Mini gaming PCs

[Kartu]

Except this box doesn't require monthly subscription to play online (both PS4/Xbone do) or visit youtube / use a web browser (Xbone).

Still waiting

[danknight48]

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.

Fairly common video complaint

[tlambert]

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.

Re:Fairly common video complaint

[tlambert]

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.

Why not?

For Samsung and Toshiba televisions, you can either blame the television, or you can blame Linux.

If you want to blame the television, then it's the lack of EDID negotiation on input channels that are not the current display input. You can blame this on the lack of multithreading in the embedded controller in the television, since electrically, there's no reason that an active input channel shouldn't be negotiating EDID information,

If you want to blame Linux, you can blame the video drivers themselves for not retrying, and you can blame X/Wayland/etc. for not forcing them to retry and delaying picking a display resolution until there's a successful EDID negotiation.

Philips had a similar issue with their DVD players when started on a secondary channel; they made a change to the DVD players and to the televisions themselves. The change to the television was that, when an input came active, the television automatically switch to the input so that it would "be there" for the negotiation phase. The change to the DVD player was to retry the EDID negotiation when it didn't get an answer from the television. In addition, when it's in "sleep mode", the DVD player will wake up when the input channel is selected.

The end result is that the DVD player comes up in a lower default resolution that's generally supported by all TV's, and then pops to the highest supported resolution in common between the player and the TV. The upshot of this is you get to see the screen change modes when you start up the DVD player.

FWIW, this first came to the attention of the ChromeOS team when we threw an I2C analyzer on the bus to watch the EDID negotiation, and it became pretty obvious what was happening. If you don't have the actual source code for the video card driver, this is a hard problem to correct without doing some reverse engineering, since it's pretty common for binary Linux drivers from the video card vendor to not do the retry and/or delay the X startup until the EDID resolution negotiation has taken place, so that you know what resolution you're going to be running at when you bring up the display server.

Personally, I think the right thing to do is fix both ends of the problem, so if you end up with an old monitor/new computer, or vice versa, Things Just Work(tm).

Re:Nano PCs?

[NJRoadfan]

Intel sells that Next Unit of Computing box.

It's expensive, but...

[rivaldufus]

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.

Should have targetted BSD

[unixisc]

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