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Mini Gaming PCs — Promising, But Not Ready

Posted by Soulskill on from the call-me-when-it-fits-inside-a-chromecast dept.

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.'"

4 of 83 comments (clear)

  1. Cute, but not $815 cute by Animats · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Cute little box, but kind of expensive.

    1. Re:Cute, but not $815 cute by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

  2. Mini gaming PCs by Roman+Mamedov · · Score: 4, Insightful

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

  3. It's expensive, but... by rivaldufus · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.