 Not long ago we were impressed by the size and silence of Zotac's EN760 ZBOX+, and by the fact that it has about the gaming prowess of the PlayStation 4. Well, not to be outdone by Zotac, Gigabyte has sent us over their unbelievable Brics Gaming BX i5 G760 Ultra Compact PC Kit. It's much smaller, actually more powerful, can handle triple displays out, and is just generally an amazing piece of computer hardware. The Corsair Flash Voyager Go is the easy way to move photos, music, and videos between your Android device and your PC. Click now to learn more. The included accessory package is really solid. You get a VESA mount so you can mount it to the back of your TV or monitor with ease. You get a 3.5mm breakout, mini HDMI, and DisplayPort to full-size cables, so you won't need any adapters to hook the Brics up to all of your existing gear. And finally, there's a massive 180W power brick. It's almost as big as the unit itself. Speaking of the PC itself, the outside has a striking glossy black and green color scheme that does get covered in fingerprints quickly, but at least is easier to clean and more difficult to scratch than some of the other finishes that I've seen. The top has nothing but a power button, and the sides are entirely reserved for ventilation. On the front, we've got a microphone slash headphone jack and two USB 3 ports. Then on the back, we find two more USB 3 ports, gigabit ethernet, power in, a Kensington lock, and the three display outputs that I alluded to before. One mini DisplayPort and two mini HDMI mean support for resolutions up to 2560x1600 at 60Hz, or 4K 30Hz if you're using it for movies on a TV. Ballin'. But the outside of the hardware isn't why you watch this show, so let's open this baby up. It comes apart easily. Just remove the four screws and lift the little handle. Once inside, we see that it's a bare-bones unit. So while it does include a wireless AC and Bluetooth 4.0 card, you will need to add your own DDR3 low-voltage RAM with one or both of the included slots and your own storage drive or drives. Yes, drives. This bad boy can handle an M-SATA SSD and a 2.5-inch hard-driver SSD at the same time. It uses a single pre-cable-managed connector soldered to the board to enable this second drive. Now, the PCB we're accessing here is actually only one of two separate stacked boards stuffed inside this Cubage form factor. So that was the motherboard, and that's why it has all the expansion, and from this angle, we can kind of see the blazing-fast Core i5-4200H dual-core hyper-threaded CPU mounted to the other side, and then this one, this other PCB, is actually a discrete graphics card. So we can just barely make out the GPU core and VRAM. Oh, and did I mention that GPU is a desktop GTX 760, not a GTX 760M? Whaaat? Did I mention it has 6GB of GDDR5 clocked at 5 GHz? Whaaaaat? Anyway, now that we're all calm again, it's time to install Windows and take her for a spin. The first thing I noticed when firing it up is that even at idle, it's not very quiet. To get enough airflow through the copper heatsinks for the CPU and GPU, those dual cooling fans need to spin at a speed that makes this little green gaming box easily audible from 10 feet away in a quiet room. That's a definite strike against the bricks gaming for me, although not everyone cares that much about noise, and for some folks, the truly remarkable form factor might make up for it. Alright, so the cooler's on the loud side, Linus, but how does it perform? Well, just because it says on the box that the CPU and GPU run at a certain clock speed doesn't mean that they will actually do that in real life. If they're running too hot, they will turn down their own performance to protect themselves. This is known as thermal throttling, and it's a real concern with notebooks and small form factor desktops, so we need to see how well the bricks holds up to some real world use to evaluate its cooling. I started out my benchmarking just kind of dinking around with Batman Arkham Origins, running with all the details cranked at 1080p and no anti-aliasing, and I noticed something almost immediately. I was humming along, pinned against my v-sync limit of 60 FPS, and then my frame rate started dropping until it reached around 42 FPS. Tabbing out revealed that while the CPU was still doing okay, running at 3.2 GHz at 75 degrees, mind you, it was only about 30 to 60% loaded, the GPU was running at 92 to 93 degrees and throttling down to 405 MHz and even dipping to 203 MHz, depending on the intensity of the scene, it was bouncing back and forth between those power states. I realized then that for my benchmarking runs, I couldn't make any assumptions about how this hardware was going to perform, and that I needed to provide some points of reference for you, the viewer, to give you a better idea of how it will stack up against other comparable devices. So here's what I came up with. First, I ran it against a Pentium Anniversary Edition clocked at 3.2 GHz and a desktop reference 760 to see how this class of hardware should perform with no throttling at all. Then I put it up against the Zotac EN760. For both of the small form factor machines, I ran each benchmark twice back to back and took the second result. Because it's quite a hot day, about 30 degrees Celsius inside, this gives us a real worst case scenario for these tiny machines compared to each other and to a properly cooled desktop setup. So that's it. The Brics Gaming has impressive specs, and if you live in an igloo, it's likely to be the highest performance to volume ratio gaming machine anywhere. But while its performance was actually still fairly good, 1080p in current games is very playable, it thermal throttled like a boss and ended up not performing as well as the competing lower spec mini PC while being significantly louder. I'm all about pushing the envelope in terms of PC form factors, but it looks like the world is just not quite ready for the size and gaming gusto of this Brics Gaming machine. Maybe if we give Intel and Nvidia another generation to refine things on the processor side, Gigabyte can take another crack at this and it will be absolutely balls to the wall amazing. But for now, I think that you might be better off just building a bit of a bigger rig and dealing with the extra size. Speaking of taking a crack at things and crack, you know what's addictive? Audible.com, our sponsor for this episode. 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Anyway, thanks again Audible for sponsoring this episode. Thanks to you guys for watching. Like it if you liked it, dislike it if you disliked it. Leave a comment letting me know what you think of mini PCs. Is it worth the trade-offs that you make? Do you even care? Would you just rather have a massive gargantuan desktop the size of a fridge or... Where like, where's your head at in terms of all this stuff? Also, don't forget to check out the video description where we've got links for how to support us. You can go ahead and you can buy this product if you tickled your fancy with our affiliate links that are down there. You can buy a t-shirt and give us a monthly contribution and you can just change your Amazon bookmark to one with our affiliate code. So every time you buy Jujubes or whatever else, we get a small kickback. Thank you very much for watching. Again, as always, don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more videos just like this one.