GIGABYTE BRIX Pro: A Second Look at the Intel i7-4770R with Iris Pro HD 5200

HTPC Credentials

Accuracy of display refresh rate, efficiency while streaming OTT content and the ability to use powerful video renderers such as madVR are some of the primary points of interest in terms of HTPC usage.

Custom Refresh Rates

In our initial Haswell HTPC review, we found that Haswell provided excellent display refresh rate accuracy. Our experience with the BRIX Pro was no different.

The gallery below presents some of the other refresh rates that we tested out. madVR reports frame drops / repeats only once every 6 hours or more in the quiescent state.

While it is not easy to configure custom resolutions / refresh rates from the main UI for the graphics configuration, it is possible to set the refresh rates manually by deselecting the 'Hide Unsupported Monitor Modes' in the monitor properties. I was able to successfully drive the display at 50 Hz on the Sony KDL46EX720 using this method.

Network Streaming Efficiency

Evaluation of OTT playback efficiency was done by playing back our standard YouTube test stream and five minutes from our standard Netflix test title. Using HTML5, the YouTube stream plays back a 720p encoding, while Adobe Flash delivers a 1080p stream. The power consumption at the wall as well as the GPU usage while playing them on Mozilla Firefox are provided in the graphs below.

Netflix streaming evaluation was done using the Windows 8.1 Netflix app. Manual stream selection is available (Ctrl-Alt-Shift-S) and debug information / statistics can also be viewed (Ctrl-Alt-Shift-D). Statistics collected for the YouTube streaming experiment were also collected here.

It is a bit surprising that Flash streaming (at a higher resolution) seems to be more efficient in terms of resource usage compared to HTML5. On the Netflix front, GPU usage for the decoding of the 5.8 Mbps video stream is pretty low and power consumption is quite low given the CPU inside. However, it can't rival the efficiency of the D54250WYK NUC kits (which utilize ULV CPUs) when it comes to video decoding / streaming efficiency.

Notes on madVR

Given the better GPU available in the Core i7-4770R, it can be expected that the madVR capabilities are slightly better than what we found in the initial Haswell HTPC review. In that review, decoding and rendering benchmark numbers for madVR, as well as other renderers, were presented. Those tests were performed on a i7-4765T. The i7-4770R in the BRIX Pro has a slightly higher TDP. There should be no cause for concern as to whether the BRIX Pro can perform as well as the Haswell HTPC that we presented in our initial review with respect to those aspects.

Andrew Van Til put the BRIX Pro through some madVR tests in his MissingRemote review and came away with the conclusion that Lanczos 4-tap with anti-ringing as well as Jinc 3-tap with anti-rining work for all types of contents (resolutions / frame rates up to 1080p) except for 720p60.

On the whole, the performance of the BRIX Pro as a HTPC is as expected. However, those looking for a pure HTPC solution would do well to consider other alternatives. In our opinion, the incremental madVR capabilities are not worth the noisy cooling solution. The other aspects that the BRIX Pro excels at are easily achieved using other Haswell-based machines (including the Intel NUC).