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

Earlier this year, we had our first look at the GIGABYTE BRIX Pro, along with a note about further benchmarks to follow. It was our first look at the Intel Core i7-4770R, a Crystal Well part with 128 MB of eDRAM built into the package. The part was aimed squarely at making integrated graphics competetive with low-end discrete GPUs. As a direct result of this, PC manufacturers could make compact gaming units. The BRIX Pro was even distributed at the Steam Developers Conference as a Steam Machine. In our second look at the BRIX Pro, we changed the memory and storage subsystem to better reflect the expected use case. Read on for our refreshed performance evaluation results, gaming benchmarks, performance as a HTPC and the final word on the thermal throttling issue that we encountered during our initial evaluation.