Gigabyte shows off first passively cooled BRIX PC

In the past, Gigabyte has had to rely on traditional air cooling for its Brix series of tiny office PCs. Fortunately over the last couple of years, heat management has gotten easier as CPU TDPs have gotten increasingly lower. Now, Gigabyte has been able to ditch air cooling entirely with its latest Brix, which appears to be a PC housed in one big heatsink.

The Gigabyte Brix GB-EKi3A-7100 has been announced this week, running a Kaby Lake based Core i3 7100U processor, with support for up to 32GB of RAM and even room for an M.2 SSD. Of course, all of this is housed in a fanless, compact chassis with a heatsink fin design on top.

As with past Gigabyte Brix systems, this one is VESA mountable, so you can tuck it away behind a monitor if you wish. For I/O connectivity you get Ethernet, WiFi, Bluetooth, HDMI 2.0, DisplayPort and USB Type-C.

This is classed as an IoT system but could be used however you want. With HDMI 2.0, you could double this as a tiny home theatre box simply for streaming media from elsewhere. It would also work as an office PC for low power tasks.

KitGuru Says: I'm always intrigued by these tiny PCs, though I have yet to try one for myself. Do any of you have any experience with the Gigabyte Brix series?

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