Looking first at the build quality and design of the Gigabyte Brix S we have a system which is discrete and compact. Its black chassis is easy to hide away, or mount out of sight. There are no garish LEDs and access to the internal components is very simple. Port layout is decent, USB and audio on the front with LAN, video and additional USB on the back.
Turning to performance and starting with thermals and power use, overall these results are good, temperatures are reasonable (and the system runs near silent to achieve these) with power use excellent. The Brix S uses just 8 watts when idle and only 34 watts when performing demanding tasks. When we look at the performance comparison between the Brix and Brix S models on storage we see that both offer good performance from their hard drives. The Brix S offers higher potential speed however for those using a mechanical/traditional hard drive the experience would be the same. Memory performance is better on the S model due to it using dual channels and faster DDR3 however USB speed is comparable between the two models.
