Gigabyte BRIX PC
Simon Brown • August 13, 2020
Teeny-Tiny PC from Gigabyte
I received an offer from https://mini-itx.com, and as a developer can never have enough computers I bought this and added 8 GB RAM. I put Windows 10 professional on.
The Spec
Gigabyte Brix GB-BLCE-4000C fully assembled PC. The Gigabyte Brix GB-BLCE-4000C features a dual core Celeron CPU, ram up to 8GB Ram. It is a total fanless PC.
Base specification (this is configurable using options)
- Intel Celeron N4000 2.6GHz
- 4GB Ram DDR4
- 500Gb Hard Disk
- Gigabit lan (Realtek RTL8111HS)
- Includes Wireless- Intel® Dual Band Wireless-AC 3168 & Bluetooth
- Intel UHD Graphics 600 onboard, dual display capable with HDMI and VGA outputs.
- Front 1 x Power Button, 1 x USB3.0, 1 x USB3.0 type-C
- 1 x Headphone Jack, 1 x Microphoce Jack
- Rear 1 x HDMI(1.4b), 2 x USB 3.0, 1 x RJ45, 1 x VGA
- Side 1 x Kensington lock slot
- Dimension 56.22 mm x 103 mm x 116.52 mm (2.21″ x 4.06″ x 4.59″)
- Vesa mountable bracket included Supports 75 x 75 and 100 x 100 mm
- 1 year parts and labour warranty
System:
- Don't forget - this is a two core N4000 Celeron chip!
Verdict:
- Hardware build quality is excellent.
- Looks very good.
- I received a 240 GB SSD instead of 120 GB as Gigabyte had run out of 120 GB!
- Plenty of CPU power considering only two cores.
- Runs a NetSDR at 1 MHz bandwidth acceptably, also fine at 2 MHz bandwidth.
- Graphics on a HD monitor is usable but not fantastic.
- Would struggle to run another resource-intensive program such as WSJT.
- Would be fine as a server for one or two SDRs.
Future Use
- This will be used for running the g4eli.sdr-radio.com DX Cluster sometime in 2020.

After too much grief, I've decided to stop using Wi-Fi to connect the small NUC systems in the computer room to my network: DX Cluster (Ubuntu) SDR Server (Windows) User Forums (Windows) These servers are in constant use, causing the wireless transmitter on my TP-Link AX50 to fail. By switching over to a wired network there's less demand on the wireless transmitter and the whole network has become far more reliable. In future I will only use Wi-fi when there's no alternative. I'm keeping a spare router ready just in case the AX50 fails.