IBUYPOWER LAUNCHED A PALM-SIZED INTEL POWERED GAMING PC

For the last year and half, the Gigabyte Brix has been slowly popularizing the concept of ultra-small form factor gaming PCs. Companies like Maingear followed with the Steam Machine-inspired Spark, and now iBuyPower is stepping into the ring with the Hexa.
Since it essentially utilizes Gigabyte’s Brix case, the Hexa is tiny. We’re talking 2.4-inches high and 4.5-inches wide. That’s smaller than a CD jewel case, shorter than a standard mechanical hard drive, and basically approximates the size of a stack of sticky notes.
The Hexa’s mini-PC shell means that, although it’s billed as a gaming PC, you won’t see dedicated graphics cards from AMD or Nvidia (yet). Instead, it packs a 3.2GHz Intel Core i7-4770R with integrated Iris Pro 5200 graphics. That’s some serious CPU power, and Intel’s Iris Pro is a dramatic step up from the iGPU that launched with Haswell. It can kick out about 42 frames per second on Tomb Raider with medium settings (DirectX 11) at 1080p. That’s no slouch.
Despite its size, it can accommodate 16GB of RAM from Kingston or G.Skill, and up to a 1TB Samsung EVO Solid State drive.  You can also configure it with a variety of standard 2.5″ hard drives or SSDs.
It may not remotely approach the kind of performance you’d glean from powerhouse systems like Falcon Northwest’s Tiki, but iBuyPower’s Hexa isn’t without its practical uses. It would be a natural fit as a Steam Machine or even as a streaming client. It’s compact and powerful enough to be billed as a media center, and discrete enough to be used in cramped office or dorm environments. Theoretically it should run all but the most demanding AAA games, albeit at decreased quality settings.
You could just buy a Gigabyte Brix directly, but the appeal here is the customization factor. iBuyPower basically receives barebones units and builds them to order. You can configure your memory size and brand, WiFi and bluetooth modules, hard drive size and brand, etc. Of course you’ll be paying a bit of extra coin for its discrete form factor. The Hexa systems start at $899 and ship with iBuyPower’s 3 year warranty.
An AMD-powered variant will also be available in the coming weeks, packing a Richland A8-5557M APU. AMD fans may want to hold off until the company introduces their Kaveri mobile APUs, though there’s no guarantee it would be integrated into the Hexa or similar mini-PCs.
What about fans of Team Green? The real showstopper would be a Brix-sized PC powered by a dedicated Nvidia mobile GPU, and Anandtech reports that such a thing is in the pipeline utilizing an Nvidia GTX 760M.