Go on, stuff the iBuyPower Hexa gaming PC into your pocket
True story, the palm-sized gaming rig offers quite a punch with its super-small form factor
Hot on the heels of winning a CES Hot Stuff Award for its Steam Box, iBuyPower has just come up with a super small gaming rig fragging in a hilariously confined space. And it looks an awful lot like another Steam Box – Gigabyte’s diminutive Brix II.
Whether it’s your micro inner-city living room or you just want a second rig to take along to a LAN party (yes, they do still happen), the Hexa cube looks like a decent gaming companion.
While there isn’t enough space inside the chassis to house a blisteringly fast dual graphics card setup (or any kind of dedicated graphics hardware for that matter), it doesn’t mean you can’t get some decent performance out of it. The Hexa relies on Intel’s Iris Pro 5200 graphics processing, integrated into its Core i7 chip, which may not be able to topple a top-end GeForce but is banging on the door of ‘impressively capable’ all the same.
Customisable gaming cube
Here’s what the standard setup of a Hexa machine looks like:
That is a pretty decent mid-range desktop computing option, and it starts at US$899.
What’s appealing about this particular setup is that it’s heavily customisable. While you can’t request a different processor or graphics, iBuyPower gives you other options like a memory bump to 16GB, an SSD drive, options for an optical drive, SD card reader and an upgraded wireless network card.
Now the real question is, what can it play? Pretty much anything mid-to-low end, and the latest AAA games, albeit at medium settings. MMOs should work just fine, as well as classic FPS favourites.
AMD fans will soon see a Richland A8-5557M APU with the accompanying AMD graphics, though there’s no word if the system will be much cheaper than the base i7 model.
[Source: Forbes]
Erna Mahyuni
Contributor 
