OK, so here is the quick review.
Just looking at it as I took it out of the box, the unit appears to be of high quality construction. It is very solid and well put together and looks nice too. The first step is to remove the 4 screws that hold on the bottom cover. From there you can see the WiFi card already installed. All I had to do was pop in the 64 GB Crucial M4 mSata (purchased separately) and bolt it down with the provided screw. Then install my two sticks of RAM. I'm using an 8GB Crucial Kit. The RAM is standard SODIMM's for notebooks and plug into the slots exactly the way they would in a notebook. Overall, pretty much anyone with a screw driver and some basic computer knowledge could easily put this together. But beware...as is the case with so many of these products the documentation is next to useless. More on that in a moment. Anyway that was all there was to the hardware setup as far as internal stuff.
Next, I plugged it in and hooked it up to a desktop monitor. I popped the usb dongle for my Logitech keyboard/touch pad combo and fired it up. Hit delete to go into the BIOS. The BIOS is minimalist so if you want to be tweaking it, this probably isn't the product for you. On the other hand it doesn't really need any tweaking. It recognized my RAM and mSATA immediately so no problems there. So, time to install the OS. Shut it down, hooked up a USB DVD/RW drive which I planned to boot the Windows 8 install from.
This is where the lack of documentation caused me about 20 minutes of delay. Newbies who haven't built a computer before might have been calling tech support at this point. I was back in the bios and looking at the boot order settings. It did not seem to be aware that my USB DVD was out there and there did not seem to be a way to boot from it. After fiddling around with it for a while and many reboots I finally figured it out. Note that it boots REALLY FAST! So fast that most of the time you don't even get a chance to see the options fly by. If you buy this product, remember that F12 is your friend. That gets you to the boot menu where you can choose something other than the mSATA - in my case the USB DVD. Even now I have only ever seen that screen saying F12 for boot menu fly by one time and I'm still not sure how I got there. It is definitely not the same scree where it says DEL to enter setup. Also note: It will not recognize the Logitech keyboard/touch pad until after the OS is installed so to install the OS, I had to plug in a USB keyboard I had laying around.
Anyway, after that little glitch it was a normal Windows 8 install that was completely seamless. All hardware was recognized and was working immediately after the install. Gigabyte includes a CD with all the drivers which even seem to be fairly current but they are not really needed.
So, why Windows 8? Two reasons. 1. Anand's reviews have been showing noticeable advantages for 8 over 7 in terms of power usage 2. I've been using the NetFlix app on my Surface Pro tablet and like it a lot. Also, I have a Technet subscription and this is ....er...for test and evaluation. For people wanting to build a lowish cost solution, the cost of Windows could be a deal killer. Of course you would be in the same boat with any bare bones system or DIY system you build. But with the hardware being pretty much standard/generic stuff, I would suspect you should be able to load up any x86 OS such as whatever your favorite Linux variety is with no problems.
Performance wise, this thing is a screamer - at least within the usages I intend for it. It boots up in no time flat - though I've kept the amount of crap I've got installed down to a minimum. I've got it hooked up to a 60 inch Sony TV and have so far been watching NetFlix and Hulu on it. I've got a 500 GB external USB 3 hard drive hooked up where I've copied my music and video library and all that runs flawlessly. FYI I've got a number of Movies (which I legally own the DVD) ripped to ISO images on the USB drive. I've also got Virtual Clone Drive installed that can mount the ISO's where they can be played in whatever your favorite player is - I'm using PowerDVD. Of course you could hook up a usb DVD or Blueray player but then you end up with more boxes and cables. Using the disk drive, I can do the ripping on my desktop system and then use the USB drive to sneaker net the movies etc.
Anyway, weather its streaming from NetFlix and Hulu or ISO's or MP4's from the disk drive, the Brix seems to have plenty of performance for these tasks. I have the i3 version and seriously considered the i5 but it was $100 more. Looking back, for my usage I made a good choice. The i3 seems to have plenty of power and the i5 or i7 would have been completely wasted.
Also, I did install Hardware Monitor and CPUz on it to get an idea of what its doing. At idle it runs at just under 800 Mhz and bouces up to its rated 1.9 Ghz as needed. Temperatures hover around 55 to 56 C all the time which seems a bit hot but not really much more than what I often see on Intel based notebooks. Still, seems to me like cramming an i7 that turbos to 3.1 Ghz in there might be asking for trouble. I does have a fan in there somewhere. You can't see it or the CPU when you have the cover off but you can hear it. Its not loud however. You have to almost put your ear up to it to hear it and you never notice it otherwise.
One issue I'm still trying to figure out. I don't know if its a problem with the Intel graphics drivers or if its with Windows 8 or something else. But the display is actually a hair larger than the screen when hooked up to a TV. This is a pain in Windows 8 when you pull your mouse to the lower right to bring up the settings, search, etc menus on the right side cause they are about 75% off the screen. Same with the edges all the way around. I thought it might be because my big TV is kind of old and only does 1080i instead of 1080P so I hooked up the Brix to our newish Samsung TV. As expected the display quality was better but there was the same issue of things going off the edges of the screen. it does not do this when hooked up to a computer monitor.
Anyway, other than that, there is not a lot to say about it. It's an i3 with HD4000 graphics, an mSATA and 8 GB of RAM - and performs exactly as you would expect from any other system with those specs. I would highly recommend it if you are looking for this type of device and don't want to be messing with the hardware a lot. Its just a matter of plugging in your mSATA and RAM and then setting up as you would with any other computer...just remember that pesky F12 key.