Gigabyte Metal Gear Plus ITX: AMD desktop APU, DC power, hosts Mini-ITX boards
In China, Gigabyte has unveiled a very interesting product that may pose as a strong competitor to traditional Mini-PCs.
The Mini-PC market has experienced tremendous growth over the past few years, primarly thanks to more power-efficient architectures. It is now easy to find an 8-core processor that also boasts powerful graphics, especially if it is based on AMD’s latest design. AMD has recently unveiled their Hawk Point APU series based on the Zen4 and RDNA3 architectures, now in a desktop socket form. The Ryzen 8000G series works with any AM5-based motherboard, with the only requirement being a good fan and the latest BIOS to function.
This release has prompted Gigabyte to introduce a new product. The Metal Gear Plus ITX is an CNC aluminum chassis designed to house a Mini-ITX motherboard. In this case, an AORUS B650I ITX board is used, which supports full-sized DDR5 memory and hosts a low-profile CPU fan. The chassis is not as small as typical Mini-PCs, measuring 200×210×58 mm and having a capacity of 3 liters.
Metal Gear Plus ITX PC, Source: Gigabyte
The size increase comes with several benefits, such as the ability to swap the APU (as it uses a normal AM5 socket), replace the cooler, and easily access DDR5 memory and storage, just like on any other ITX motherboard. Furthermore, users can swap the entire motherboard and have different I/O ports altogether.
Metal Gear Plus ITX PC, Source: Gigabyte
An interesting feature of Gigabyte’s ITX systems is that they come with AC to DC power converters, meaning the power supply is external, and the chassis does not contain any internal power supply. In comparison to some ultra-small Mini-PCs that can be powered by USB Type-C connectors, this is clearly a disadvantage because it won’t work standard power supplies. However, barely any Mini-PC on the market supports 65W TDP APUs these days, so most of the compact GaN chargers bundled with Mini-PCs wouldn’t suffice anyway.
Metal Gear Plus ITX PC, Source: Gigabyte
Gigabyte is selling several variants of these systems, including:
- AMD Ryzen 5 8500G : 6C/12T up to 5.0 GHz (Zen4 & Zen4c), features Radeon 740M iGPU
- AMD Ryzen 5 8600G : 6C/12T up to 5.0 GHz (Zen4), features Radeon 760M iGPU
- AMD Ryzen 7 8700G: 8C/12T up to 5.1 GHz (Zen4), features Radeon 780M iGPU
All of these systems feature the same AORUS B650I ITX board with WiFi 6. They are equipped with 16GB XPG D300 memory, 512GB to 1TB NVMe M.2 storage, and utilize a DC-ATX 180W power supply.
Metal Gear Plus ITX PC, Source: Gigabyte
Pricing is as follows:
- 8700G : 5259-5899 RMB ($811 – $909)
- 8600G : 4269-4799 RMB ($660 – $740)
- 8500G : 3999-4499 RMB ($618 – $693)
The pricing isn’t as high as one might expect, given the rarity of AM5 systems. The main benefits lie in upgradability. Unlike some AM4 based systems (like popular Minisforum systems), there will be less of an issue with BIOS updates. This product uses a standard Mini-ITX board, which will receive the same updates as any other AMD 600 board. So once BIOS is available, it will support AMD Ryzen 9000 series without issues.
The system should also be compatible with standard Raphael CPUs, which feature integrated RDNA2 graphics, although GPU performance will understandably be lower. Here the only concern will be the cooling capacity of the low profile fan, definitely stick to 65W TDP variants.
Source: Gigabyte