We've come a long way from my first beige IBM XT clone back in early 90's. It wasn't going to win any prizes for looks, and at the size of a large suitcase, it was also a hernia-busting bit of kit that was built like a brick you-know-what house.
Sporting
a 4.77Mhz CPU and mono Hercules graphics, I am still stunned that it ever managed to run gaming titles like populous. At the time if someone had said to me that only 20 years later I'd be able to get a PC that fits into the palm of my hand and has the sort of graphics and processing power that would have most certainly been a classified military secret back in the 90's, I'd have laughed.
Nowadays however it mightn't sound too far-fetched, especially thanks to games consoles, but getting a half decent games PC that is small enough to occupy a niche in your lounge seems to have remained a tricky proposition even to this day. Dell had a crack at it with their console-like X51 PC, as have a bunch of other manufacturers. Nothing has really set the world on fire.
Which is of course a real shame, the PC has a massive ecosystem of games and thanks to the Stream online game store, getting said games is now easier than falling off a log. Add in the free to download XBMC media centre and you've also got a smoking hot media centre that'll handle most media formats with relative ease.
Gigabyte however have taken things one step further by taking advantage of Intels latest CPU to develop the Brix II bare-bones PC that is housed in an insanely small chassis. By Adding in recently launched Haswell silicon (which includes much improved integrated graphics), they've managed to craft a tiny games machine that'll also do a great job of games and most multimedia chores. When I said insanely small, I'm not kidding - the Gigabytes box of tricks is only 29.9 x 107.9 x 114.6 mm, making it small enough to fit in the palm of your hand (or on the back of your TV using a VESA mounting bracket).
