Published in News

Maingear launches SPARK small form factor gaming PC

by on01 August 2014

Image AMD-A-Series-Logo

Based on quad-core AMD Richland APU

Maingear has officially announced its latest small form factor (SFF) gaming system, the SPARK, which is based on AMD's quad-core A8-5557M APU and packs an R9 M275X dedicated graphics card.

Measuring just 114.3x107.4x59.4mm (4.5x4.23x2.34-inches), the new Maingear SPARK packs quite a punch for its size. The heart of the Maingear SPARK is AMD's quad-core A8-5557M Richland APU clocked at 2.1GHz base and 3.1GHz Turbo clocks. The A8-5557M APU packs Radeon HD 8550G integrated GPU with 256 Stream Processors. It has a TDP of 35W.

In addition to the intergrated GPU inside the APU, the SPARK also features AMD Radeon R9 M275X GPU with 2GB of GDDR5 memory. The R9 M275X GPU is part of AMD's R9 M200 series and has 10 Compute Units for 640 Stream Processors, 40 TMUs and 16 ROPs. It is usually connected to 2GB of GDDR5 memory via 128-bit memory interface. According to AMD's official details, it is clocked at up to 925MHz for the GPU and 1125MHz (4500MHz) for the memory.

The rest of the Maingear SPARK specifications are not bad either as it has two SO-DIMM memory slots for up to 16GB of DDR3-1600 memory, one mSATA slot with support for up to 512GB SSD and one 2.5-inch SATA 6Gbps slot for HDD/SSD, Gigabit Ethernet via Realtek RTL8111G chip, Realtek ALC269 audio, integrated 802.11ac DualBand WiFi and Bluetooth 4.0 in half-size mPCIe slot, HDMI and mini DisplayPort outputs and four USB 3.0 ports.

Maingear's SPARK comes without OS and and gives you an option to either go for Linux or Valve's SteamOS, although we are quite sure that Microsoft's Windows 8.1 will work just fine as well.

The price of the Maingear SPARK starts at US $699 and includes four free games valued at $200 from AMD's Reward program. Unfortunately, Maingear's systems are reserved for the US only, but in Europe you can get the Gigabyte BRIX instead, which is more or less the same.

maingear-spark-1

 

maingear-spark-2

 

Last modified on 04 August 2014
Rate this item
(0 votes)

Media

Read more about: