Until recently the mini-PC form factor has suffered a bad rap, albeit
a justified one. Diminutive boxes like the Zotac ZBox line and the
Xi3 Piston are necessarily confined to embedded graphics solutions like AMD’s APUs or
Intel's
HD and Iris graphics platforms, simply due to restrictions on size and
proper heat dissipation. They may have touted themselves as gaming PCs,
but in reality were at best relegated to media or home theater PCs.
Zotac’s newest ZBox (EN760), however, forces us to reconsider what a
mini-PC is capable of, and thank goodness for fresh perspectives.
With a thickness of 1.75-inches and a depth of only 7-inches, the
ZBox EN760-U is considerably smaller than the Xbox One or PlayStation 4
and posts superior graphics performance than both current-gen consoles.
It has a smaller footprint than traditional laptops, and even
small-form-factor gaming towers (think
Falcon Northwest Tiki or
Origin Chronos), well,
tower above Zotac’s squarish box (couldn’t resist that one).
ZOTAC ZBox EN760 Mini Gaming PC | Photo by Jason Evangelho
ZOTAC ZBox EN760 Mini Gaming PC | Photo by Jason Evangelho
As you’ve probably guessed, this new ZBox from Zotac eschews embedded
graphics and adopts Nvidia’s GeForce 860M discrete mobile GPU — the
same GPU inside
MSI’s GE70 Apache Pro gaming laptop.
Nvidia’s not messing around with its Maxwell architecture, and it’s
likely the efficient cooling and power management that earns it its spot
inside Zotac’s latest.
Remember the
Alienware Alpha
that I previewed at this year’s E3? It’s roughly the same size as the
ZBox EN760 and also features a custom Nvidia GPU based on Maxwell. It’s a
sure sign of great things to come in ever-shrinking, streamlined
packages
