Zotac ZBOX MAGNUS EN1080 SFF PC Review: A Premium Gaming Powerhouse
by Ganesh T S on December 19, 2016 8:30 AM ESTGaming Notebooks Compared
One of the most common comments posted in response to mini-PC reviews is that the value proposition of an equivalent notebook is much higher than that of the PC. While there are plenty of factors that might make this comparison invalid, we thought it would be interesting to see how the Zotac ZBOX MAGNUS EN1080 fares against premium gaming notebooks. Towards this, we borrowed a few benchmarks from our notebook reviews and processed them on the EN1080. In the graphs below, we also have the gaming mini-PCs on which the benchmarks were processed. First, we will look at some artificial benchmarks before moving on to the games themselves.
3DMark Revisited
GFXBench
Dota 2
Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor
The takeaway from these results is that the performance of the ZBOX MAGNUS EN1080 is beaten only by the Clevo desktop replacement (DTR) notebook that uses the same GPU, but, with a 91W Core i7-6700K, instead of the 65W Core i7-6700. This gives the Clevo DTR an edge in the benchmarks that also depend on the CPU performance.
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TheinsanegamerN - Tuesday, January 17, 2017 - link
I'm surprised zotac didnt contract with dell for the 330w brick.zenonu - Monday, December 19, 2016 - link
The bricks can sit on the floor and be ugly there. The desktop can sit on your desk, be functional, and take a minimal footprint. That said, two separate power bricks is clunky design and annoying for certain.Zak - Monday, December 19, 2016 - link
WTF with the retarted ads on Anandtech lately? Seriously? This is total garbage! Does not belong here.BrokenCrayons - Monday, December 19, 2016 - link
Advertisements are all targeted based on what the advertiser learns about you by mining your web activity and compiling relevant information. The ads I see, are intelligent and thoughtful. They attempt to market smart and helpful products because advertisers understand that I'm a discerning customer. If the advertisements you're seeing are conversely "retarted" that might say something about what you do on the Internet through your devices.Holliday75 - Monday, December 19, 2016 - link
LOLprisonerX - Monday, December 19, 2016 - link
There are ads on Anandtech?alphasquadron - Monday, December 19, 2016 - link
"The premium PC also needs to adopt the Alpine Ridge controller with Thunderbolt 3 / USB 3.1 Gen 2 support instead of the plain ASMedia ASM1142 solution."Can someone expand on this. Are they saying that this doesn't support thunderbolt at all or just has thunderbolt 2 and 3.1 Gen 1?
ganeshts - Monday, December 19, 2016 - link
ASM1142 only supports USB 3.1 Gen 2. There is one Type-A and one Type-C port in the front panel that is enabled by the ASM1142.For Thunderbolt 3 support, Zotac has to use the Alpine Ridge controller. That one enables Type-C ports that can operate in either Thunderbolt 3 mode or USB 3.1 Gen 2 mode depending on the peripheral connected to it.
My 'complaint' was that at $2K, I believe consumers deserve Thunderbolt 3 support.
alphasquadron - Monday, December 19, 2016 - link
I see, that makes sense.prisonerX - Monday, December 19, 2016 - link
What's up with a lack of pictures on this article? We get to see the manuals but not the front or back ports, or much of anything else. Odd.