Gadgetory

hey everyone this is steve from gamers nexus net and today we're reviewing zotac snoozy box en 760 mini gaming pc i guess so this i almost said steam machine and the reason for that is this was originally intended to be a steam machine along with the gigabyte brix bricks pro and alien where's unit that have all started shipping recently the reason these are not branded as steam machines and they are instead branded as many gaming PC's is because valve has pushed back their steam machine into 2015 while they finalize some controller designs so what that means is that these companies have all these resources tied up in development they don't want this hardware to go stale to become obsolete they've got to ship these things now and just brand them as a mini gaming pcs then the end user that's us can very easily install steamos on there if you want to you can DIY steam machine if you will let's run through the specs of this box before getting into the benchmark and thermal performance i have already done a few short videos on this this one we look at the actual review of the product so the zbox en 760 is not even a mini ITX system it's much it's smaller than that it's seven by seven by two inches a very small box that you can actually mount via visa mount to the back of a monitor or TV you can keep it out of sight in that regard and its target audience is gamers who would like a living room pc or who would like a DB our replacement that type of thing basically it's an htpc with some gaming prowess running through the specs both units are identical other than two capacities which i will talk about at the end of this list the cpu is an intel i5 4200 you cpu it is a dual-core cpu and its native operating frequencies 1.6 gigahertz it is turbo-boosted to 2.6 a gigahertz which is actually where it's going to be resting most of the time for gaming and is pretty okay for most games as we'll find out in a minute the cpu is a mobile unit and so is the GPU the GPU is actually a gtx 860 em with two gigabytes of dedicated gddr5 one memory on a 128-bit bus and the reason I say dedicated is just to make sure you know it's not shared it is not shared with the rest of the system you supply the RAM for our networking the unit ships with 802 11 AC wireless it uses an antenna for that that is included so you don't need an external card it has two Ethernet port has bluetooth 4.0 for USB 3.0 ports that feel somewhat limiting as we'll talk about in a minute one hdmi audio 1 3.5 millimeter audio and a card reader that supports SD sdhc MMC SDXC anda and all that good stuff and then for video out we have DVI and HDMI so pretty standard suite of things there the plus model has to differences in that it includes RAM and it includes a hard drive the included RAM is a single 8 gigabyte stick of ddr3 1600 megahertz memory and the included hard drive is a one terabyte 2.5 inch 5400 RPM drive I strongly encourage you not to run on a 5400 RPM drive for two reasons one slow to it'll be loud in any type of htpc environment where you want absolute silence so you can enjoy your entertainment the DIY model which does not include RAM or an HDD is priced at five hundred forty dollars the plus model which includes those two things is priced at six hundred ninety dollars that difference doing the math is one hundred fifty dollars for one hundred fifty dollars you can buy your own Ram your own SSD or hard drive and it'll outperform the plus model and you'll pay the same so if you buy this if you're considering at all before we even review anything don't even look at the plus model just look at the DIY model plus it's more fun anyway so why not right so those are the specs lots of talking in a very short period of time moving into how this actually performs because that's ultimately all that matters now we've got a small 7 by 7 by 2 enclosure which means thermals are a concern and then we've got an 86 TM which means that gaming performance is potentially concerned I tested this on four games we're only going to run through two of them here and then I will refer you to the article links in the description below so you can see the benchmarks and all the test methodology if you are interested in learning more about this and if it fits your needs if it performs like you want it to first we're going to talk about grid Autosport I chose this because it's a new game it's the type of game i could see someone playing in the living room with a controller or a racing wheel and it's pretty well optimized actually so grid Autosport on the 860 em with high settings in the benchmark performs at 65 FPS average with a one-percent minimum low of 46 FPS that means your one percent of the time drop into just barely below 60 FPS not bad this is actually very good performance you could actually run this game on a hybrid of high and maximum settings which is what we're looking at right now on maximum settings it runs at 35 FPS pretty unplayable on the 860 em you can see that this outperforms the 250 x and is just below the 7850 which is last generations mid-range budget type card so not bad performance considering it is a mobile GPU and it will play grid on high or high / Ultra settings pretty good performance they're looking at titanfall titanfall is relatively optimized considering what it is and it was pretty bad at launch but it's okay now titanfall on the 860 em on high and on the highest settings possible operates at 50 FPS average that's pretty good you can drop your settings a little bit too to right around the high and medium high area and you'll get 60 FPS constantly which is perfect for a game like titanfall that's what it's meant to be played at so again for about 700 bucks after you include the RAM and the hard drive you're running these games at at a playable 60 FPS at almost max settings in these two instances and that is noteworthy I know 700 is a lot of money you can build a very good big system for that but you have to keep in mind that the form factor is what you're paying for here 7 by 7 by 2 again is very tiny you can't build that in mini ITX because this does not include a power supply in it it's using an AC drop from the wall that saves a lot of space yes you can cheat sort of like that in mini ITX but it's going to cost you a bit more if you want something quality that's sort of where your where your money's going and it's not meant for desktop gaming anyway now it also tested battlefield 4 metro and watchdogs so i guess i lied i tested five games all of those are linked in the description below performance bit lower on those obviously because they are far more intensive check that out if you want to play those games now in terms of things that I was concerned about thermals definitely is the number one item so testing thermals i put the GPU at a hundred percent load and it operated at doing the math in my head 53 ish celsius you'll see the chart on the screen here with the phone number it's about 53 celsius after calculating for ambient under load which is not bad that's about what the dedicated gps i have perform at when under a hundred percent load so it's really it's doing pretty well like cooling the unit and that's because the only thing had even a focus inside of this box when you take it apart is a giant frickin aluminum copper heatsink with a fan on top of the CPU and the GPU so it's obviously doing its job there idle was about 20-something celsius and that's for the GPU looking at the cpu idol was still in the 20s there's about 23 Celsius which is pretty warm it's about 10 Celsius higher than what we're used to with a high-end air cooler on on a bigger desktop but again this is small so that's understandable and then load operating under prime95 SL fft is one hundred percent load which you will never experience in gaming was in the again doing math my head 45 celsius range not too bad it is a bit warm it is a bit toasty but what's really toasty is the SSD I had a hyperx SSD in there which should run pretty cool it runs actually in the right around ambient at about 22 Celsius one in a normal environment in this it ran at 41 Celsius before calculating for ambient two times the temperature of what I'm used to that's because it's sitting in between the GPU cooler and above the RAM and and an adiabatic wall on the other side it will get pretty hot and it's getting two times hotter than what we're used to but you're still going to perform okay as long as you're not really stressing out that drive too much if you're doing really I Oh intensive tasks then perhaps it is a concern thermals overall not bad actually I'm impressed at the GPU thermals to be quite honest it performed far better than I expected and you'll have pretty decent longevity based on these thermals as long as things like the thermal pads thermal paste don't don't wear out over time which is something I can't really test adequately due to the time involvement there but everything looks good from the teardown i did so i do feel pretty confident in the thermals on this unit in terms of things i did not like i did not like the SSD temperature i did not like the limited for USB 3 ports you should probably get a hub if you're the type of person who uses a lot of storage USB storage because there's four ports will be instantly saturated by keyboard mouse controller and one storage or network or other such device so a hub is sort of necessary if you are like me in that regard especially if you're trying to connect an external capture card for this so you can make a DIY DVR and get rid of Time Warner Cable forever and burn them and I'm getting off track here hello Time Warner Cable please don't shut off my internets I need it to upload this video so that's the zbox overall here's what I I think in terms of the target audience if you're the type of person who a travels to conventions or travels for work a lot and can plug this into a hotel TV and do your work and editing they're talking about myself and anyone like me this is a great product for you because it's going to be far more powerful than a similarly priced laptop you're going to get more space if you connected to the hotel TV and it's small so why not if you're a gamer and you want a very discreet low profile htpc that you can play games on in your living room or hiding it somewhere behind your monitor if you've got a special project it's great for that purpose do keep thermals and minds don't stuff it in a corner somewhere where it will suffocate if you are anyone who needs any amount of power it might be worth investigating a DIY mini-itx system build instead but do keep in mind that you instantly expand the size 3 to 4 X because you've got to account for that power supply unless you build with a motherboard that is capable of using an AC drop and I'm not too familiar with many of those off the top of my head and they will inflate costs that's sort of the gray area if you it ultimately comes down to this do you want something really tiny and if not can you live with something that's about three to four times the size but potentially more powerful at the same price if you need something tiny in those scenarios I described this is your thin get the UN 760 DIY model and throw in some ram and an HDD or an SSD I make recommendations in the article link below I think it's good I was fairly impressed with performance and thermals it'll also make for a great steam machine if you would like to do a DIY steam machine build you basically throw steamos on a USB key and then install it from there and you're good to go just keep those limitations in mind and that is all for this review I will see you all next time peace