Gadgetory

now this is something that I've been meaning to take a look out for a while this is the zotac zbox or Zed box whichever you prefer personally I'm not fussy and this has been quite popular for a while because it is a bare-bones all-in-one net top so there is there are many other companies on the market these days that are making a net top that is actually completely customizable and doesn't come with the things that most people would want to change they say for example memory hard drive and OS so that's pretty much the only things they haven't included and that gives you a lot of flexibility like if you want to build sort of an alternate performance net top then you could throw in a bunch of RAM throw in an SSD drive and then throw you know windows 7 on there and all of a sudden you've got a great little fun fake if you decide you don't want that you can throw in like it the cheap as possible to two half-inch drive the least possible amount of RAM and that's an optimal grandma PC you know install an old copy of XP that you have lying around in great boom there you go it's like the cheapest possible thing that way so it gives you a lot of flexibility this particular one is there is part of their newest generation of products so this is the HD I d40 you yeah they're their model names aren't really all that remembering exactly what they are friendly but here let's go through exactly what is included here so it's the atom d525 so it's a dual core 1.8 gigahertz intel atom processor it has the next generation which is why I guess the second generation nvidia ion chipset with 512 megs ddr3 graphics memory has two ddr2 expansion slots one two and a half inch hard drive slot that is a say 23 gigabit per second gigabit lan wireless-n card reader that also has a SATA i don't see that oh yeah there's the e stato so there's all the included io hdmi as well as DVI you can get vga with a dongle and then you've got 810 channel digital audio included it is extremely silent i have personally validated this camera man's grandpa actually built a pc around the zbox ahh this one was a couple ago and he was just super impressed with how fast it was for what he needed which is basically just like you know browsing the internet watching a couple videos you know just sort of no big deal stuff but also with how quiet it was it was almost no noise and this is even in comparison to other net tops on the market it's fully 1080p capable which is a here okay and it will play 1080p video when I don't run around this I I did actually I built it form so I did test that as well it includes the vesa mount and everything else here I think we've covered already there's a little explanation of that which I'll leave there while we go through the packaging itself so the first thing we find in the package is a power cable so you're going to notice that this looks an awful lot like a notebook power adapter you got your power brick you got your little DC plug and then you've got an AC cord that goes into it the reason is that the inside of the zbox is an awful lot like a netbook the only difference is that it doesn't have a screen I guess there's probably some other differences but I'm not going to get too far into that so in Canada there we go the 1 year warranty on the zbox we have a driver installation CD so here I'm going to refine my throw away the CD suggestion to download the land drivers off the CD and then throw it away and then download the rest of the newest ones off of the zotac or the the OEM website because remember for things like audio chip sets you can download them directly from the OE n that makes the chip here is a user's manual here is a quick start guide which presumably includes things like where to plug stuff into not it looks like it doesn't include anything about upgrading the ram hard drive so that's kind of interesting I wonder if that's in the manual I mean is the assumption that if you've gotten this far you probably know how to do that already or what hi here we go yeah so it does include instructions for customizing DZ box okay what do we find in the other side on the other side you find a DVI DVI to vga adapter some mounting screws which I guess me for something as well as a little stand if you want to have it sit on your desk like that so tech it's time to play yeah you won't be playing too much on this particular one unless it's like videos and stuff not really not really a gaming machine Intel Atom an ok so here we go it comes pre attached to its a little base amount besa besa I don't know okay so you just press that little switch take that off no problem look it even includes like ventilation built-in okay so we'll have a look Bob's really light actually without a thought or drive in it makes an enormous difference you'd be surprised okay so on the front we have eSATA then 2 3 4 USB 2.0 that's a Gigabit LAN DVI HDMI that is optical digital audio out as well as our power input up on the top we have ventilation so you can clearly see the heatsink here that is cooling the CPU as well as the nvidia ion chipset that's where your exhaust is going to go so we've got another USB port here conveniently located oh there's rubber feet here so you can actually put it down this way so that's the way you'd use it as a desktop so there's the front this is the way you'd use it if you put it on the stand and then if you obviously attach the base amount when you put it on the back of a monitor on the front you can see we've got a power switch as well as a couple activity LEDs for wireless as well as presumably the hard drive we have another USB port so it's a total of six and an SD card reader we have a microphone port as well as a headphone port that's all you're going to get for analog audio so unless you want to run digital you're only going to get 2 point 0 or I guess you give Martin 2.1 if you had a built-in subwoofer so you're only going to get two channels out I guess that's pretty much everything there is to say about it so basically you need ram drive and os and you are ready to go so here's how it works on the back of the nlcd I promised you guys I'd show them click you can also wall mount it that's kind of neat ok so thank you for checking out my unboxing of the zbox and don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips and leave a comment criticizing how I'm saying this letter wrong because everyone seems to do that