Gadgetory

this is a ZOTAC z box the en 760 model more specifically it's not the first time I've ever seen one but my early experiences with Z box just weren't that great the hardware was slow usually Intel Atom or early AMD APU based and they didn't have decent graphics so from a gaming perspective they were basically irrelevant a global leader in tech recruiting is celebrating geek pride by giving away 10 amazing tech prizes for more info visit the modus Facebook page or modus com step forward a few years and two things have happened number one is that hardware is much more efficient at number two is that it's much more powerful so this same form factor I mean it really looks almost identical to the old ones can have way cooler and faster guts in it so let's get physical with our Z Box II that's for epic gaming by the way series mini PC overall there are no surprises here it can lay flat it can stand upright on the included foot and it can be bolted to a basic compatible monitor or TV with the included adaptor also included in the Box is a couple of antennas for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth a DVI to VGA adapter a manual a driver disk which you may actually need because no tax website is so low and the screws for the base amount for the PC itself we'll start at the front where we've got headphone and microphone jacks an SD card reader a USB 3 port an IR sensor and a power switch a funny thing here is as otech couldn't decide which way was up for the labels on the front ports it's a minor issue but it's definitely one that made me laugh on the right hand side is another USB 3 port with a little cover on it and a large exhaust vent on the left we find two thumb screws to open up the unit and the mount for the foot and then the top is straight smooth glossy plastic with an attractive orange LED that you can actually turn off in the vials but it's got a very muted glow so I would personally leave it on the bottom is the same thing but with a bunch of ventilation holes and led and this is all for the internal cooling fan I guess there's also four little rubber feet here now speaking of cool most of the interesting i/o is on the back where we find power in our antennas HDMI and dual link DVI out to USB 3 ports an optical audio out and finally dual Ethernet ports which feels like a very strange inclusion to me I would have preferred a mini DisplayPort output or something but maybe next time now all on a minute then normally these kinds of small form-factor pcs are tightly integrated and difficult to take apart why did this thing have thumb screws over on the side with the foot mount well truthfully you're intended to take it apart it's available as a bare-bones where you put in your own Drive in memory or as a prebuilt that you just install an operating system on so once we get inside we can see the large 6800 Ultra style heatsink that cool is a dual core Intel Core i5 that runs at 1.6 gigahertz base and up to 2.6 gigahertz with turbo boost and a gtx 860m with 2 gigs of ram here we see the included Intel wireless AC and Bluetooth 4.0 card and finally over here we've got the one terabyte hard drive that's included with the pre-built one but can be removed if we pull out that one screw to reveal two ddr3 sodium slots one of which is populated with an 8 gig module now evaluating the performance of this thing could have been as simple as running our suite of games and measuring the FPS but I don't think it really would have been fair to a product like this I don't see this as a normal PC it's more like a console in terms of size and utility so I took a little bit of a different approach using the same image quality settings that we found looked the same as a ps4 back when we did our image quality comparison with battlefield 4 and Assassin's Creed 4 we wanted to see if this tiny PC a mere 6 months after we did that video could deliver the same gaming experience at 1080 as a current gen console and it did in fact it was about 10% faster than our value gaming PC at the time which was able to achieve the same minimum frame rate of 30 fps that the consul's target so this one did it quite comfortably and it managed to that while being much much smaller than the PC smaller than a console and whisper quiet even while gaming I'm really really impressed but with that said the en 760 does cost quite a bit more than a PlayStation 4 so whether it's worth your hard earned money is a pretty tough call and only you can make that decision once you've considered the pros and cons it is a great package if you don't mind the spend enos of it the cooling fan is incredibly quiet its well-built fully featured and tiny enough to hide behind the TV or pretty much anywhere else so it has that gadgety sex appeal and it's fairly likely to achieve spouse approval if you have a process for that in your house given that it'll be out of sight but the big drawback of course is that while you'll have the functionality of a desktop like a lot more versatility than a console you won't get the upgrade ability or customizability of a true desktop PC so there you have it guys I love that ZOTAC had the guts to build something like this and I hope it's a massive success because given what they can jam in a notebook these days there is obviously more powerful hardware that could make its way into this kind of a form factor if the demand was strong enough but with steam in-home streaming finally available theoretically we don't even need gaming machines on our TVs anymore but it's hardly perfect so especially if I had some ddr3 or two and a half inch drive lying around this epic gaming series would likely be getting a look from me if nothing else even if I didn't end up going forward and I went for a very low power just streaming box with an h.264 decoder but guys let me know your thoughts our powerful gaming box is hooked up to TVs dead or do you like the directions otac is going in here or would you prefer just a larger one in the first place speaking of direction here's how to do something fun on audible.com find some celebrity you like and search his or her name to see if they've narrated anything interesting I picked Jason Alexander of Seinfeld Fame because I don't know who knows maybe I hate my ears never buds get this it turns out that there's a 90 our new King James Bible reading with its own musical score and some seriously heavy adding voice actors including Jason Alexander now you could buy that for just shy of $40 or you could get it for one credit as part of your audible membership sounds awesome right with audibles library of over 150,000 audiobooks there's sure to be something to listen to every month with your membership and the best part is that by heading over to audible.com slash blindness you get your first 1 for 3 with a new sign up so check it out today at audible.com slash Linus and as usual that is the link for pricing and availability of this product is in the video description below - like dislike and share buttons which I'd love for you to use accordingly also in the video description is a support link where you can buy a t-shirt give us a monthly contribution or change your amazon bookmark so we get an affiliate kickback whenever you buy new laundry detergent or whatever else it helps us out a lot thanks again for watching and as always don't forget to subscribe