Zotac ZBOX Nano XS AD11 Plus: Redefining the Small Form Factor PC
by Ganesh T S on April 11, 2012 5:30 PM EST- Posted in
- Home Theater
- ZOTAC
- Fusion
- HTPC
The ZBOX Nano XS AD11 Plus is based on a platform meant for an ultra-portable solution. It wouldn't make sense to compare it with full blown desktop solutions (or for that matter, even the mid-range and high end SFF HTPCs we have reviewed over the last two years). In the figures presented in the rest of this section, we will provide the scores obtained by the ZBOX unit and also place other SFF PC scores for comparison purposes (even though the price range of the PCs might not be the same).
Windows Experience Index
It is no secret that the Bobcat cores in the E-450 are the weak links. As expected, the Windows Experience Index pin-points the culprit.
PC Mark and x264 Encoding
We ran two more benchmarks to evaluate the CPU performance. It is not surprising in any way that the AMD E-450 is lagging behind in both of them. Ideally, we should have graphed some other nettops, but we chose machines with already available data points.
WinRAR Benchmarking
An estimate of how well WinRAR performs, particularly with respect to processing split archives, is evaluated next. Towards this, a 4.36 GB MKV file is compressed in the 'Best' compression mode into a split archive (97.1 MB each), which results in 44 files on the hard disk. The time taken to decompress this split archive is then recorded. The performance in this benchmark is heavily influenced by the drive in the system. Ideally, SSD-based systems should be able to easily beat hard disk based ones.
We find that the ZBOX slots somewhere in the middle. Even if the SSD was fast enough, it appears that the CPU is too slow to decompress the archive fast enough to match the speed of the SSD. In the next subsection, we will deal with the mSATA SSD specifically.
Primary Drive Performance
As mentioned earlier, the mSATA SSD in the system is from Kingston. The Kingston SSDNow mS100 has a Phison controller. The table below shows the Iometer test results for the mSATA SSD.
| IOMeter Performance | |
| Test | Transfer Rate (MBps) |
| 4 KB Random Write | 5.87 |
| 4 KB Random Read | 6.29 |
| 128 KB Sequential Read | 211.89 |
| 128 KB Sequential Write | 103.39 |
The suggestion is that writes to the drive be kept to a minimum. The 4K figures are downright abysmal, considering we get more than 50 MBps for most SSDs. It is quite possible that the transfer rates may go down as more writes are done to the flash.
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ganeshts - Wednesday, April 11, 2012 - link
Nope, it is a standard MCE IR remote, similar to what was bundled with the Vision 3D and the CoreHT 252B.You will need a separate keyboard / mouse if you wish to do even basic browsing or navigation outside of a 10-ft UI (like XBMC)
ectoplasmosis - Wednesday, April 11, 2012 - link
The photography in this article is truly shocking.Matias - Wednesday, April 11, 2012 - link
I also noted the very poor pictures! What the hell??ganeshts - Wednesday, April 11, 2012 - link
I apologize for the poor pictures. We were running late for the NDA lift [ in fact, we missed it by a good 9 hours :( ], and had to make do with whatever I could snap in a hurry yesterday evening.adityanag - Thursday, April 12, 2012 - link
Ah I just posted a comment to this.. Well, nevermind what I said previously, these things happen :)einstein4pres - Thursday, April 12, 2012 - link
They appear to be taken with a Nikon P&S. I was curious, so I checked the exif info on the shot of the box that has an incredible amount of barrel distortion.I suggest taking the shot in the middle of your zoom range, which should help eliminate the barrel distortion, and increasing the F number (from f2.8 to ~ f8) to increase the depth of field (amount of stuff in focus). You probably need more ambient light, a flash, or a tripod to make this work.
freedom4556 - Wednesday, April 11, 2012 - link
Test HD Netflix performance in your HTPC reviews, hell, throw in Hulu Plus and HD Youtube and any other major streaming you can think of. Reason I say this is I have an E-350 based HTPC and Silverlight (Microsoft's technology that powers Netflix) doesn't properly provide hardware acceleration to HD streams coming from Netflix. This results in an unplayable single-digit FPS on my Windows 7 HTPC. Youtube works fine, Adobe's got it figured out, and on the latest drivers too. Don't have Hulu, but still FIX IT MICROSOFT. Grrrr...Musafir_86 - Thursday, April 12, 2012 - link
-Did you check that you really have Silverlight 5 installed? Windows Update only pushes Silverlight 4 as far as I could see, so you need to download and upgrade manually. Also, AFAIK, only in version 5 it have proper hardware acceleration support.Regards,
-Musafir_86.
Kakumei - Thursday, April 12, 2012 - link
microsoft removed true gpu acceleration from their to-do list for silverlight 5.You cannot watch netflix hd on netbook cpus, sorry.
Matias - Thursday, April 12, 2012 - link
I agree, cant see HD videos on Netflix using the AD10 because of lame Silverlight...