Zotac ZBOX MAGNUS EN970 Review - A Gaming mini-PC Done Right
by Ganesh T S on September 28, 2015 8:00 AM ESTPerformance Metrics - I
The Zotac ZBOX MAGNUS EN970 was evaluated using our standard test suite for mini / industrial PCs. Not all benchmarks were processed on all the machines due to updates in our testing procedures. Therefore, the list of PCs in each graph might not be the same.
Futuremark PCMark 8
PCMark 8 provides various usage scenarios (home, creative and work) and offers ways to benchmark both baseline (CPU-only) as well as OpenCL accelerated (CPU + GPU) performance. We benchmarked select PCs for the OpenCL accelerated performance in all three usage scenarios. These scores are heavily influenced by the CPU in the system. The issue for the MAGNUS EN970 is the fact that it comes with a U-series CPU, while the gaming mini-PCs from the competitors use the non-U CPUs. For example, the extra thickness of the ASRock VisionX series units allows them to integrate Core i7-4712MQ CPUs in the VisionX 471D and 420D systems. The GIGABYTE GB-BXi5G-760 uses a Core i5-5200H.
Miscellaneous Futuremark Benchmarks
3D Rendering - CINEBENCH R15
We have moved on from R11.5 to R15 for 3D rendering evaluation. CINEBENCH R15 provides three benchmark modes - OpenGL, single threaded and multi-threaded. Evaluation of select PCs in all three modes provided us the following results. The surprising aspect is the OpenGL results - the previous generation GTX 760 seems to perform better than the GTX 960. As we shall see further on in the review, this issue persists in a few other benchmarks as well. The other results can easily be explained by the low power CPU (Core i5-5200U) in the system.
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KateH - Monday, September 28, 2015 - link
I would be very curious to hear more about the GPU rebranding situation... why would a 1280-shader GM204 on an MXM card be a 970m in a laptop but a 960 non-M in a SFF? Why would Nvidia/Zotac go to the trouble of editing the VGA BIOS and drivers to make this GM204 show up as a 960 when there are already loads of MXM 970m's that are functionally identical to this aside from re-badging? The OEM GPU re-branding situation is ridiculous; Zotac/Nvidia have created a doubly confusing situation where this card could be easily confused for either a significantly-slower GM107-based GTX 960m (that's itself a rebadged 860m) or a slightly-slower GM206 GTX 960 that has the potentially-important HEVC decode that's actually not present in this "960".KateH - Monday, September 28, 2015 - link
And while I'm on a rant, re-badging between generations is ridiculous too- but I know by now that's a losing battle that's only getting worse. FFS.mapesdhs - Monday, September 28, 2015 - link
A lot of that going on by all sides, but it's hard to discuss without enraging rival armies of haters and fanboys. We'd be a lot better off if nobody did it. What really bugs me is the massive performance overlap of newer lesser models vs. older models. The naming system allows one to infer that a newer card will have a particular level of basic performance, but the reality is often very different. I benchmarked a 650 Ti recently, was amazed to find it often failed to beat an old GTX 460.lmcd - Tuesday, September 29, 2015 - link
I mean the 650 Ti should be like 2/3 the power consumption at most, no?KateH - Tuesday, September 29, 2015 - link
Yeah, something like that. ~100-120W for a 650Ti vs ~150-170W for a 460. The 660 is in the same power envelope as the 460 and should outperform it by a fair marginrtho782 - Tuesday, September 29, 2015 - link
You're perfectly right. Having a separate mobile product stack made sense when mobile gpus were way behind desktop ones, now they use the same silicon, less so.I think we should have the same product names and tiers for both, perhaps use the "m" suffix in cases where the clockspeed is much lower in the laptop variant.
KateH - Tuesday, September 29, 2015 - link
I kinda wonder if it's not time to do away with the "M" suffix for GPUs altogether and move towards segmentation based on power, like what Intel has done with their K/S/H/Y/U suffixes. Low-power MXM/onboard GPUs are by no means strictly in the realm of notebooks anymore- AIO and SFF computers are using them more and more. And looking at AMD/NV's product stacks, "desktop" GPUs cover ~15W-250W (with all but the top-end being under ~150W) and "mobile" GPUs cover ~15W-125W- that's a whole lot of overlap.ruthan - Tuesday, September 29, 2015 - link
Better than Macmin, but otherwise is better build own, even if MXM is not possible to use by us second category people..adithyay328 - Thursday, October 1, 2015 - link
Those specs actually almost give my mid tower desktop a run for it's money-almost.aj654987 - Friday, October 2, 2015 - link
Well, for the alienware alpha with the 860m and the T series processors (Haswell 35W), the CPU's are almost all GPU limited, even the i3's. So there is room for a higher powered GPU.With going broadwell, the lowest desktop CPU is 65 watts so far, which is probably too high for that small case, so their only choice is a 15 watt mobile chip.