Zotac ZBOX MAGNUS EK71080 Compact Gaming PC Review

Power Consumption and Thermal Performance

The power consumption of the Zotac ZBOX MAGNUS EK71080 at the wall was measured with a 4K display (LG 43UD79B) being driven through one of its DisplayPort outputs. In the graphs below, we compare the idle and load power of the system with other high-performance SFF PCs that we have evaluated before. For load power consumption, we ran our own custom stress test (Prime95 and FurMark) as well as the AIDA64 System Stability Test with various stress components, and noted the maximum sustained power consumption at the wall.

Our configuration of the EK71080 has the highest idle and load power consumption numbers amongst all the -H series and lower TDP CPU-equipped systems. In fact, the EK71080's numbers are surpassed only by the systems with the 65W desktop CPUs.

Our thermal stress routine starts with the system at idle, followed by four stages of different system loading profiles using the AIDA64 System Stability Test (each of 30 minutes duration). In the first stage, we stress the CPU, caches and RAM. In the second stage, we add the GPU to the above list. In the third stage, we stress the GPU standalone. In the final stage, we stress all the system components (including the disks). Beyond this, we leave the unit idle in order to determine how quickly the various temperatures in the system can come back to normal idling range. The various clocks, temperatures and power consumption numbers for the system during the above routine are presented in the graphs below.

We repeated the same observations with our legacy stress test using the latest versions of Prime95 and Furmark.

The EK71080 was able to get through our thermal stress routines without any issues. The core temperatures were held below 95C even under extreme stress. The only minor concern is the SSD temperature. The M.2 SSD has a fan on its side, but, it doesn't prevent the SSD from reaching as high as 80C.