Zotac ZBOX: Brazos Goes HTPC
by Andrew Van Til on June 9, 2011 5:00 PM ESTFinal Thoughts
With an outstanding form factor, including a slim-line slot loading Blu-ray drive, the ZOTAC ZBOX AD03BR-PLUS-U delivers on Fusion’s promise of an affordable, capable, low power HTPC. With an MSRP of $519 (street ~$512), it is possible to DYI an E-350 system with similar media capabilities for a bit less; however, but matching the size and overall attractiveness and flexibility of the ZBOX would be impossible to do economically. The form factor is demanding, with limited I/O and future expandability, so it is not the right fit for every scenario—especially those where a stronger CPU is required. That said, as a client HTPC or standalone media streamer the E-350’s balance of CPU + GPU provides a good mix of performance and power consumption.
Pros:
- Form factor
- Power usage
- Mountable
- Multi-channel LPCM/HD Audio support from an AMD IPG
Cons:
- Video levels can be difficult to get right
- Limited I/O ports and expandability
- Fan can get a bit loud under heavy load
- Heavy network use causes the NIC to stress the CPU
Thanks to ZOTAC for providing the review sample.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
36 Comments
View All Comments
babgvant - Friday, June 10, 2011 - link
The slim, slot loading BD drive is a big part of the cost increase. At retail a drive like the one in this system would go for $120+. ZOTAC sells a similar E350 system w/o an ODD for ~$320 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...wkeller - Saturday, June 11, 2011 - link
You can have a Foxconn NT A3500 barebone E350 for around $200 (without memory/disk). Runs very quit and uses very little power. Also has lots of USB2/3 ports in a very small case.Penti - Saturday, June 11, 2011 - link
Nice, but as we know the problem with something like Zacate is that it won't be powerful to do (more advanced gpu-accelerated) interlacing and stuff like that. If you need to playback virtually anything you still need a CPU that's powerful enough to do software decoding. We already know that a low-end AMD-gpu is still not powerful enough to do post processing. You won't escape from the problem by just integrating the graphics, it's still a good system on it's own though. A Intel Mini-ITX system with Z68 with external graphics would be interesting by it's strengths too albeit some other properties, especially if your system also do encoding, or handles heavier TV-capture/viewing tasks.Zacate does a good job handling a cheap platform that does bitstream decoding and so on though. But it has limits. Systems to playback pirated or ripped content and all sorts of formats including web-streamed or online content normally doesn't always work out perfectly. Flash Player doesn't always work out so good with hardware acceleration either thanks to it's awkward architecture. The all-round system takes some work, it's not effort less. This fills a place, this system. It comes in a quite nice form factor. BD makes it quite costly compared to the pure Zotac Brazos barebone though, it's ~190 dollars less on newegg. A DVD-only system would also had cost less. Like their Atom-based system with only a plain old DVD-drive. It's also quite preferable over the Atom based BD-system with ION-NG for the same price. All for a pretty reasonable price. If you don't need even more power that is.
jielundd - Monday, June 13, 2011 - link
The website whol esale for many kinds of fas hion sho es,like the nik e,jord an,pr ada, the jea ns,shirts,bags,hat and decorations.
All the products are free ship ping, and the the price is com petitive,
and also can accept the pay pal pay ment.
,after the paym ent, can ship within short time.
Hugh R - Sunday, June 19, 2011 - link
Is the DVI output dual link? I'm wondering whether it can drive my 2560x1600 monitor.The official specs and manual are silent on this issue. That probably means that it is only single link.
Oscarcharliezulu - Saturday, June 25, 2011 - link
Bluetooth was not mentioned so presuming another USB port used up for my dinovo mini.Would people say the zotac is better than my amd4850e on a 780g (amd 3200) ?
Hdmi support is better as is image quality, but not sure I can give up the CPU speed which give me a lot of flexibility.