Zotac ZBOX EI750 Plus: A Feature-Rich Iris Pro mini-PC

Gaming Benchmarks

The gaming credentials of the Core i7-4770R received a huge marketing boost when the BRIX Pro was distributed as a 'Steam Machine' at the Steam Developers Conference earlier this year. Based on paper specifications alone, the Crystal Well parts should be able to perform much better than any other previous Intel IGP. For the purpose of benchmarking, we chose five different games (Company of Heroes 2, Sleeping Dogs, Tomb Raider, Bioshock Infinite and DiRT Showdown) at three different quality levels.

As someone focusing on HTPCs and multimedia aspects, I rarely get to process gaming benchmarks, even while evaluating GPUs. One of the aspects that I feared was spending lot of time in installing the same games again and again on different PCs under the review scanner. The solution was to go the Steam route. Unfortunately, Steam also likes to keep the game files updated. A quick online search revealed that Steam could make use of an external drive for storing the game executables and downloadable content. With the Steam drive on-the-go use-case being read-heavy, the Corsair Flash Voyager GS USB 3.0 128GB Flash Drive (with read speeds of up to 275 MBps) was ideal for use as a portable Steam drive.

Benchmark Numbers

Despite similar clock speeds and memory configurations, the BRIX Pro manages to have a lead over both ZBOX EI750 configurations in our gaming benchmarks.