Zotac ZBOX CI320 nano Review: A Fanless Bay Trail-M mini-PC
by Ganesh T S on January 6, 2015 10:00 AM ESTFinal Words
The Zotac ZBOX CI320 nano provided us with an opportunity to evaluate one of the more configurable, but passively cooled Bay Trail UCFF PCs in the market. Passively cooled systems are either very costly (particularly if they integrate powerful CPUs) or downright abysmal in performance (when they integrate the low-end / low-power CPUs such as the older Atoms). Zotac's offering with the ZBOX CI320 nano aims to strike a balance. $140 for a barebones configuration is quite good in this market segment. A fully loaded PLUS model, along with a pre-installed licensed version of Windows 8.1 is lesser than $260. It is frankly quite difficult to build such a compact and passively cooled system for that price on one's own.
One of the aspects we were worried about was thermal throttling, but the ZBOX CI320 nano surpassed our expectations. The chassis never got extremely hot (reaching only around 68 C, even after extended thermal stress with a couple of power viruses).
Pretty much the only downside of the unit is the relatively bad performance of Bay Trail when compared to Haswell. However, we shouldn't be really complaining for the price since the system seems to operate quite nicely for day-to-day use. The BIOS does need some work - particularly to ensure that cores are not in the max performance mode always in the default configuration. The SSD supplied with the PLUS model could be a bit better, but that is not an issue if the end-user buys a barebones configuration.
All in all, Zotac manages to deliver a very price-effective passive mini-PC in the ZBOX CI320 nano. Along with the ECS LIVA and the Zotac ZBOX CA320 nano in the market, the days of users having to spend an arm and leg for passively cooled systems with decent performance are history.
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marvdmartian - Wednesday, January 7, 2015 - link
Seeing as a mini-ITX motherboard specification is 6.7" x 6.7" in size, then yes, I'm pretty sure it's not the small Gideon Bible you'd find in a hotel room.You could easily, however, cram that into an enclosure that's the size of a sheet of notebook paper, and no more than 4" thick, by using a small form factor power supply, like you'd find in a Shuttle SFF barebones computer.
Pissedoffyouth - Wednesday, January 7, 2015 - link
Exactly, I use a picoPSU so external power brickPissedoffyouth - Wednesday, January 7, 2015 - link
Size of case 19 x 21 x 6.2cm.I use a PicoPSU 120w and it works great.
StevoLincolnite - Monday, January 12, 2015 - link
You would be surprised how well AMD processors undervolt.Like overclocking... AMD and Intel actually have a bit of leeway with the voltages that they apply, so that there is more tolerance for chips that are less than stellar at lower volts.
Of course that's to the advantage of the enthusiast as heat output can then be reduced whilst retaining the same level of performance by undervolting.
That 45w chip could easily end up being a 30w chip or lower if he is lucky and plays with the clocks and voltages.
Conversely, CPU's are generally not under 100% load 24/7, so the heat probably isn't a big concern if his usage demand is only in big but short bursts.
rahduke - Monday, January 19, 2015 - link
Of course he is, there are a ton of mini-itx AMD f2+ boards out there. The Minibox is the smallest mini-itx case out there and their pico PSU makes it all seem quite plausible...rahduke - Monday, January 19, 2015 - link
This is precisely what I've been looking into. I was going to go with the A8-7600 since you can clock it down to 45watts and use the pico PSU that minibox sells. How is this thing working out for you?justareader - Tuesday, January 20, 2015 - link
Size of a bible. What bible? Soon you and your extremist friends will want eternal damnation for a sell out site.BrokenCrayons - Tuesday, January 6, 2015 - link
Typos on page 2 in the second paragraph - "The Ceneron N2930 in the CI320 nano is not as powerful as the Haswell-Y Core i4 " Probably a Celeron and a Core i3 instead of Ceneron and Core i4.074geodude - Tuesday, January 6, 2015 - link
While I generally love Anandtech for their thorough benchmarks and testing, I couldn't help but feel this review totally missed the mark. I think what consumers want to know is, how good would the Zbox work as a home office PC? All these benchmarks are meaningless if they don't provide insight into the daily tasks that someone would be using this for.Can someone run Office and web browse with acceptable performance? Could this be a good inexpensive PC for students? Can it handle light gaming like League of Legends or DOTA 2 perhaps?
And most importantly, how does it compare to the Chromebox, arguably its most direct competitor?
Jodo116 - Tuesday, January 6, 2015 - link
In an office setting, this is a pretty darn good machine. I have the N2840(dual core vs this quad core) and it's perfect. I would maybe argue that this is a little too pricey with the HP and Acer 11" netbooks that have the N2840 for under $200 but this is a solid machine.It won't be able to handle much for gaming though, with a caveat, as even Minecraft is none too keen to play on this machine. The caveat however is in Steam streaming if you have a more powerful computer elsewhere in the house. This is the perfect Steam in-home streaming device. You can play AAA games at ultra setings at 1080p with no real issues. I use mine for this and it's flawless.
I replaced my AppleTV with this and while this is obviously more expensive, the use cases are much much more.