Zotac ZBOX CI320 nano Review: A Fanless Bay Trail-M mini-PC
by Ganesh T S on January 6, 2015 10:00 AM ESTPower Consumption and Thermal Performance
The power consumption at the wall was measured with a 1080p display being driven through the HDMI port. In the graphs below, we compare the idle and load power of the Zotac ZBOX CI320 nano with other low power PCs evaluated before. For load power consumption, we ran Furmark 1.12.0 and Prime95 v27.9 together. The numbers are not beyond the realm of reason for the combination of hardware components in the machine.
Reasonable power aside, there does seem to be a BIOS default configuration issue causing the idle power to be a bit on the high end. One of the possible reasons was revealed in our evaluation of the thermal performance (discussed below).
The various clocks in the system as well as the temperatures within the unit are presented below. We start with the system at idle, followed by 30 minutes of pure CPU loading. This is followed by another 30 minutes of both CPU and GPU being loaded simultaneously. After this, the CPU load was removed, allowing the GPU to be loaded alone for another 30 minutes.
A look at the frequencies above indicates that all the cores are pegged at 1.83 GHz throughout our evaluation (even at idle). On the other hand, the GPU frequency varies between 600 and 800 MHz depending on the GPU load. The junction temperature of the Celeron N2930 is 100 C. The cooling system is efficient and manages to keep the SoC temperature below 93 C even under extreme duress.
Another important aspect to keep note of while evaluating fanless PCs is the chassis temperature. Using Seek Thermal's thermal imager, we observed the chassis temperature after the CPU package temperature reached the steady state value in the above graph.
Surprisingly, the chassis temperature was less than 70 C even after heavy loading. Though this is not as low as the 56 C we observed in the CA320 nano, it is better than the 75 C+ that we saw in the CI540 nano.
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andychow - Tuesday, January 6, 2015 - link
Yes is has an IR sensor, but from what I read it's not very good and doesn't seem to wake up from sleep via IR, even if the option is in the bios, it doesn't work.lianthus - Tuesday, January 6, 2015 - link
I love that you guys added XMBC to the tests, one thing though, what I have the most trouble knowing is how well these low powered chips do when playing a Hi10bit mkv file. Anime now is mostly encoded this way and my old ZBOX cannot properly play the files regardless of whether or not I'm using wireless, wired, or local playback. If you could add this one piece to your reviews it would save me a tremendous amount of trouble, as nobody ever seems to post anything about playing back these files. It is literally the most important part of my purchasing choices when it comes to media PCs like this one.bobbozzo - Tuesday, January 6, 2015 - link
Also we need to worry about h.265 performance.saiga6360 - Wednesday, January 7, 2015 - link
The latest version of XBMC or Kodi as it is now called supports HVEC or H265 encodes. As for Hi10p, not sure if there is hardware acceleration support but the latest Celerons and AMD APUs can run these MKV encodes in software just fine up to 1080p. I use the latest Kodi version 5.0 in OpenELEC and I can run these files on a Zotac AMD E-450 APU and a Chromebox 1.4 Celeron CPU.hlovatt - Tuesday, January 6, 2015 - link
Any chance of reviewing the Mac mini to seen ow it compares?takeship - Wednesday, January 7, 2015 - link
It would seem to me that a passively cooled box whose BIOS fails to implement dynamic frequency stepping properly (or apparently at all) needs more than "a little work". It's inexcusable to ship a product with an issue like that. I wonder Ganesh if you tested or ran into issues with APCI sleep/wake states as well? Those have been notable pain points of Zotac on other boxes. And given the storage perf numbers, are we sure that SATA6 is actually being used, instead of say 3? I've looked at these Zotac boxes with lust for years now, but ultimately have always avoided because of questions concerning driver/firmware. It looks like Zotac still hasn't gotten their house in order.zepi - Wednesday, January 7, 2015 - link
HTPC Credentials needs to include H265 decode tests. That is soon going to be crucial.Wineohe - Wednesday, January 7, 2015 - link
I would like to see these small form factor PC's move to a 12V supply instead of 19V. They would be more versatile for mobile use.AgeOfPanic - Wednesday, January 7, 2015 - link
I don't understand how they cannot enable HD audio bitstreaming under Windows and have it work under Linux. Is there a logic behind it?saiga6360 - Thursday, January 8, 2015 - link
Driver issues