Zotac ZBOX CI320 nano Review: A Fanless Bay Trail-M mini-PC

Performance Metrics - I

The Zotac ZBOX CI320 nano was evaluated using our standard test suite for low power desktops / industrial PCs. We revamped our benchmark suite earlier this year after the publication of the Intel D54250WYK NUC review. We reran some of the new benchmarks on the older PCs also, but some of them couldn't be run on loaner samples. Therefore, the list of PCs in each graph might not be the same.

Futuremark PCMark 8

PCMark 8 provides various usage scenarios (home, creative and work) and offers ways to benchmark both baseline (CPU-only) as well as OpenCL accelerated (CPU + GPU) performance. We benchmarked select PCs for the OpenCL accelerated performance in all three usage scenarios. These scores are heavily influenced by the CPU in the system. The Ceneron N2930 in the CI320 nano is not as powerful as the Haswell-Y Core i4 in the CI540 nano or the Haswell-U CPUs in the NUCs with similar form factor. However, those PCs are either much costlier or require fans for cooling.

Miscellaneous Futuremark Benchmarks

3D Rendering - CINEBENCH R15

We have moved on from R11.5 to R15 for 3D rendering evaluation. CINEBENCH R15 provides three benchmark modes - OpenGL, single threaded and multi-threaded. Evaluation of select PCs in all three modes provided us the following results.

Benchmarks which rely on GPU performance are won by the AMD Temash-based ZBOX CA320 nano, while those relying on CPU performance (either single or multi-threaded) are won by the ZBOX CI320 nano. The ECS LIVA lags both of these, but it does come at a lower price point.