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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josephandrews222 - Thursday, January 8, 2015 - link
I enjoy reading the comments from ars experts in a thread like this...and I have a question/comment similar to one posted earlier.My wife's computing needs are minimal (word processing, downloading pdfs and filling out forms for job-related stuff, paying bills online, light web-surfing, occasional Netflix etc.).
Would this box work for her? Flawlessly? No driver issues etc.? Plug it into a simple 1080p monitor via DVI/HDMI or VGA and all is well?
Oxford Guy - Saturday, January 10, 2015 - link
Sounds like the ECS Liva would fit the bill. It has been as cheap as $95. Slap Windows 10 preview on it and you don't even have to pay for a Windows license.sonicmerlin - Tuesday, January 13, 2015 - link
Can you install a cablecard in this thing? I guess you could always use an external usb tuner but I would prefer something internal.Zim - Tuesday, January 13, 2015 - link
What about the pipo x7 from gearbest ? Baytrail T Z3736F Quad Core 2GB/32GB WiFi Bluetooth Windows 8.1 /bing $89 shipped.