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

Final 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.