Zotac ZBOX MAGNUS EN980 SFF PC Review - An Innovative VR-Ready Gaming Powerhouse
by Ganesh T S on August 25, 2016 8:00 AM ESTGaming Notebooks Compared
One of the most common comments posted in response to mini-PC reviews is that the value proposition of an equivalent notebook is much higher than that of the PC. While there are plenty of factors that might make this comparison invalid, we thought it would be interesting to see how the Zotac ZBOX MAGNUS EN980 fares against premium gaming notebooks. Towards this, we borrowed a few benchmarks from our notebook reviews and processed them on the EN980. First, we will look at some artificial benchmarks before moving on to the games themselves.
3DMark Revisited
GFXBench
Dota 2
Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor
The takeaway from these results is that the performance of the mobile GPUs are approaching that of the desktop GPUs in many games. However, the EN980 is able to hold its own except in certain cases where there is a SLI of mobile GPUs, or where the benchmark is also reflective of the CPU capabilities and the competing system uses a 4C/8T processor
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nathanddrews - Thursday, August 25, 2016 - link
Revision 2.0 with Pascal and PCIe SSD should be interesting. The tiny design is really neat.Chaitanya - Thursday, August 25, 2016 - link
V2 with 1080 or 1070 has already been announced.nathanddrews - Thursday, August 25, 2016 - link
...ImSpartacus - Thursday, August 25, 2016 - link
That's going to be awesome. I hope they can cram some kaby lake in there as well as it'll surely have some minor improvements over Skylake.lament - Thursday, August 25, 2016 - link
Not v2 though.. different model EN10: http://techreport.com/news/30526/zotac-magnus-en10...Morawka - Thursday, August 25, 2016 - link
Tiny? this thing is huge. sure it's smaller than your typical M-ITX case but not far from it.Einy0 - Friday, August 26, 2016 - link
Is it just me or is a 250GB SSD is not enough for a gaming PC. I thought it would be enough a few years ago and quickly discovered that I was constantly shuffling games over to a HDD to make room. Most of the games from the past few years are about 40GB a piece. Looking at my current Steam folder, the Witcher 3 is 38GB and Shadow of Mordor is 42GB. With Windows 10 and a standard load of common apps and utilities, you are looking at 4 to 5 games installed. I suppose if you only use it for games it would okay.jamyryals - Thursday, August 25, 2016 - link
Looks like a terrific little box. The visual comparison to the Nuc was especially helpful to get size context. Too bad they couldn't get the Pascal cards in on this version.fallaha56 - Thursday, August 25, 2016 - link
too bad? deal breaker more like! no point being this far behind the curve...gtx1060 would wipe floor wit at every levelBrokenCrayons - Thursday, August 25, 2016 - link
It's an interesting system. As already mentioned in another comment, the NUC size comparison is useful for putting things in perspective about just how much more physical space it takes to gain gaming performance.I do question this line though:
"At this point of time, a premium gaming PC that can't be advertised as VR-ready can't get good market reception."
The monetary returns for companies producing VR hardware and VR-enabled software for consumer use isn't easy to find and we haven't had enough time or products out there to see any enduring trends about the latest round. All I've got is personal experience to work with here, but I see very little consumer demand because of the cost of entry and the unaddressed shortcomings that we saw with 90's era headgear being duplicated in current hardware.