Zotac shows several small, powerful Zbox PCs at Computex

[Scorpus]

I stopped by Zotac's booth at Computex 2014, where the company was showing off several extremely small form factor PCs with some powerful internals inside. One of them, pictured above and called the Zbox CA320, is a passively cooled system with an AMD A6-1450 APU inside, constructed mostly out of metal that looks great.

Best of all, it's barely larger than my hand, and should be powerful enough for video playback and some light gaming. Chuck it next to your TV and use it as a reasonably powerful nano HTPC.

The other main product Zotac was showing was the recently announced Zbox Sphere OI520. Reminiscent of Google's failed Nexus Q, the Zbox Sphere is a much more powerful small form factor PC with an Intel 'Haswell' Core i5-4200U processor inside. You can also find a 500 GB hard drive and 4 GB of RAM inside, plus an LED light strip around the sphere's seam.

In fact it's very easy to take apart the Zbox Sphere. By easily twisting the top of the sphere, you can remove it to reveal compact innards with a surprising amount of space for a 2.5" drive and airflow. The system is designed for light PC tasks and multimedia, and again it looks very good without sacrificing functionality.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/57024-zotac-shows-several-small-powerful-zbox-pcs-at-computex.html

 

[VitalyT]

The sphere looks nice, but if it is not upgradeable for memory + SSD, then it is not that good.
I would consider buying it to install IIS for home use, but 4GB of RAM is just too little.

 

[Guest]

You should have taken a picture with the round enclosure in your left hand, looking at the ports, and say "Alas, Poor Yorick! I knew him!"

 

[Guest]

According to the PDF manual on the Zotac website:

"System Memory support
Two 204-pin SO-DIMMs DDR3L 1600/1333
Up to 16 GB of memory"

and

"Onboard Serial ATA
SATA 6.0 Gb/s transfer rates
Supports one 2.5-inch SATA HDD or SSD (max 9.5mm height)"

 

[gamoniac]

Pretty cool, although A6-1450 (Tamesh) was a bit too weak for me. I got an Acer laptop with it, I swapped in an SSD but barely saw any improvement. I thought they would be able to stick a Kabini (A4-5000) in this enclosure. Alas this is much better than the Brazo APU from two years ago.

 

[Ryan Abrams]

Good Day:
I would not recommend buying anything from this company.
This company uses sub-par components in there systems and refuses to stand behind there equipment. I have experience 2 major hardware failures of the same component on 2 separate systems from this company with in less then one year of purchasing the unit. Zotac refuses to honor the warranty for the unit. I would not recommend this or any other product from this company to anyone.

 

[Guest]

Looks good, until you start plugging in the cables.