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  • hojnikb - Friday, November 4, 2016 - link

    Any word on when zotac will refresh it's passive mini PCs with kaby lake ?
  • lmcd - Friday, November 4, 2016 - link

    Looks like this particular 480 is notably underclocked compared to retail cards. The question though is whether that underclocking is cautionary or reckless (not enough thermal relief).

    Makes me regret my Skull Canyon, slightly.
  • TheinsanegamerN - Friday, November 4, 2016 - link

    It could be the mobile varient of the 480, which would be clocked lower and binned higher for lower power consumption.

    People on forums have underclocked the 480 to dramatically drop it's TDP. People running the 480 at 1100MHz have cut significant voltage off of the chip, reducing it to sub 100 watt TDP in some cases.

    This may be what zotac did here.
  • TheinsanegamerN - Friday, November 4, 2016 - link

    *1000mhz, not 1100
  • philehidiot - Friday, November 4, 2016 - link

    The other question is of course if the desktop 480 hit the bare minimum requirements for VR, does this variant with the lower clock speed mean this that VR performance is compromised? I know they're saying it does, but then the question becomes throttling - are they testing the components using VR in an open enclosure or in the real chassis? Or has it been tested properly with VR at all? Are they just taking components which themselves are rated for VR and then putting a stamp on it without testing how the system performs? I'd honestly be very cautious about buying something like this and expecting decent VR performance, especially if they're having to mess with clock speeds to keep within the thermal envelope.
  • TheinsanegamerN - Friday, November 4, 2016 - link

    true, although a stock desktop 480 also throttles pretty badly in some cases. it was also memory bandwidth bottlenecked IIRC, so that lower clock rate may not do as much harm as it would other cards.

    It also depends on resolution and graphical quality. You can run VR on a 470 with some sliders turned down, the 480 underclocked should still work pretty well.
  • lmcd - Friday, November 4, 2016 - link

    I think the real thing to emphasize though is how much the Gigabyte BRIX from a recent Anandtech review struggled in spite of its far-superior cooling system. I can't see this system fairing better.

    Not to say that the Brix ran into real struggles, but it was an appropriate amount of cooling. With a lower-TDP chip and what appears to be a much better cooling design in the same volume, I'd say this Zotac is probably in trouble.
  • Death666Angel - Friday, November 4, 2016 - link

    "[...]Gigabyte BRIX from a recent Anandtech review struggled [...]"
    You mean the GTX950/i7-6700HQ one? Where did that struggle? It ran the CPU @ 3.1GHz, above base clock and the GPU @ 1024 continuously, no throttling. The test even said:
    "It is heartening to note that the thermal design is indeed very effective even in our unnatural power-virus test."
  • deksman2 - Monday, December 26, 2016 - link

    They seemed to have reduced the GPU's frequency to 1050 MHz.
    Other than that, the GPU seems to be the regular desktop version.
    The mobile version of 480 is known as E9550 and does not differ from the desktop in anything, except TDP (which has been cut down to about 95W).
    This was probably achieved through tighter quality controls and voltage reduction without sacrificing performance.

    However, underclocking is not the only route to reducing the GPU's TDP.
    By properly using Wattman feature in Crimson drivers, the 480's voltages can be effectively reduced to result in 120 W (1060 levels, or lower) under full load without reducing it's operational clocks at all.

    This was achieved by only reducing highest core voltage setting. The VRAM can also be undervolted (in some cases reportedly by as much as half).
    Here's the relevant article:
    http://www.legitreviews.com/amd-radeon-rx-480-unde...

    The 480's performance also goes up by around 5% in some cases because the boost clocks can be sustained for far longer periods of time.
    Also, as you factor in new drivers release... coupled with undervolting, the 480 is now on the same level as 1060 performance/TDP-wise in DX11 and overshoots it in DX12 more or less.

    Also to keep in mind is that 480 is working on much lower clocks than 1060 does.

    Reference models of RX 480 have been set with too high voltages to improve yields, but subsequent releases of 480 from other vendors resulted in lower voltages out of the box.
    That of course doesn't mean we cannot use Wattman to further improve upon 480 without dropping its performance.

    So, I find Zotac's version quite underwhelming to be honest.
  • BrokenCrayons - Friday, November 4, 2016 - link

    Interesting system, but I never liked the idea of companies using CGI renders of their products instead of photos of the actual item in their announcements and promotional materials. You really only get a vague sense of the product's look and feel. It's excusable in Zotac's case because the company has, I think, a pretty solid reputation for delivering on their promises, but still...meh
  • jaydee - Friday, November 4, 2016 - link

    It certainly gives the impression that the product isn't going to be out for awhile, because it makes you think they didn't have an actual product to take pictures of.
  • djsvetljo - Friday, November 4, 2016 - link

    If Zotac has good reputation - it is fake. Their support is awful. Sent them a passive Zbox that had BIOS clock freezing once in a while, with documentation, videos, etc. They sent it back to me stating no issues found. No one acknowledged the issue even though it was clearly shown in the videos. I continued troubleshooting after that with an "engineer" from Taiwan who noticed BIOS updated versions didn't match or something. Mind you, this was after it was sent to them for repair. That "engineer" eventually stopped replying. So I gave up and tossed on fleabay.
  • nathanddrews - Friday, November 4, 2016 - link

    Any guess on price? I'm going with $600 barebones...
  • lmcd - Friday, November 4, 2016 - link

    You're joking, right? This is $1k minimum.
  • lmcd - Friday, November 4, 2016 - link

    For a reference comparison point, look at the recent BRIX review on this site.
  • Valantar - Friday, November 4, 2016 - link

    The GTX 1060 variant of this (exact same specs outside of the GPU) is $999. That's with the 6GB 1060, so this would probably cost the same or $50 less. No less than that, I'd wager.
  • TheinsanegamerN - Friday, November 4, 2016 - link

    Looks sweet. If it doesnt throttle, this would be a sweet set top PC for TV gaming.
  • PsychoPif - Friday, November 4, 2016 - link

    I can't wait to see the price and the avaibility in Canada.
    I almost built a system with the exact same spec when the 480 was released.
  • The_Assimilator - Friday, November 4, 2016 - link

    Article says 2x DP 1.3, table says 2x DP1.2, which is it?

    I presume there is an updated model of this with an MXM GTX 1060 6GB in the pipeline - hopefully Zotac will also switch to Kaby Lake parts as soon as they're available.
  • fanofanand - Friday, November 4, 2016 - link

    This has me mildly interested depending on price. It has reasonable, moderate hardware that should be sufficient for my family's needs, but that stupid SFF typically doubles or triples price. I would rather not have the "T" processor in there but I'm not oblivious to the cooling needs in such a small box. I really wish the manufacturers would stop looking at the SFF boxes as their saving grace for margins.
  • creed3020 - Friday, November 4, 2016 - link

    I would love to see a teardown and review of this unit. It seems that it could pack quite a punch with the RX480.
  • BOMBOVA - Friday, November 4, 2016 - link

    good size, good power usage, quite good performance, bets a 8 thread cpu, " for me " n a 4x m2, and a thunderbird output, i will follow a bill of material, by one of you system designers, " i will " love this computer site. cheers, all. i am so needing to upgrade, stuck in x58 land
  • BOMBOVA - Friday, November 4, 2016 - link

    bets, = needs a 8 thread cpu, i need 8 units before xmas.
  • HomeworldFound - Friday, November 4, 2016 - link

    I'd like more competition and entries into this market. I see about 100 small form factor computers with Intel GPU technology, that isn't interesting to me. The Steambox might've flopped but something small capable of gaming really interests me.
  • roc1 - Friday, November 4, 2016 - link

    At VRDC yesterday, Zotac was showing this (turned off) next to the same with the mobile GTX 1070 running VR games. The latter naturally I find more interesting, and wonder why it is not even mentioned in the article.

    https://www.zotac.com/us/product/mini_pcs/magnus-e...
  • blzd - Friday, November 4, 2016 - link

    With a Core i5-4690k overclocked slightly to 4.4Ghz I'm noticing a select few games already maxing out the 4 CPU threads (specifically, Mafia 3).

    Would a maximum turbo clock of 2.8Ghz not theoretically be a limiting factor in gaming performance?
  • Death666Angel - Friday, November 4, 2016 - link

    Yes.
  • Daniel Egger - Saturday, November 5, 2016 - link

    Wow, that is very nice and piqued my interest. Waiting for a full review...

    Few things about the article are bogus though:

    "Users with 5.1- or 7.1-channel speaker systems will have to use an external USB audio solution however."

    No, sane users with a multichannel audio system connect them through HDMI.

    Users stuck with an old amp may use an audio extractor (also one of the most favourite workarounds to get decent audio from a Raspberry Pi) and connect using SPDIF.

    Only stupid people use analog output to drive a surround setup. So it makes total sense to reduce the number of analog outputs.
  • Xajel - Wednesday, November 9, 2016 - link

    I'm still waiting for updated HTPC CPU & GPU comparison, what does current CPU & GPU's are doing in this regard mainly: encoding, transcoding, decoding & visual IQ.

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