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  • Pissedoffyouth - Tuesday, January 6, 2015 - link

    I built me a mini itx the size of a bible recently, with a 65w AMD APU (A10-7800). With the L9a cooler unless under a heavy gaming load its inaudible. I recommend if your looking for a tiny PC for office work but also gaming go down that route as the performance is much better than these bay trail NUC's and similar cost.
  • BackInAction - Tuesday, January 6, 2015 - link

    What case/MB did you use?
  • Pissedoffyouth - Wednesday, January 7, 2015 - link

    Minibox m350 - the smallest case you can get. Motherboard was Asrock A88 itx - has msata which was a plus as I had no space for SSD
  • The_Assimilator - Tuesday, January 6, 2015 - link

    Maybe the performance is much better *because it consumes 8 times more power*. And there is no way that you're not experiencing throttling, if indeed you have been foolish enough to cram an AMD APU into a bible-sized enclosure.
  • Samus - Tuesday, January 6, 2015 - link

    BRIX and NUC are still amazing. We're talking 4"x4" and power on-par with a mainstream desktop, here.

    That being said, ITX is the largest format I consider anymore. My Xeon E3-1231 workstation has an Asus H87 ITX board, 16GB RAM, 480GB SSD, 6TB HDD, 2TB 2.5" HDD, NVidia GTX970, 450-watt PSU and liquid cooling built in the Silverstone FT03-mini. Although it's aluminum it weighs quite a bit just because it's literally packed...not enough room inside to fit a balled-up fist.

    But it's ultra-fast, 24/7 reliable and the size of a loaf of bread.

    NUC/BRIX is mainstream fast, 24/7 reliable and the size of a sandwich.
  • Antronman - Saturday, January 10, 2015 - link

    "Workstation build"

    "H87"

    "GTX970"

    Just because you use a computer for work does not make it a workstation.

    ITX isn't something everybody is interested in, because either they don't care about how much space their computer takes up or they need expansion room. Really, small form-factor PCs are a small niche. Otherwise you'd see a much larger variety in ITX boards, and a drive to make components much, much smaller.

    As for the GTX 970, unless it has the MSI ITX variant, the card itself is the size of a sandwich.
  • StevoLincolnite - Monday, January 12, 2015 - link

    Move over to Socket 2011, 64Gb+ Ram then you have a workstation.

    I laugh at your quad-core xeon and only 16Gb of Ram.

    However, you can't get that much performance in ITX.
  • Pissedoffyouth - Wednesday, January 7, 2015 - link

    It is throttling, but only under heavy gaming and I only game at 1280x1024 so it still works great. Day to day tasks never get the temps high at all
  • johnny_boy - Tuesday, January 6, 2015 - link

    That must be an enormous bible you have in mind. Even at 45W, there is no way god damned hell you're getting an A8/10 series APU into a bible-sized enclosure.
  • Samus - Tuesday, January 6, 2015 - link

    He must be talking about those bibles that sit on a pedestal that weigh 30 lbs :)
  • marvdmartian - Wednesday, January 7, 2015 - link

    Seeing as a mini-ITX motherboard specification is 6.7" x 6.7" in size, then yes, I'm pretty sure it's not the small Gideon Bible you'd find in a hotel room.
    You could easily, however, cram that into an enclosure that's the size of a sheet of notebook paper, and no more than 4" thick, by using a small form factor power supply, like you'd find in a Shuttle SFF barebones computer.
  • Pissedoffyouth - Wednesday, January 7, 2015 - link

    Exactly, I use a picoPSU so external power brick
  • Pissedoffyouth - Wednesday, January 7, 2015 - link

    Size of case 19 x 21 x 6.2cm.

    I use a PicoPSU 120w and it works great.
  • StevoLincolnite - Monday, January 12, 2015 - link

    You would be surprised how well AMD processors undervolt.

    Like overclocking... AMD and Intel actually have a bit of leeway with the voltages that they apply, so that there is more tolerance for chips that are less than stellar at lower volts.
    Of course that's to the advantage of the enthusiast as heat output can then be reduced whilst retaining the same level of performance by undervolting.

    That 45w chip could easily end up being a 30w chip or lower if he is lucky and plays with the clocks and voltages.

    Conversely, CPU's are generally not under 100% load 24/7, so the heat probably isn't a big concern if his usage demand is only in big but short bursts.
  • rahduke - Monday, January 19, 2015 - link

    Of course he is, there are a ton of mini-itx AMD f2+ boards out there. The Minibox is the smallest mini-itx case out there and their pico PSU makes it all seem quite plausible...
  • rahduke - Monday, January 19, 2015 - link

    This is precisely what I've been looking into. I was going to go with the A8-7600 since you can clock it down to 45watts and use the pico PSU that minibox sells. How is this thing working out for you?
  • justareader - Tuesday, January 20, 2015 - link

    Size of a bible. What bible? Soon you and your extremist friends will want eternal damnation for a sell out site.
  • BrokenCrayons - Tuesday, January 6, 2015 - link

    Typos on page 2 in the second paragraph - "The Ceneron N2930 in the CI320 nano is not as powerful as the Haswell-Y Core i4 " Probably a Celeron and a Core i3 instead of Ceneron and Core i4.
  • 074geodude - Tuesday, January 6, 2015 - link

    While I generally love Anandtech for their thorough benchmarks and testing, I couldn't help but feel this review totally missed the mark. I think what consumers want to know is, how good would the Zbox work as a home office PC? All these benchmarks are meaningless if they don't provide insight into the daily tasks that someone would be using this for.

    Can someone run Office and web browse with acceptable performance? Could this be a good inexpensive PC for students? Can it handle light gaming like League of Legends or DOTA 2 perhaps?

    And most importantly, how does it compare to the Chromebox, arguably its most direct competitor?
  • Jodo116 - Tuesday, January 6, 2015 - link

    In an office setting, this is a pretty darn good machine. I have the N2840(dual core vs this quad core) and it's perfect. I would maybe argue that this is a little too pricey with the HP and Acer 11" netbooks that have the N2840 for under $200 but this is a solid machine.

    It won't be able to handle much for gaming though, with a caveat, as even Minecraft is none too keen to play on this machine. The caveat however is in Steam streaming if you have a more powerful computer elsewhere in the house. This is the perfect Steam in-home streaming device. You can play AAA games at ultra setings at 1080p with no real issues. I use mine for this and it's flawless.

    I replaced my AppleTV with this and while this is obviously more expensive, the use cases are much much more.
  • tential - Tuesday, January 6, 2015 - link

    Yes for small machines like this the benchmarks are nice, but we need to have in the "Final Words" section some notes about their usage of this machine. Because the benchmark doesn't tell me if using Office/WebBrowsing feels alright or not.

    I'm VERY happy though that they started doing XBMC testing and to find this PC handles it perfectly. I'm curious to see how this would be priced without Windows so I could make it a dedicated XBMC machine.
  • jimbo2779 - Tuesday, January 6, 2015 - link

    The price listed is already the price without the OS. It came with no OS and they had to install it themselves.
  • bsd228 - Tuesday, January 6, 2015 - link

    Windows with Bing is free for computers < $250. Basically they don't want to lose that business to Chrome.
  • 074geodude - Tuesday, January 6, 2015 - link

    I'm starting to see a rise in popularity of low cost ($200 or less) miniPCs. At CES 2015 HP just announced the $180 Stream Mini. Gone will be the days of huge bulky desktops sitting on top of your desk. Now we'll have pocket-sized PCs at every monitor or TV that are capable of doing the daily tasks that most consumers need, like Office/web-browsing/streaming video.
  • Solandri - Tuesday, January 6, 2015 - link

    I would argue that most everyone already has a pocket-sized PC in their pocket - a smartphone. And all that's needed is a straightforward way to interface it with an external monitor/TV and keyboard/mouse any time you want to use a "PC" at a desk. Microsoft realizes this, which is why they are pushing Windows Phone and were pushing Windows RT. Intel realizes this, which is why they're concentrating on power savings and mobile processors (to take on ARM), rather than trying to push high-end performance.
  • t.s. - Wednesday, January 7, 2015 - link

    Agreed!
  • Solandri - Tuesday, January 6, 2015 - link

    That is exactly what the PCMark benchmarks on page 2 are for. They do a bunch of things which simulate home, office, or creative tasks and boil it down to a single number.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCMark
  • kmmatney - Tuesday, January 6, 2015 - link

    The benchmarks I see are video encoding, compression, and some photoscan benchmark. Not really the same as using it as an office computer. It would also be nice to see these systems compared to a cheap desktop system with a Celeron or Pentium.
  • silverblue - Wednesday, January 7, 2015 - link

    I'd like to see a test that exposes the JPEG acceleration in Temash/Kabini; surely a valid usage scenario given the image-heavy nature of the Internet.

    Both the CI320 and CA320 confuse me. The former is hamstrung by having only one DIMM (Bay Trail supports dual channel at 1333MHz) and the latter has an astonishingly pedestrian CPU but actually costs more to buy. The top Mullins APU is far faster and wouldn't use any more power, so perhaps we'll see one in the not too distant future? Also, adding in an extra DIMM to the CI320 to test for any difference in performance would be very interesting.
  • Libertysyclone - Tuesday, January 6, 2015 - link

    I see there is a spot for an IR sensor, is that built in? I didnt see it on the specs sheet
  • andychow - Tuesday, January 6, 2015 - link

    Yes is has an IR sensor, but from what I read it's not very good and doesn't seem to wake up from sleep via IR, even if the option is in the bios, it doesn't work.
  • lianthus - Tuesday, January 6, 2015 - link

    I love that you guys added XMBC to the tests, one thing though, what I have the most trouble knowing is how well these low powered chips do when playing a Hi10bit mkv file. Anime now is mostly encoded this way and my old ZBOX cannot properly play the files regardless of whether or not I'm using wireless, wired, or local playback. If you could add this one piece to your reviews it would save me a tremendous amount of trouble, as nobody ever seems to post anything about playing back these files. It is literally the most important part of my purchasing choices when it comes to media PCs like this one.
  • bobbozzo - Tuesday, January 6, 2015 - link

    Also we need to worry about h.265 performance.
  • saiga6360 - Wednesday, January 7, 2015 - link

    The latest version of XBMC or Kodi as it is now called supports HVEC or H265 encodes. As for Hi10p, not sure if there is hardware acceleration support but the latest Celerons and AMD APUs can run these MKV encodes in software just fine up to 1080p. I use the latest Kodi version 5.0 in OpenELEC and I can run these files on a Zotac AMD E-450 APU and a Chromebox 1.4 Celeron CPU.
  • hlovatt - Tuesday, January 6, 2015 - link

    Any chance of reviewing the Mac mini to seen ow it compares?
  • takeship - Wednesday, January 7, 2015 - link

    It would seem to me that a passively cooled box whose BIOS fails to implement dynamic frequency stepping properly (or apparently at all) needs more than "a little work". It's inexcusable to ship a product with an issue like that. I wonder Ganesh if you tested or ran into issues with APCI sleep/wake states as well? Those have been notable pain points of Zotac on other boxes. And given the storage perf numbers, are we sure that SATA6 is actually being used, instead of say 3? I've looked at these Zotac boxes with lust for years now, but ultimately have always avoided because of questions concerning driver/firmware. It looks like Zotac still hasn't gotten their house in order.
  • zepi - Wednesday, January 7, 2015 - link

    HTPC Credentials needs to include H265 decode tests. That is soon going to be crucial.
  • Wineohe - Wednesday, January 7, 2015 - link

    I would like to see these small form factor PC's move to a 12V supply instead of 19V. They would be more versatile for mobile use.
  • AgeOfPanic - Wednesday, January 7, 2015 - link

    I don't understand how they cannot enable HD audio bitstreaming under Windows and have it work under Linux. Is there a logic behind it?
  • saiga6360 - Thursday, January 8, 2015 - link

    Driver issues
  • 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.

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