Please disassemble and see if the plastic is in place on the thermal pad or not. Since this seems to be a retail unit and not a pre-production sample, it could help to answer the question posed on those links and verify that it is not a production unit issue.
Also, while the relatively higher idle power draw could be fixed, when we're talking a difference of 2-4W it's not really that big a deal in absolute terms.
An IR port would have been nice, for use with remotes and such, but an external usb adapter is usually the only option these days it looks like.
Also, would Steam In-Home Streaming benchmarks be worth testing on these devices? I know I use my HTPC sometimes in my living while my gaming desktop is elsewhere in the house (both devices on gigabit ethernet and nvidia hardware encoding on the host and intel hw decoding on the htpc client). Latency and such would be a good measure, assuming it would vary statistically for each device.
The external IR will probably be your only option for he foreseeable future. Newer HT gear can usually be networked and controlled via apps or browser sessions. Steam IHS is pretty solid even on wireless Atom devices, so it's probably pointless to review on an i5 with GbE. I'm with you, though, and would like to see a proper review of the IHS feature someday.
IR is good for learning but if line of sight is a concern get an RF -> IR blaster and a remote that supports both IR and RF, some Harmony's, URCs, Philips do.
Zotec says it has an integrated IR receiver and visually it appears that it does (see the transparent black plastic area between the WiFi LED and the memory card reader slot). Can someone confirm that? It is a required feature for me as I already have Harmony remotes that are IR only.
To be honest, I'm not too crazy about this "super small" mentality. It seems like people are going super small as an end into itself more than anything else.
The problem is that smaller means that more heat has to be put through a small space, as this example here shows. A slightly larger design here I think would have been an advantage.
Yes it seems you can go from a m-atx box to something minute. Doesn't have to be 'as small as you can make it'. Something the size of say a PS2 or a little smaller would be fine.
Fully agree, even something in the 20x20x20 cm size doesn't occupy much more size then say a NUC once we include space for cables for power, monitor, keyboard and mouse.
I like the thermal pictures. It looks like a space age furnace or reactor. Or like it's a box of lava. Not sure if I want to hang this on the VESA mount on the back of a $1500 TV set.
I've never had an "HTPC" (I have a windows home server and a WD live player) so I'm not an expert on this, but couldn't a laptop perform the same function? It's cheaper and a lot more capable. $350 gets you a core i5 laptop with HD4400 graphics not to mention a keyboard, screen, and OS. Maybe it takes a little more space, but having the screen would make it easier to setup.
Same for me. From my own anecdotal experience and expecting to use a PC for 6+ years, fans can suck in a lot of dust over time. The dust can cause overheating and throttling issues. Sometimes, the fans fail at some point too. I'm done with opening up PCs to clean/replace things. It's just not worth my time anymore. Also, notebooks are even more time consuming to open up to clean/replace stuff.
So far with my experience with fanless devices is that they don't attract as much dust and, of course, no fans that can fail. However, you have to choose the right device. I've encountered some devices where the thermal design wasn't very good and you get throttling under normal conditions.
Sure. Pretty much anything can be a HTPC as long as it meets your media needs. Some people just have different needs. For example, you probably cannot VESA mount a laptop on the back of a monitor/TV, but you can do that with a NUC/UCFF PC (I do that with my touch-based HTPC).
In a corporate environment the solution would be to check the laptops out to employees and buy docking stations for the desks. My current corporate environment is primarily that way, as was my previous employer.
They did have quite a few thin clients as well, but in general, people hated them.
That said, my work laptop is WAY more powerful than this. It's a Dell mobile workstation with a Quad i7, an SSD, Radeon graphics, and 16 GB of RAM. Only downside is that it weighs about 10 pounds.
I'm not sure how we've suddenly jumped from a single HTPC to 500 devices in a corporate network however having been down both routes in a corporate environment, I preferred the laptop mounting option. There are standardised brackets available and it meant we could use a standard laptop that was properly supported (the company was a large one and standardised on a handful of models from a single supplier) making them much quicker to set up and much easier to get them fixed thanks to next day on site warranties.
I immediately lost all interest in the Zotac when I saw the price, there's no way I'd pay such a huge premium when there's plenty of cheaper laptops with similar hardware that can do the job.
Keep in mind the retail price is probably temporary. The Gigabyte BRIX products tend to sell for about half of retail after they've been out for a while. This will probably be the same way.
Right now Newegg is bundling a free 4 GB memory stick with this.
Absolutely correct, aside from aesthetics. my standard go to recommendation for semi-technical friends is to grab a 200-300 dollar laptop and leave it connected to the telly permanently.
For some people that's worth the 50% cost saving (plus the laptop can be used as... a laptop? in a pinch lol). Not everyone is OCD about their TV setup.
As long as performance doesn't matter much, $200 USD of inexpensive Bay Trail laptop would really be a far less costly solution. Quite a few modern low-end notebooks with 11 inch screens with those sorts of specifications don't have cooling fans and are kitted out with solid state memory making dust ingestion a non-issue. Yes, there's a lot less performance potential, but being able to grab the HTPC and use it someplace else when you need to leave the living room is sort of nice too since it's still a laptop.
I think that's a very interesting little box! Thanks for the evaluation!
Idle power in the French article linked behind Fanless Tech seems a little higher: They quote a 9-31Watt range.
Could the plastic foil they found between the thermal pad and the chassis actually also have increased power consumption? Don't hotter chips consume more power?
They also say that checking for the presence of the "isolated human error" would void the warranty, which is, well, bizarre in this case...
Can you measure DRAM bandwidth on the unit? I'm a little worried that the single DRAM socket would be limiting the bandwidth unnecessarily.
I guess I'd still perfer a somewhat more massive design with the i5-4200U (same CPU price), which I've seen sustain 2.1GHz peaks pretty long as well as the 2.6GHz spikes for things like spreadsheet recalcs.
Or even with the vastly more expensive i7-4500, all the very same silicon inside.
Unfortunately Intel gauges and charges for perceived performance pretty well: These little Haswells do deliver quite acceptable performance for those little sprints in typical desktop work, which you can't really see under these synthetic benchmark loads, where the first thermal limits kick in pretty pretty fast.
Thus the i7-4500U really does feel no slower than a true 3GHz i7 quad core with 8 threads, when you browse a complex web page, reformat a complex document or recalc a huge spreadsheet.
Because it a) does actually go to 3GHz for a comple of seconds when cold and b) none of these tasks exploit multiple cores or run long enough to heat up the CPU.
Chances are you could even put the 4200 or 4500 into the very same chassis and just risk that they arrive at speeds very similar to the 4210Y under continued load.
But they'd still "feel" a lot faster on office work stuff.
And I might be tempted to spend an extra 50 bucks or so on a case which foregoes convection through the case and uses large external fins instead to avoid issues with dust and cleaning staff "whet cleaning" these cases to the point where create solid composite crusts of dust and dried cleaning agents.
Too bad Broadwell will soon render these a lot less attractive far too soon!
This is very true. With broadwell supposed to be even more energy efficient the Y series (or is it called core M now instead of Y series or is the core m a power level below Y and there is still a Y and a u?) the fanless mini pc will end up able to convert the broadwell energy savings into even more performance at the same temperature and the U series with the new iGPU should make it actually able to game many popular titles at a respectable 30 fps and 1366x768 resolution and maybe even some at 1920x1080. I could see myself chilling in the living room loading up a game of hearthstone which would definitely run as the ipad air 1 is known to run it well and that is just an apple a7x proc not even the new A8x.
and before u bash the 768p gaming quite a few xbox one titles will end up at this resolution and fps. It's not as terrible as the low numbers make it sound. And games like hearthstone and league of legends should run at 1920x1080 on the intel graphics 5000 (the igpu in the intel mini pc) successor without a hitch. Broadwell might just take this category to a new level.
I only see this being a good buy for the noise nazis out there. My personal favorite was the intel box that was only an extra 153 as configured and it had a u series cpu with intel 5000 graphics instead of y series with intel 4200 and an intel 530 240GB SSD instead of a samsung 840 evo 120GB SSD and dual channel 1866 ram instead of single channel 1600mhz and intel 7260 2x2 wireless instead of intel 3160 1x1 wireless.
The intel box beats it on every single specification for only a 153 dollar premium. So it would seem that unless being fanless is the number 1 thing you care about by a large margin you would have to be senile to choose the zotac nano over the intel.
well TBH unless size/noise is your only concern you're better off served via a mITX or better still a mATX build. They can still look pretty good aesthetically with the right case, and with right part selection don't make any appreciable noise.
I have been using this box for a couple of weeks now. Main use: XBMC for movies and audio. I am surprised that the silent aspect of the device is not appreciated more here - when listening to audio on hi-end speakers, last thing I want is to hear the fan noise in the background (during the quite parts of a classical piece). Not to mention that this thing is in my living room, where occasionally I want to relax in a quiet environment - again, the hum of a fan would sometimes be irritating.
Of course, there you can get higher performance for an extra $X,but it is all about balance.
This is probably the best looking Zotac mini-PC I've seen. Most of their other mini-PCs have an ugly glossy design.
How fast is the SD card reader? I hope it's not connected through via USB 2.0. I have some SDXC cards that have 100+ megabytes/second sequential reads/writes which is useful when transferring large photos and videos.
Why would you not just buy a Mac mini for $549, and have really great hardware vs mediocre garbage! Put windows or linux on it if you're not into OS X! Whatever!
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MadMan007 - Friday, October 31, 2014 - link
Please disassemble and see if the plastic is in place on the thermal pad or not. Since this seems to be a retail unit and not a pre-production sample, it could help to answer the question posed on those links and verify that it is not a production unit issue.Also, while the relatively higher idle power draw could be fixed, when we're talking a difference of 2-4W it's not really that big a deal in absolute terms.
noelbonner - Tuesday, November 11, 2014 - link
Why don't people get a "real" mini-PC instead (such as they ones that are rated highly at http://tinyurl.com/obzllgb for example)?BinaryTB - Friday, October 31, 2014 - link
An IR port would have been nice, for use with remotes and such, but an external usb adapter is usually the only option these days it looks like.Also, would Steam In-Home Streaming benchmarks be worth testing on these devices? I know I use my HTPC sometimes in my living while my gaming desktop is elsewhere in the house (both devices on gigabit ethernet and nvidia hardware encoding on the host and intel hw decoding on the htpc client). Latency and such would be a good measure, assuming it would vary statistically for each device.
nathanddrews - Friday, October 31, 2014 - link
The external IR will probably be your only option for he foreseeable future. Newer HT gear can usually be networked and controlled via apps or browser sessions. Steam IHS is pretty solid even on wireless Atom devices, so it's probably pointless to review on an i5 with GbE. I'm with you, though, and would like to see a proper review of the IHS feature someday.meacupla - Saturday, November 1, 2014 - link
IR is so outdated.BT remote should be standard already.
Alexvrb - Sunday, November 2, 2014 - link
IR works and is probably the lowest power option there is. The less often I have to change remote batteries, the better.cjb110 - Monday, November 3, 2014 - link
Unless you want to use a universal remote...IR works and is lower power...the only advantage BT offers is less reliance on Line of Sight.BuddyRich - Monday, November 3, 2014 - link
IR is good for learning but if line of sight is a concern get an RF -> IR blaster and a remote that supports both IR and RF, some Harmony's, URCs, Philips do.jmorey - Monday, November 3, 2014 - link
Zotec says it has an integrated IR receiver and visually it appears that it does (see the transparent black plastic area between the WiFi LED and the memory card reader slot). Can someone confirm that? It is a required feature for me as I already have Harmony remotes that are IR only.josue16 - Friday, October 31, 2014 - link
Is this the only fanless pre-built Haswell based UCFF PC available?CrazyElf - Friday, October 31, 2014 - link
To be honest, I'm not too crazy about this "super small" mentality. It seems like people are going super small as an end into itself more than anything else.The problem is that smaller means that more heat has to be put through a small space, as this example here shows. A slightly larger design here I think would have been an advantage.
jabber - Friday, October 31, 2014 - link
Yes it seems you can go from a m-atx box to something minute. Doesn't have to be 'as small as you can make it'. Something the size of say a PS2 or a little smaller would be fine.Calista - Saturday, November 1, 2014 - link
Fully agree, even something in the 20x20x20 cm size doesn't occupy much more size then say a NUC once we include space for cables for power, monitor, keyboard and mouse.Alexvrb - Sunday, November 2, 2014 - link
Agreed. I can't imagine going smaller than a baby ITX box, if for no other reason than it's easier to upgrade or modify. :Djosue16 - Friday, October 31, 2014 - link
Will you guys add LAN latency tests? That is if it can be reliably measured. Also, gigabit Ethernet tests would be nice too.knightspawn1138 - Friday, October 31, 2014 - link
I like the thermal pictures. It looks like a space age furnace or reactor. Or like it's a box of lava. Not sure if I want to hang this on the VESA mount on the back of a $1500 TV set.bobbozzo - Friday, October 31, 2014 - link
Can SSDs tolerate 75C?Shadowmaster625 - Friday, October 31, 2014 - link
$500 for a notebook with no screen and no battery/UPS. What a great deal! Sign me up for 3. NOTzodiacfml - Saturday, November 1, 2014 - link
i agree. the notebook i'm using now is only 250 USD with probably the same performance of this low voltage cpu.kmmatney - Friday, October 31, 2014 - link
I've never had an "HTPC" (I have a windows home server and a WD live player) so I'm not an expert on this, but couldn't a laptop perform the same function? It's cheaper and a lot more capable. $350 gets you a core i5 laptop with HD4400 graphics not to mention a keyboard, screen, and OS. Maybe it takes a little more space, but having the screen would make it easier to setup.p@nc@k3s - Friday, October 31, 2014 - link
To me, it really is the footprint and fanless design that would make me buy this over a notebook.james16 - Monday, November 3, 2014 - link
Same for me. From my own anecdotal experience and expecting to use a PC for 6+ years, fans can suck in a lot of dust over time. The dust can cause overheating and throttling issues. Sometimes, the fans fail at some point too. I'm done with opening up PCs to clean/replace things. It's just not worth my time anymore. Also, notebooks are even more time consuming to open up to clean/replace stuff.So far with my experience with fanless devices is that they don't attract as much dust and, of course, no fans that can fail. However, you have to choose the right device. I've encountered some devices where the thermal design wasn't very good and you get throttling under normal conditions.
Aikouka - Friday, October 31, 2014 - link
Sure. Pretty much anything can be a HTPC as long as it meets your media needs. Some people just have different needs. For example, you probably cannot VESA mount a laptop on the back of a monitor/TV, but you can do that with a NUC/UCFF PC (I do that with my touch-based HTPC).Spectrophobic - Friday, October 31, 2014 - link
Pretty sure it isn't that hard to DIY a mount for a laptop behind a monitor/TV.gopher1369 - Friday, October 31, 2014 - link
In a corporate environment installing 500 of them at once?barleyguy - Saturday, November 1, 2014 - link
In a corporate environment the solution would be to check the laptops out to employees and buy docking stations for the desks. My current corporate environment is primarily that way, as was my previous employer.They did have quite a few thin clients as well, but in general, people hated them.
That said, my work laptop is WAY more powerful than this. It's a Dell mobile workstation with a Quad i7, an SSD, Radeon graphics, and 16 GB of RAM. Only downside is that it weighs about 10 pounds.
Johnmcl7 - Saturday, November 1, 2014 - link
I'm not sure how we've suddenly jumped from a single HTPC to 500 devices in a corporate network however having been down both routes in a corporate environment, I preferred the laptop mounting option. There are standardised brackets available and it meant we could use a standard laptop that was properly supported (the company was a large one and standardised on a handful of models from a single supplier) making them much quicker to set up and much easier to get them fixed thanks to next day on site warranties.I immediately lost all interest in the Zotac when I saw the price, there's no way I'd pay such a huge premium when there's plenty of cheaper laptops with similar hardware that can do the job.
John
barleyguy - Monday, November 3, 2014 - link
Keep in mind the retail price is probably temporary. The Gigabyte BRIX products tend to sell for about half of retail after they've been out for a while. This will probably be the same way.Right now Newegg is bundling a free 4 GB memory stick with this.
wintermute000 - Saturday, November 1, 2014 - link
Absolutely correct, aside from aesthetics.my standard go to recommendation for semi-technical friends is to grab a 200-300 dollar laptop and leave it connected to the telly permanently.
Michael Bay - Saturday, November 1, 2014 - link
And it instantly becomes a dust magnet.Not even mentioning how extremely nice cheap laptop fits into TV cabinet aesthetic.
wintermute000 - Sunday, November 2, 2014 - link
For some people that's worth the 50% cost saving (plus the laptop can be used as... a laptop? in a pinch lol). Not everyone is OCD about their TV setup.BrokenCrayons - Tuesday, November 4, 2014 - link
As long as performance doesn't matter much, $200 USD of inexpensive Bay Trail laptop would really be a far less costly solution. Quite a few modern low-end notebooks with 11 inch screens with those sorts of specifications don't have cooling fans and are kitted out with solid state memory making dust ingestion a non-issue. Yes, there's a lot less performance potential, but being able to grab the HTPC and use it someplace else when you need to leave the living room is sort of nice too since it's still a laptop.p@nc@k3s - Friday, October 31, 2014 - link
Glad to see an Intel WiFi NIC. What is the gigabit Ethernet NIC? I hope it's not Realtek.saiga6360 - Friday, October 31, 2014 - link
This one has Bluetooth so you can probably have better luck with those remotes. I would avoid IR if I can help it.abufrejoval - Saturday, November 1, 2014 - link
I think that's a very interesting little box! Thanks for the evaluation!Idle power in the French article linked behind Fanless Tech seems a little higher: They quote a 9-31Watt range.
Could the plastic foil they found between the thermal pad and the chassis actually also have increased power consumption? Don't hotter chips consume more power?
They also say that checking for the presence of the "isolated human error" would void the warranty, which is, well, bizarre in this case...
Can you measure DRAM bandwidth on the unit?
I'm a little worried that the single DRAM socket would be limiting the bandwidth unnecessarily.
I guess I'd still perfer a somewhat more massive design with the i5-4200U (same CPU price), which I've seen sustain 2.1GHz peaks pretty long as well as the 2.6GHz spikes for things like spreadsheet recalcs.
Or even with the vastly more expensive i7-4500, all the very same silicon inside.
Unfortunately Intel gauges and charges for perceived performance pretty well: These little Haswells do deliver quite acceptable performance for those little sprints in typical desktop work, which you can't really see under these synthetic benchmark loads, where the first thermal limits kick in pretty pretty fast.
Thus the i7-4500U really does feel no slower than a true 3GHz i7 quad core with 8 threads, when you browse a complex web page, reformat a complex document or recalc a huge spreadsheet.
Because it a) does actually go to 3GHz for a comple of seconds when cold and b) none of these tasks exploit multiple cores or run long enough to heat up the CPU.
Chances are you could even put the 4200 or 4500 into the very same chassis and just risk that they arrive at speeds very similar to the 4210Y under continued load.
But they'd still "feel" a lot faster on office work stuff.
And I might be tempted to spend an extra 50 bucks or so on a case which foregoes convection through the case and uses large external fins instead to avoid issues with dust and cleaning staff "whet cleaning" these cases to the point where create solid composite crusts of dust and dried cleaning agents.
Too bad Broadwell will soon render these a lot less attractive far too soon!
Laststop311 - Sunday, November 2, 2014 - link
This is very true. With broadwell supposed to be even more energy efficient the Y series (or is it called core M now instead of Y series or is the core m a power level below Y and there is still a Y and a u?) the fanless mini pc will end up able to convert the broadwell energy savings into even more performance at the same temperature and the U series with the new iGPU should make it actually able to game many popular titles at a respectable 30 fps and 1366x768 resolution and maybe even some at 1920x1080. I could see myself chilling in the living room loading up a game of hearthstone which would definitely run as the ipad air 1 is known to run it well and that is just an apple a7x proc not even the new A8x.Laststop311 - Sunday, November 2, 2014 - link
and before u bash the 768p gaming quite a few xbox one titles will end up at this resolution and fps. It's not as terrible as the low numbers make it sound. And games like hearthstone and league of legends should run at 1920x1080 on the intel graphics 5000 (the igpu in the intel mini pc) successor without a hitch. Broadwell might just take this category to a new level.Laststop311 - Sunday, November 2, 2014 - link
I only see this being a good buy for the noise nazis out there. My personal favorite was the intel box that was only an extra 153 as configured and it had a u series cpu with intel 5000 graphics instead of y series with intel 4200 and an intel 530 240GB SSD instead of a samsung 840 evo 120GB SSD and dual channel 1866 ram instead of single channel 1600mhz and intel 7260 2x2 wireless instead of intel 3160 1x1 wireless.The intel box beats it on every single specification for only a 153 dollar premium. So it would seem that unless being fanless is the number 1 thing you care about by a large margin you would have to be senile to choose the zotac nano over the intel.
wintermute000 - Sunday, November 2, 2014 - link
well TBH unless size/noise is your only concern you're better off served via a mITX or better still a mATX build. They can still look pretty good aesthetically with the right case, and with right part selection don't make any appreciable noise.kaczor47 - Sunday, November 2, 2014 - link
I have been using this box for a couple of weeks now. Main use: XBMC for movies and audio. I am surprised that the silent aspect of the device is not appreciated more here - when listening to audio on hi-end speakers, last thing I want is to hear the fan noise in the background (during the quite parts of a classical piece). Not to mention that this thing is in my living room, where occasionally I want to relax in a quiet environment - again, the hum of a fan would sometimes be irritating.Of course, there you can get higher performance for an extra $X,but it is all about balance.
Teknobug - Sunday, November 2, 2014 - link
I wonder how this compares to the fanless Celeron N2930 (4C 1.86GHz) NUCs, I have some interest in a fanless box.Osamede - Sunday, November 2, 2014 - link
Why are these products not being compared to the Mac Mini in the tests. The use case is basically identical, especially with respect to HTPC.ultimatexbmc.com - Sunday, November 2, 2014 - link
Looks like a nice unit for the price.james16 - Monday, November 3, 2014 - link
This is probably the best looking Zotac mini-PC I've seen. Most of their other mini-PCs have an ugly glossy design.How fast is the SD card reader? I hope it's not connected through via USB 2.0. I have some SDXC cards that have 100+ megabytes/second sequential reads/writes which is useful when transferring large photos and videos.
Romulous - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
I believe that it was Via that kick started this form factor, not Intel.Romulous - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
"Zotac ZBOX CI540 nano". Will be supprised if Via dont sue them.Noëlius - Friday, November 21, 2014 - link
Why would you not just buy a Mac mini for $549, and have really great hardware vs mediocre garbage! Put windows or linux on it if you're not into OS X! Whatever!damageboy - Friday, December 5, 2014 - link
Does the 4210Y GPU support decoding H265/x265 on HW?