I want to oogle Ganesh's cans via review photos. :D
Oooh! Maybe we should start a GoFundMe to soak up the cost of purchasing a can so there's no out-of-pocket expense. If we pull it off, it might be possible for the readers to get a look at everyone's cans.
how bout a tape measure, ruler, yard stick - something - perhaps with both metric and american markings? This way - EVERYONE wins and the international measure standards are covered
Cool system but IMO since a GTX 1080 is not quite enough for full blown 4k gaming then why waste all that money getting it.
The best buy is the ZOTAC ZBOX MAGNUS EN1070 Gaming Mini PC, Intel Skylake Core i5-6400T which only costs $1200.
GTX 1070 is powerful enough to handle anything 2k and below which is all you could really do comfortably with the 1080 version so most of that extra $800 would be going to waste.
It isnt enough for 4k, but it is enough for 1440p, or for 1080p for years from now. You could buy this with the knowledge that, at 1080p, say with a g sync monitor, you would not need to replace it for 5+ years.
also, the 1070 is not enough to consistently max out 1440p, or do 1400p or 1080p consistent at 144 hz refresh rates. the 1080 isnt quite enough either, but its a heck of a lot closer.
LOL no card can max out 1440 @144hz consistently (you even put it in your own post) so why waste $800 getting a 1080 when a 1070 is enough to get 60+fps in 1440 everywhere and will do any game @1080p (even lesser cards than that are more than enough for 1080)?
My Titan X (P) hits 1440p 144Hz in a significant amount of games. The 1080 doesn't need to hit 1440p 144Hz consistently either to provide a significant amount of value from between 60Hz and 144Hz. There is a place for this product, and your own financial valuation of this product is generally only relevant to you.
lol the en1070 doesnt even come with a 1070 it comes with a crappy 960 and ti also doesnt come with the bad ass CPU/GPU water cooler the en980 en080 have. If you are a 1080p gamer you can get a barebones en980 system for 1200. Save the extra 800 saved for good peripherals a quality 10 dollar mechanical switch gaming keyboard quality 100 dollar gaming mouse and use the other 800 left from not getting crap ram and storage and spend 550 on a 2TB SD and a super fast 512GB PCI-e drive. Instead of getting the 1080 system. The en980 is a killer buy
GTX 1080 can run get excellent results on a 4K screen. The secret is not to whack everything up to ultra and expect 60fps+. I prefer to game with v-sync and a locked frame-rate and have my GTX 1080 hooked up to a 4K UHD TV.
A really good tip is to set a 50Hz 4K resolution. Per frame there's just a 3.3ms persistence difference between 50Hz and 60Hz and you effectively reduce your GPU requirement by 17.5% for what - to the human eye - a very similar looking experience.
Combine that with dialling down settings from ultra to high (very little visual impact in 99% of scenarios if we're being honest) and for most games, you're done. I'd also not be afraid of using game resolution scalers - 90% of 4K on a 4K screen combined with decent anti-aliasing can look excellent (Battlefield/Battlefront are good games to try).
The en1070 does not come with the amazing liquid cooled GPU and liquid cooled CPU giving the 1080 AMAZING acoustics. People have said it is quieter than a large amount of full towers. It also does not come with usb 3.1 gen 2 on the front and it only uses a 35 watt CPU. And does the en1070 actually come with a 1070 as the en970 actually came with a gtx 960. Don't think the en1070 has pci-e x4 enabled m2 just SATA.
2000 dollars is a good deal for a PC loaded with top specs and water blocks on the GPU and CPU for full liquid cooling the thermals are amazing and the noise output is top class that also leads to the price being worth it. You Can get the best of the best 2x8GB sodimms for 120 dollars and even though they downclock to 2133 since they are rated for 3000 they are higher quality memory chips so while you can only get the speed to 2133 you can get really tight timings with the higher quality memory ics and get memory latency to a rly good number. The machine is tiny and they don't even really charge much extra for all the engineering to get it in a tiny space with dual liquid cooling. It also has way better port selection than the 1070. Front USB type c + a at 10gbps should be a main priority so your front ports aren't outdated the day you buy it. Sure the chip and graphics card should only command like an extra 400 not 800 you are getting the amazing cooling tech super quiet acoustics and more advanced ports for the remaining 400 with whatever is left for there tiny bit of markup they do.
Who cares if 1 1080 isn't enough for 4k gaming. Like 0.2% of the population games at 4k and i think its pointless. I've tried games at both 4k and 1440 and honestly getting consistent 100+ fps at 1440 is a better gaming experience then even a steady 60 fps at 4k with a 144hz g sync monitor. Both are so crisp you need a much bigger display then 27 or 32 inches for 4k to make an honest to goodness useful difference.
A GTX 1080 allows you to keep this system with a really high end 10 bit billion color panel quantum dot layer VA panel type for 3000:1 Static contrast ratio for superior blacks to IPS with the quantum dot layer making even VA surpass IPS in color fidelity. Zero color banding with 10 bit a 144hz refresh with a g sync module inside and with the GTX 1080 and i7 6700 and fast NVME SSD you will easily be able to play all the latest triple AAA titles at max details with super quick loading times and 1920x1080 for literally close to a full decade if not over a decade with the rate CPU's are improving. Plus the way consoles hold back game manufacturers from really going crazy, and still have perfectly smooth 60+ fps g sync butter smooth gaming with no tearing.
Flash is advancing at breakneck speeds and even the cheapest m2 NVME drives are incredibly fast. Now the sweet spot is a 1TB m2 drive (intels is very affordable but Samsung is king of speed) and a 2TB Crucial MX300 2.5" SSD (it's only 25 cents per Gb! at that price a 256GB drive would only be like 60 dollars). Keeping inline with keeping this PC a decade with the rate flash is improving in 5 years you can turn the 2.5" and m2 drives into external usb 3.1 gen 2 10gbps drives for dirt cheap and get a 4TB m2 drive that will probably be able to max out the full 4GB/sec read and write of the pci-e x4 link by then and have like a crazy 80-100k iops for 4k QD1 vs the current 14k for the Samsung and a 8TB 2.5" SSD drive with fully saturated sata 6 and 50k+ QD1 iops for the same price as the current 1 and 2 TB drives so the storage drive limitation will be no problem. Or better yet just stick a really good Samsung 960 pro 512GB or 1TB, depending on how many important apps you use for work and how many games you play a lot that are very important to you, in there and use a NAS in another room for bulk storage to keep ur noise levels in the home theater room quiet.Remember flash is going to plummet in price they went back to like 48nm lithography for the 3d nand which boosted its endurance and speed ratings back up and they have been increasing the layers to get more density. Once they have mastered 3d nand enough and they can shrink it from the HUGE 48nm to the 16nm flash many are using all the while adding more layers. Prices are going to fall faster than womens panties at a justin bieber concert and capacities are going to skyrocket with 6-10TB being the norm for a 2.5" drive. The spinning platters days are numbered for home users. Enterprise I can see kinda downshifting everything like putting in SSD's where they used to have 15k HDD's + 10k HDDS and high performance 7200, maybe 15k most likely 10k or 7.2k HDDS where they used to use 5400 rpm HDD's for less accessed but still needed files and 5400 rpm HDD's replacing all the really old super slow tape archival rarely accessed data drives. So HDD's will live on in the enterprise archival space and cloud storage archival for a very long time. But client consumer pc's pfft the HDD is on it's last leg not even 2 legs soon all consumer PC's will be SSD with a new tech like optane or maybe something a little better for the type of consumer that was an early SSD adopter and wants something faster than the standard drive now.
Wait, seriously there are two separate power bricks needed for this thing? As far as I'm concerned, it defeats the purpose of its small size when you need two power bricks that combined are about half the size of the PC itself.
Could be trying to avoid the need for a grounded power cable, the limit for a 2 prong cord is 250W (not sure if that's a global standard, but since SOP is to make everything but the plug global they'd need a grounded brick everywhere regardless). OTOH it could just be availability, 250W bricks were relatively hard to find on Google and only marginally capable of running the system; and I struck out on finding a 300W brick entirely
Dell is a larger company. They can probably more easily design something suitable in-house or negotiate favorable pricing from a supplier. Zotac may simply not have the resources or reach to do the same thing in a cost-effective manner, thus forcing the company into shipping a dual PSU solution in order to maintain their target price point.
The bricks can sit on the floor and be ugly there. The desktop can sit on your desk, be functional, and take a minimal footprint. That said, two separate power bricks is clunky design and annoying for certain.
Advertisements are all targeted based on what the advertiser learns about you by mining your web activity and compiling relevant information. The ads I see, are intelligent and thoughtful. They attempt to market smart and helpful products because advertisers understand that I'm a discerning customer. If the advertisements you're seeing are conversely "retarted" that might say something about what you do on the Internet through your devices.
"The premium PC also needs to adopt the Alpine Ridge controller with Thunderbolt 3 / USB 3.1 Gen 2 support instead of the plain ASMedia ASM1142 solution."
Can someone expand on this. Are they saying that this doesn't support thunderbolt at all or just has thunderbolt 2 and 3.1 Gen 1?
ASM1142 only supports USB 3.1 Gen 2. There is one Type-A and one Type-C port in the front panel that is enabled by the ASM1142.
For Thunderbolt 3 support, Zotac has to use the Alpine Ridge controller. That one enables Type-C ports that can operate in either Thunderbolt 3 mode or USB 3.1 Gen 2 mode depending on the peripheral connected to it.
My 'complaint' was that at $2K, I believe consumers deserve Thunderbolt 3 support.
To be honest, I did take the pictures, but didn't upload them because (a) their quality was not good, and I was attempting a quick turn around for this review prior to my year-end break, (b) the information conveyed in the photographs were conveyed in a better manner by the photos from Zotac's marketing team.
Anyways, in order to avoid making readers go to Zotac's site for the pictures, I have made a gallery of the ones from their initial PR blast.
I'd rather have quicker turntimes than pretty pictures. If you want to see a gallery go to the manufacturer site. Excellent analysis Ganesh. I was hoping you could elaborate on why the memory was restricted to jedec? Is it a motherboard limitation?
Thanks, they might not be ideal but they are informative and really most people want to stay on this site and continue going through articles, so going to an external site can be a problem, as silly as that sounds.
That could explain it. I've seen that dual brick thing a few times very recently, including just earlier today found out the ASUS G20CB small form factor "desktop" has a dual brick setup too.
While it's small I would rather put 2500 dollars into a fully powered micro atx tower. Better + quieter cooling, fully powered overclocked cpu, overclocked gpu, regular DDR4 ram with more bandwidth and with that kinda budget you can stick a 2TB 960 pro m2 ssd as your main drive and a big HGST helium drive for your mass media storage. Or go with cheaper SSD storage + a 5 -8 bay NAS in your basement. To have 2500 to pay for this means you really have money to throw around or are stupid.
While I love the concept, $2500 seems absurd for what you're getting.
To put this in comparison, an Alienware 17 laptop with an 8GB GTX 1070, i7-6820HK CPU, and 16GB RAM starts at $1899. Upgrade to GTX 1080 and 32GB RAM for $2899. That includes a 512GB PCIe SSD *and* a 1TB HDD for additional storage.
For $400 more you get a computer that is still compact enough to be portable, and is the same performance (actually with a faster CPU and more storage space), but with a built in 17" 120Hz G-Sync enabled monitor and keyboard to boot. You can always hook up external KVM to use at home, but be able to take it with you easily. Oh, and I believe the Alienware only requires one power brick.
Alienware tend to be more expensive than the competition. ASUS' laptops with GTX 1080 aren't out yet. But when they are, I'm betting they'll have one at $2500, making this Zotac irrelevant.
Interesting review but ultimately has a ton of info I don't need (1280x1024 performance with a GTX 1080? What?) and a ton of info I do need that isn't there. For example, boost clock on my GTX 1080 FE tops out at around 1866MHz and will stay there - what about this one? How loud is the unit under load? How about 1440p and 4K benchmarks (far more relevant for this GPU than what you did test)?
Bottom line is that I went in wanting to know if this can match an actual desktop GTX 1080 system and I came out still not really knowing to what extent it may be lacking. If it's slower than a GTX 1080 laptop (which typically loses around 100-150MHz compared to the FE) I guess it's really a fair bit slower?
My feeling here is that perhaps the benchmark suite is outdated and so this review is being held hostage by the need to match up with legacy data that in many areas has little relevance to the actual use-case scenarios for the unit.
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Michael Bay - Monday, December 19, 2016 - link
There was a nice trend of posting size comparison pics with a can of soda and a cig pack.I really wish it came back.
BrokenCrayons - Monday, December 19, 2016 - link
I want to oogle Ganesh's cans via review photos. :DOooh! Maybe we should start a GoFundMe to soak up the cost of purchasing a can so there's no out-of-pocket expense. If we pull it off, it might be possible for the readers to get a look at everyone's cans.
cm2187 - Tuesday, December 20, 2016 - link
Unfortunately a can of coke is not an international measure:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beverage_can#Standar...
Renagade - Wednesday, December 21, 2016 - link
how bout a tape measure, ruler, yard stick - something - perhaps with both metric and american markings? This way - EVERYONE wins and the international measure standards are coveredK_Space - Monday, December 19, 2016 - link
I think those belonged to either Ian or Brandon (the cola can I think).... No one else got em!¬_¬
cknobman - Monday, December 19, 2016 - link
Cool system but IMO since a GTX 1080 is not quite enough for full blown 4k gaming then why waste all that money getting it.The best buy is the ZOTAC ZBOX MAGNUS EN1070 Gaming Mini PC, Intel Skylake Core i5-6400T which only costs $1200.
GTX 1070 is powerful enough to handle anything 2k and below which is all you could really do comfortably with the 1080 version so most of that extra $800 would be going to waste.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01M3062Z5/ref=psdc_1389...
TheinsanegamerN - Monday, December 19, 2016 - link
It isnt enough for 4k, but it is enough for 1440p, or for 1080p for years from now. You could buy this with the knowledge that, at 1080p, say with a g sync monitor, you would not need to replace it for 5+ years.also, the 1070 is not enough to consistently max out 1440p, or do 1400p or 1080p consistent at 144 hz refresh rates. the 1080 isnt quite enough either, but its a heck of a lot closer.
cknobman - Monday, December 19, 2016 - link
LOL no card can max out 1440 @144hz consistently (you even put it in your own post) so why waste $800 getting a 1080 when a 1070 is enough to get 60+fps in 1440 everywhere and will do any game @1080p (even lesser cards than that are more than enough for 1080)?Again IMO save $800 and get the 1070 config.
zenonu - Monday, December 19, 2016 - link
My Titan X (P) hits 1440p 144Hz in a significant amount of games. The 1080 doesn't need to hit 1440p 144Hz consistently either to provide a significant amount of value from between 60Hz and 144Hz. There is a place for this product, and your own financial valuation of this product is generally only relevant to you.LordanSS - Monday, December 19, 2016 - link
1080p60 with SuperSampling. There.Laststop311 - Sunday, January 15, 2017 - link
lol the en1070 doesnt even come with a 1070 it comes with a crappy 960 and ti also doesnt come with the bad ass CPU/GPU water cooler the en980 en080 have. If you are a 1080p gamer you can get a barebones en980 system for 1200. Save the extra 800 saved for good peripherals a quality 10 dollar mechanical switch gaming keyboard quality 100 dollar gaming mouse and use the other 800 left from not getting crap ram and storage and spend 550 on a 2TB SD and a super fast 512GB PCI-e drive. Instead of getting the 1080 system. The en980 is a killer buyTheinsanegamerN - Tuesday, January 17, 2017 - link
what on earth are you smoking? The EN1070 comes with...wait for it.... the mobile 1070, hence the name.OrphanageExplosion - Monday, December 26, 2016 - link
GTX 1080 can run get excellent results on a 4K screen. The secret is not to whack everything up to ultra and expect 60fps+. I prefer to game with v-sync and a locked frame-rate and have my GTX 1080 hooked up to a 4K UHD TV.A really good tip is to set a 50Hz 4K resolution. Per frame there's just a 3.3ms persistence difference between 50Hz and 60Hz and you effectively reduce your GPU requirement by 17.5% for what - to the human eye - a very similar looking experience.
Combine that with dialling down settings from ultra to high (very little visual impact in 99% of scenarios if we're being honest) and for most games, you're done. I'd also not be afraid of using game resolution scalers - 90% of 4K on a 4K screen combined with decent anti-aliasing can look excellent (Battlefield/Battlefront are good games to try).
bkydcmpr - Friday, December 30, 2016 - link
With some hardware update (eye tracking) and algorithm improvement, gtx 1080 might be able to handle 4k vr contents.Laststop311 - Sunday, January 22, 2017 - link
The en1070 does not come with the amazing liquid cooled GPU and liquid cooled CPU giving the 1080 AMAZING acoustics. People have said it is quieter than a large amount of full towers. It also does not come with usb 3.1 gen 2 on the front and it only uses a 35 watt CPU. And does the en1070 actually come with a 1070 as the en970 actually came with a gtx 960. Don't think the en1070 has pci-e x4 enabled m2 just SATA.2000 dollars is a good deal for a PC loaded with top specs and water blocks on the GPU and CPU for full liquid cooling the thermals are amazing and the noise output is top class that also leads to the price being worth it. You Can get the best of the best 2x8GB sodimms for 120 dollars and even though they downclock to 2133 since they are rated for 3000 they are higher quality memory chips so while you can only get the speed to 2133 you can get really tight timings with the higher quality memory ics and get memory latency to a rly good number. The machine is tiny and they don't even really charge much extra for all the engineering to get it in a tiny space with dual liquid cooling. It also has way better port selection than the 1070. Front USB type c + a at 10gbps should be a main priority so your front ports aren't outdated the day you buy it. Sure the chip and graphics card should only command like an extra 400 not 800 you are getting the amazing cooling tech super quiet acoustics and more advanced ports for the remaining 400 with whatever is left for there tiny bit of markup they do.
Who cares if 1 1080 isn't enough for 4k gaming. Like 0.2% of the population games at 4k and i think its pointless. I've tried games at both 4k and 1440 and honestly getting consistent 100+ fps at 1440 is a better gaming experience then even a steady 60 fps at 4k with a 144hz g sync monitor. Both are so crisp you need a much bigger display then 27 or 32 inches for 4k to make an honest to goodness useful difference.
A GTX 1080 allows you to keep this system with a really high end 10 bit billion color panel quantum dot layer VA panel type for 3000:1 Static contrast ratio for superior blacks to IPS with the quantum dot layer making even VA surpass IPS in color fidelity. Zero color banding with 10 bit a 144hz refresh with a g sync module inside and with the GTX 1080 and i7 6700 and fast NVME SSD you will easily be able to play all the latest triple AAA titles at max details with super quick loading times and 1920x1080 for literally close to a full decade if not over a decade with the rate CPU's are improving. Plus the way consoles hold back game manufacturers from really going crazy, and still have perfectly smooth 60+ fps g sync butter smooth gaming with no tearing.
Flash is advancing at breakneck speeds and even the cheapest m2 NVME drives are incredibly fast. Now the sweet spot is a 1TB m2 drive (intels is very affordable but Samsung is king of speed) and a 2TB Crucial MX300 2.5" SSD (it's only 25 cents per Gb! at that price a 256GB drive would only be like 60 dollars). Keeping inline with keeping this PC a decade with the rate flash is improving in 5 years you can turn the 2.5" and m2 drives into external usb 3.1 gen 2 10gbps drives for dirt cheap and get a 4TB m2 drive that will probably be able to max out the full 4GB/sec read and write of the pci-e x4 link by then and have like a crazy 80-100k iops for 4k QD1 vs the current 14k for the Samsung and a 8TB 2.5" SSD drive with fully saturated sata 6 and 50k+ QD1 iops for the same price as the current 1 and 2 TB drives so the storage drive limitation will be no problem. Or better yet just stick a really good Samsung 960 pro 512GB or 1TB, depending on how many important apps you use for work and how many games you play a lot that are very important to you, in there and use a NAS in another room for bulk storage to keep ur noise levels in the home theater room quiet.Remember flash is going to plummet in price they went back to like 48nm lithography for the 3d nand which boosted its endurance and speed ratings back up and they have been increasing the layers to get more density. Once they have mastered 3d nand enough and they can shrink it from the HUGE 48nm to the 16nm flash many are using all the while adding more layers. Prices are going to fall faster than womens panties at a justin bieber concert and capacities are going to skyrocket with 6-10TB being the norm for a 2.5" drive. The spinning platters days are numbered for home users. Enterprise I can see kinda downshifting everything like putting in SSD's where they used to have 15k HDD's + 10k HDDS and high performance 7200, maybe 15k most likely 10k or 7.2k HDDS where they used to use 5400 rpm HDD's for less accessed but still needed files and 5400 rpm HDD's replacing all the really old super slow tape archival rarely accessed data drives. So HDD's will live on in the enterprise archival space and cloud storage archival for a very long time. But client consumer pc's pfft the HDD is on it's last leg not even 2 legs soon all consumer PC's will be SSD with a new tech like optane or maybe something a little better for the type of consumer that was an early SSD adopter and wants something faster than the standard drive now.
Laststop311 - Sunday, January 22, 2017 - link
the above post is what happens when you take 7x 30mg adderall pillsjhoff80 - Monday, December 19, 2016 - link
Wait, seriously there are two separate power bricks needed for this thing? As far as I'm concerned, it defeats the purpose of its small size when you need two power bricks that combined are about half the size of the PC itself.DanNeely - Monday, December 19, 2016 - link
Could be trying to avoid the need for a grounded power cable, the limit for a 2 prong cord is 250W (not sure if that's a global standard, but since SOP is to make everything but the plug global they'd need a grounded brick everywhere regardless). OTOH it could just be availability, 250W bricks were relatively hard to find on Google and only marginally capable of running the system; and I struck out on finding a 300W brick entirelyDeath666Angel - Monday, December 19, 2016 - link
Dell seems to ship 330W PSUs with their Alienware M18 laptop.BrokenCrayons - Monday, December 19, 2016 - link
Dell is a larger company. They can probably more easily design something suitable in-house or negotiate favorable pricing from a supplier. Zotac may simply not have the resources or reach to do the same thing in a cost-effective manner, thus forcing the company into shipping a dual PSU solution in order to maintain their target price point.TheinsanegamerN - Tuesday, January 17, 2017 - link
I'm surprised zotac didnt contract with dell for the 330w brick.zenonu - Monday, December 19, 2016 - link
The bricks can sit on the floor and be ugly there. The desktop can sit on your desk, be functional, and take a minimal footprint. That said, two separate power bricks is clunky design and annoying for certain.Zak - Monday, December 19, 2016 - link
WTF with the retarted ads on Anandtech lately? Seriously? This is total garbage! Does not belong here.BrokenCrayons - Monday, December 19, 2016 - link
Advertisements are all targeted based on what the advertiser learns about you by mining your web activity and compiling relevant information. The ads I see, are intelligent and thoughtful. They attempt to market smart and helpful products because advertisers understand that I'm a discerning customer. If the advertisements you're seeing are conversely "retarted" that might say something about what you do on the Internet through your devices.Holliday75 - Monday, December 19, 2016 - link
LOLprisonerX - Monday, December 19, 2016 - link
There are ads on Anandtech?alphasquadron - Monday, December 19, 2016 - link
"The premium PC also needs to adopt the Alpine Ridge controller with Thunderbolt 3 / USB 3.1 Gen 2 support instead of the plain ASMedia ASM1142 solution."Can someone expand on this. Are they saying that this doesn't support thunderbolt at all or just has thunderbolt 2 and 3.1 Gen 1?
ganeshts - Monday, December 19, 2016 - link
ASM1142 only supports USB 3.1 Gen 2. There is one Type-A and one Type-C port in the front panel that is enabled by the ASM1142.For Thunderbolt 3 support, Zotac has to use the Alpine Ridge controller. That one enables Type-C ports that can operate in either Thunderbolt 3 mode or USB 3.1 Gen 2 mode depending on the peripheral connected to it.
My 'complaint' was that at $2K, I believe consumers deserve Thunderbolt 3 support.
alphasquadron - Monday, December 19, 2016 - link
I see, that makes sense.prisonerX - Monday, December 19, 2016 - link
What's up with a lack of pictures on this article? We get to see the manuals but not the front or back ports, or much of anything else. Odd.ganeshts - Monday, December 19, 2016 - link
To be honest, I did take the pictures, but didn't upload them because (a) their quality was not good, and I was attempting a quick turn around for this review prior to my year-end break, (b) the information conveyed in the photographs were conveyed in a better manner by the photos from Zotac's marketing team.Anyways, in order to avoid making readers go to Zotac's site for the pictures, I have made a gallery of the ones from their initial PR blast.
http://www.anandtech.com/Gallery/Album/5209
It is also linked now in the first page of the article.
fanofanand - Monday, December 19, 2016 - link
I'd rather have quicker turntimes than pretty pictures. If you want to see a gallery go to the manufacturer site. Excellent analysis Ganesh. I was hoping you could elaborate on why the memory was restricted to jedec? Is it a motherboard limitation?prisonerX - Tuesday, December 20, 2016 - link
Thanks, they might not be ideal but they are informative and really most people want to stay on this site and continue going through articles, so going to an external site can be a problem, as silly as that sounds.JamsCB - Tuesday, December 20, 2016 - link
That could explain it. I've seen that dual brick thing a few times very recently, including just earlier today found out the ASUS G20CB small form factor "desktop" has a dual brick setup too.Laststop311 - Tuesday, December 20, 2016 - link
While it's small I would rather put 2500 dollars into a fully powered micro atx tower. Better + quieter cooling, fully powered overclocked cpu, overclocked gpu, regular DDR4 ram with more bandwidth and with that kinda budget you can stick a 2TB 960 pro m2 ssd as your main drive and a big HGST helium drive for your mass media storage. Or go with cheaper SSD storage + a 5 -8 bay NAS in your basement. To have 2500 to pay for this means you really have money to throw around or are stupid.shelbystripes - Tuesday, December 20, 2016 - link
While I love the concept, $2500 seems absurd for what you're getting.To put this in comparison, an Alienware 17 laptop with an 8GB GTX 1070, i7-6820HK CPU, and 16GB RAM starts at $1899. Upgrade to GTX 1080 and 32GB RAM for $2899. That includes a 512GB PCIe SSD *and* a 1TB HDD for additional storage.
For $400 more you get a computer that is still compact enough to be portable, and is the same performance (actually with a faster CPU and more storage space), but with a built in 17" 120Hz G-Sync enabled monitor and keyboard to boot. You can always hook up external KVM to use at home, but be able to take it with you easily. Oh, and I believe the Alienware only requires one power brick.
Alienware tend to be more expensive than the competition. ASUS' laptops with GTX 1080 aren't out yet. But when they are, I'm betting they'll have one at $2500, making this Zotac irrelevant.
OrphanageExplosion - Monday, December 26, 2016 - link
Interesting review but ultimately has a ton of info I don't need (1280x1024 performance with a GTX 1080? What?) and a ton of info I do need that isn't there. For example, boost clock on my GTX 1080 FE tops out at around 1866MHz and will stay there - what about this one? How loud is the unit under load? How about 1440p and 4K benchmarks (far more relevant for this GPU than what you did test)?Bottom line is that I went in wanting to know if this can match an actual desktop GTX 1080 system and I came out still not really knowing to what extent it may be lacking. If it's slower than a GTX 1080 laptop (which typically loses around 100-150MHz compared to the FE) I guess it's really a fair bit slower?
My feeling here is that perhaps the benchmark suite is outdated and so this review is being held hostage by the need to match up with legacy data that in many areas has little relevance to the actual use-case scenarios for the unit.
ottawajimbo - Thursday, December 29, 2016 - link
Has anyone tried to get a Linux distribution running on this?