there has been a flood of trash can PCS
in recent years all of them vying for the title of the one that finally got it
right Zotac on the other hand well Zotac
has no need for trash cans no my friends
Zotac brings the heat in fancy
handleless lunchboxes last year's Magnus en980 blew
our socks and sandals off as a super
tiny liquid cooled high-end gaming PC
that we thought was pretty darn close to our vision of the ultimate compact PC so
then will this year's en1080k VR ready
Mini PC with a substantial graphics upgrade be even more
filling let's find out
roat's iscu plus Force FX features
pressure sensitive qwe Asad Keys which
can be configured in three different modes for multiple functions check it
out now at the link below
sorry so taking a good look at the new
Magnus we can see that aside from its totally blacked out matte aluminum
finish and an HDMI 2.0 port at the front
for VR very little has changed externally so on the front we've still
got USB 3.1 type A and typc front panel
audio and an SDXC card slot and then at
the back we've got identical looking
rear iio 2 again frustratingly lacking
audio jacks making the front panel ones the only ones you get with that said
DisplayPort 1.3 and HDMI 2.0 are both
nice addition the en1080k actually has a total of five
video outputs though only four of them will work simultaneously on the bottom
we get the same oddly ventilated panel
along with the familiar honeycombed plastic upper panel that work together
surprisingly well with a nice mesh that keeps bugs and other debris from making
it into your lunch okay no I'll stop that now because
this next bit is super cereal this is perhaps the most important upgrade over
last year's model lighting
effects now the Magnus logo is illuminated and the power LED is RGB woo
so you can use the software to configure it for the world's smallest dance party
cuz uh that's actually about the extent of the system lighting pulling off the
bottom panel then gets us to the really fun stuff Zotac ships the en1080k as
either a completed system or as a
barebones so if you're going to buy the ladder pay close attention first up
we've got twin ddr4 sodm slots alongside
an m.2 SSD slot that thankfully supports
NVMe this time around then we've got a
tooless SATA drive rounding out our expansion with the 2 and 1/2 in Drive of
your choice then if we go further than
barebones Builders and painstakingly remove all of the panels that is 25
screws not counting the feet we get a good look at the water cooling system
complete with radiator Reservoir and
custom blocks for the CPU and the entire
desktop grade mxm module
GPU if you look even closelier you can
actually see that the CPU block is way
larger than it needs to be so it's clear
then that Zotac is taking no Chances with vrm cooling as well as the basics
which is a great indicator of future
reliability overall we should hopefully get great thermal results and super low
noise now let's talk first though about what's under the water cooling for the
GPU we go from a GTX 980 4 gig all the
way up to a GTX 1080 8 gig graphics card
and Zotac decide decided to man up on
the CPU as well moving from a core i5 to
a near top-of-the line core i7 7700
though it should be noted that they are still not allowing overclocking it is
not a k model I think we can let that
slide though for how utterly impressive it is that Zotac managed to cram all of
that in here I mean to put it in perspective at 5.85 L that is under half
the the volume of the very impressive Corsair 1 that we reviewed recently and
only slightly more than the lower spec
MSI Trident that uses air cooling so
then let's power it on first there's a
really annoying buzzing
noise then nothing yes my friends the
default BIOS configuration has the fan
not even spinning unless the GPU hits
50° or higher making the new Magnus much
quieter at idle than the old model the
drawback of this config is that under synthetic load we did manage to get the
CPU to throttle because the default fan
curve sacrificed maybe too much of its performance for silence the good news
though is that this two can be tweaked in the BIOS and it's still quieter than
you'd expect for something so compact
all right so now the performance Showdown for
comparison we dusted off its older brother the en980 pulled the Corsair one
out of the mothballs and grabbed a full-sized KB Lake test bench for
reference so then we expected the test bench to be faster given its higher
turbo clocks and higher speed memory but
what we didn't see coming was how close the en1080k would hang on it handled
everything we threw at it with flying colors including our synthetic CPU tests
where it only really lagged behind in the real bench image editing test it
also provides a great VR experience thanks to the aforementioned front panel
HDMI 2.0 and USB 3.1 ports making it one
damn impressive little lunchbox sorry
sorry couldn't resist but that impressiveness do
doesn't change a key point that we made in our review of the en980 the inability
to upgrade the CPU and GPU in the
magnusen 108k seriously puts a damper on
its otherwise spectacular performance
and the $17.99 us price tag yes
$200 more even than its predecessor is
for a system that will forever be as you
bought it say for maybe throwing in some more RAM or storage I mean with a GTX
1080 a core i77700 HDMI 2.0 DisplayPort
1.3 USB 3.1 I mean we can't see your
gaming lunch getting moldy anytime soon
we're just saying that what are we saying maybe maybe it's this okay
there's no question that the en1080k is a tiny quiet punching above its weight
class freaking incred little piece of
technology Zotac did an outstanding job
once again but at these prices you just
have to ask yourself are you hungry enough for frames to spring for this
water cooled super meal or is it just
too much to
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