Welcome to my unboxing of something that's actually pretty cool. This is the
Zotac Zbox 804 Plus. So, it's got their
usual chassis, but there's some aspects
of this particular little mini PC that are not very usual at all. It comes with
Bluetooth gigabit LAN 802.11n. So, that is N wireless, a
remote control, and a vase mount. The configuration that I've got here has a
320 gig hard drive and two gigs of memory. Although you can buy it as a
barebones, which doesn't come with a hard drive or RAM, obviously at a
cheaper price, and you can put in whatever you want. So, you can build yourself a very silent, very high
performance, and more on that later. Mini PC for a very reasonable budget. It
also doesn't come with an operating system, so you're free to choose your own. Whether you want to go with Windows
7 Home Premium Professional, or whatever else the case may be. They don't lock
you in that way or force you to buy a more expensive premium skew in order to
get a better operating system. So, that's something that's really convenient. Let's have a look at the
overall specs first. So, this uses the AMD E450 APU, which has two cores
running at 1.65 GHz, as well as an AMD
6000 series 6320 graphics core built
into the APU itself. So, an APU is kind of like a CPU and a GPU on one die.
Moving on, we've got two uh two gigs of memory included. There are two sodium
spot slots available. It supports one 2 and 12 in hard drive or SSD with the 320
gig drive included. Anything without plus in the part number is a bare bones,
just so you guys know. Gigabit LAN 802.11n Bluetooth 3.0. It has an SDHC
slot that also supports memory stick if you actually still use that. Onboard 8
channel digital audio is uh output via
HDMI or optical spitiff. Okay. IO
dimensions. We'll get into that later. Cool. There's a QR code. We'll talk
about that after. And since we're going to open this thing, none of this is very
relevant. So, let's get this baby opened
up. I don't know if you guys remember, but I did a full NCX tech tips episode
on one of Zotac's mini PCs, which was just beastly. The thing was running some
serious high bit rate MKVS
uh using XBMC. Very, very robust little system.
We've got a bunch of pieces here. You know what? I'm going to actually open
these up off camera. So, here we are. One thing that we do have to do is
install the batteries in the remote, which is a fairly simple process, as you
guys can see. Here I am doing it now. I'm doing it. I'm doing it now. You
know, the guys on the local radio station, Team 1040, the uh the sports
radio station, are just they're doing like this thing. It's like a March
Madness themed, like basketball themed thing where they're taking iconic TV
characters and then they have like brackets where they come down down down
to a finals and then they're they're going to have someone win and they're having the uh the listeners vote and
they're like floored every time Basil Faulty wins a bracket because apparently
none of them understand the humor of Faulty Towers which just irked me this
morning cuz they were like, "Oh, it's some British show. There were only 12 episodes." Yes, 12 episodes of the
purest comedy gold that ever existed. Anyway, moving on. Uh, here is the media
center remote that is included. It has all of your usual suspects in terms of
programmable keys, numbers, and mute buttons and navigation keys and all that
good stuff. Next, we have the included power cord, four included screws, more
on those later, as well as the IR receiver. So the reason this comes on a
really long cord that is more than one Linus arms span in length is because it
can be easily positioned like plugged into the uh the Zbox itself and then
positioned somewhere discreet and convenient so that the remote will be
able to hit it. It would hit that thing. Okay. Then
we have an antenna and a little mounting
piece here, which we'll do more on later. As well
as a warranty terms thing. So, in the
Oh, look at that. In the EU, they get two years. I think that's by law.
Everywhere else is one year. Driver installation DVD, users manual, as well
as uh quick start guide. Now, the unit
itself. So, remember guys, this is an E450. That means it is capable of
DirectX11 gaming in games like uh Dirt
3, for example, where they're not super super demanding, but they are DirectX11.
So, more on that in a moment here. Let's uh let's do the unit itself
here. Very shiny. ERP ready, evidently.
There's our cooling fan right there. Can you guys see that at all? There's a
little aluminum heat sink under it. I don't know if you're going to be able to
see that. That's okay. There's a cooling fan in there. You guys will have to take my word for it. We also have four rubber
feet. So, if you want to use it sitting down, you would put it this way. And as
like a media PC box, that's probably how I would set it up. You can decide which
way is the front. So, there's an exhaust vent here with a front USB 2. On this
side, there's audio. Uh, so that's headphones, microphone, SD slot, USB 2,
wireless LAN indicator, drive indicator, power
button. Okay, so that's probably the front. Then moving on to this side, we
got a couple screws. So that's to open up the chassis as well as more
ventilation holes. And finally on this side, this is what I would consider to be the back. Yeah. Yeah, this is the
back. So there's the wireless antenna, which we
can derp plug
in if I can. Oh, it's like springloaded. Neat.
Okay, there we go. wireless antenna, USB 3, gigabit Ethernet, two more USB 2,
DisplayPort out. That's cool. That's uh that's a function of the AMD Radeon
graphics on board. HDMI as well as optical audio out. And finally, the
power in. It also has a power indicator on the top. That
orange ring does glow. But check this out. This is the kind of thing Zotac
thought of. You can turn it off in the BIOS if you have it in a room where, for
example, maybe it's a media PC and you don't want like disturbing random orange
glows coming out of your PC. Turn it off. No problem. And then it just looks
the way it does when it's powered off right now. Other than a small glow from
the power button. Yeah, that is USB 2. Sorry, I was just checking that, guys.
So, okay. Right. What other options do we have for mounting? So, you guys saw
this funky thing right here. That is so that you can mount uh so that you can
mount it on the base station, which hopefully I can figure out how to
do. There we go. Slide that into place. That is
another way that you can configure it. Finally, and it comes with everything
you need in the box. You can do it this
way. Check this out. It comes with a
vase mount. So, all you have to do is clip the unit in. And I'll see if I can
remember how it Yeah, there we go. You can find the guides here. So, you see
these indents right here and right
here. You just clip the unit in like
this. And you mount the plastic piece.
Hold on. That opens up the clips. So, you mount the plastic piece to the back
of your TV or monitor or maybe you're using this at a POS terminal in a store,
something where you you don't want like a huge PC next to it. You screw this
into the back with those screws that I said I'd tell you more about later.
They're stuck to something. Sorry, guys. And then you clip the PC in just like
this, like I kind of showed you already, but
whatever. And there you go. Just like that. No big deal, right? You have
access to all of your important IO, including that top USB 2
port. And you have a nice little lowprofile PC. You don't need a wire for
networking cuz it has built-in wireless as well as built-in Bluetooth. And I
think that pretty much covers it. Thank you for checking out my unboxing of the
ever popular Zotac 804. Don't forget to
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