Building a fairly compact, super powerful system with like a GTX 980 and
a miniITX case is kind of fashionable right now. But there's a whole other
class of machine that's smaller than what can be built using offthe-shelf
components. The issue is that with these
systems, you get less customizability and in some cases like we experienced
with this really small Gigabyte bricks micro PC, heat management can be a real
problem if desktop class GPUs are integrated into such a design. So, Zotac
is taking a bit of a middle ground approach with their new Zbox Magnus
EN970 compact gaming desktop. At only
about 20 cm long and wide and about 5 cm
tall, it's small, but not so small that
it seems like it'll melt the minute you fire up Battlefront. But does it hold
up? I guess we'll find
out. If you already know about Loot Crate, go sign up for the October crate
at the link in the video description. And if you don't, stick around till the
end of the video to check out our unboxing of the September Summon Crate
with items from Pokémon and Hearthstone. So, let's start with a look
at the Magnus' specs. At the heart of this tiny PC is an Intel Core i5 5200U
processor running at 2.2 GHz with a turbo boost speed of up to 2.7 GHz. For
graphics, you get a desktop class NVIDIA
GeForce GTX 960 with 3 GB of GDDDR5
VRAM. And well, okay, you don't get a whole lot else. This is a barebones kit,
meaning that you get no storage, no RAM, and no operating system included, but
it's got two 2 and 1/2 in SATA 3 6 GB per second bays and an M.2 slot. For
RAM, you will need laptop style sodium memory. It's got two memory slots with
official support for up to 16 GB of RAM. Although we were able to install 32 gigs
of this fancy pants highdensity stuff that we got from intelligent memory a
little while back. Not the first time we fit tons of RAM into a tiny PC. You can
check out that video here. Now, moving on to the outside. The chassis itself
has an, I'd say, unassuming, but personally appealing look that would fit
in well either on your desktop or in your living room as a console
replacement. The front panel features a power button that lights up in orange
when you turn the system on. And you'll also find two USB 3 ports, headphone and
microphone jacks, and an SDXC reader for high-capacity cards. The back panel has
two more USB 3.0 no ports as well as two USB 2 ports, four HDMI outputs, 2 GB
Ethernet ports, an antenna connector for the built-in wireless AC Wi-Fi, and of
course, a power connector for the included 180 W power brick. While
another type of display output such as DisplayPort would have been nice to
see, at least these are HDMI 2.0 ports,
meaning that you can get 4K at 60 Hz as
long as you have a compatible monitor or television. I wouldn't try to game at
that resolution, mind you, on the GTX 960 anyway, but those connections could
still be useful if you wanted to use a box like this for other less intensive
tasks at high resolution, whether it's web browsing or office work or whatever
the case may be. For accessories, you get a screw and Wi-Fi antenna, the
aforementioned power brick, and drivers on a CD.
Although, since the Magnus doesn't include an optical drive, you'll either
need to dig out an external optical drive if you want to get into that CD,
or you could just use the also included readonly USB stick. Thumbs up for that
one. Installing our RAM and SSD was a
breeze. The bottom panel comes off quite easily with a couple of thumb screws,
revealing the two drive bays and RAM slots. our test SSD, a Samsung 850 Pro,
installed with a very simple toolless plastic mounting system that snapped
right onto the drive. From there, it was just a matter of inserting the SSD
directly into the SATA ports and securing it with another thumb screw. It
was one of the easiest SSD installations that I've ever done and will allow you
to get up and running in a matter of minutes. And remember that these bays
also support 2 and 1/2 in mechanical drives if you're more into that sort of
thing, giving you the capability to throw an M.2 two SSD and then up to two
high-capacity hard drives in here. So, now let's have a look at some
performance numbers though, just to see how capable the little Magnus is.
Although, we were a little concerned that a desktop GTX 960 would thermal
throttle due to being in such a small case, our gaming results were actually
very good. We ran three games at 1080p, starting with Crisis 3 on high settings
with anti-aliasing and motion blur turned off, and the Magnus delivered a
very solid 63 frames per second average. Moving on to Tomb Raider, we got 54 FPS
with everything maxed out and FXA enabled. And finally, we achieved 38 FPS
on The Witcher 3 on high settings, again with AA and motion blur off. Aside from
FPS numbers though, we wanted to keep an eye on our GPU's core clock speed to see
if it was throttling in spite of the solid performance. And Zotac clearly did
a solid job with his cooling solution with our GTX 960 running smooth at 1038
MHz during both our Crisis 3 Skybox stair load test as well as a Firmark
stress test at 1080p with MSAA cranked up. While that clock speed is about 90
MHz lower than NVIDIA's reference GTX 960, you can still expect a solid and
consistent gaming experience with the Magnus at normal room temperature. And
speaking of temperatures, the Core i5 5200U maintained an average core
temperature of a very reasonable 70° C throughout the ID to 64 system stress
test with no thermal throttling either. What's really impressive in addition to
that though is that the system stayed nearly whisper quiet even during our
most strenuous tests with John standing right next to it during testing and kind
of having to get pretty close in order to hear it even after turning off the
room's air conditioning. Our review unit also scored good marks for power
consumption or lack thereof. So, even though the included power brick is rated
for 180 watts, we didn't come close to
hitting that during testing with idle power consumption at a mere 21 watts
going up to 34 watts in IDA and 84 watts
in Firmark and only 100 watts during the Crisis 3 load test. I mean, seeing as
there are full-fledged desktop rigs that consume close to that while idle, this
is a big plus if you're an eco-conerned individual who's worried about power
draw. We also put the system through a couple synthetic benchmarks to get a
feel for its non-gaming performance. It scored 255 in Cinebench, uh 7438 in
Windzip, and uh okay. Although these
numbers are just fractions of what you'd expect to get with a desktop Core i5 or
Core i7, they are respectable when you consider that the i5200U is a low power
part and it only has two physical cores
with four threads. So, watch out for
that because while I wouldn't have recommended doing any kind of heavy
rendering or like super intensive video editing on a system like this anyway,
some games don't cooperate well with two
cores or less. So, your mileage may vary
in terms of the long-term usability of the system for gaming, which I guess
leads us pretty well into the conclusion. I don't really have anything
negative to say other than there's a slightly weird pickled vegetable smell
that uh was kind of detectable when it was first open, but none of that showed
up during uh during testing. Anyway, and
I guess, okay, I guess if there was something to complain about, cost is a
bit of a tough pill to swallow on this one because
$800 is pretty steep for a barebones machine, especially when you compare it
to what you could build in terms of a fully equipped traditional desktop. But
if you can stomach the price, the solid 1080p performance, the thermal
management, and superb acoustics make
the Zbox Magnus an interesting choice for anyone who wants a bigger than it
looks gaming experience in a tiny lightweight
package. So, if you don't know what Loot Crate is, basically it's a basically
basically it's a monthly subscription box for geeks and gamers as well as pop
culture afficionados. So, we are going to be unboxing September's Summon Box with the
October theme being time. It costs less
than 20 bucks a month and gets you six to eight items, including licensed gear,
apparel, collectibles, and unique one-of-a-kind items. They guarantee a
$40 value on each crate. If you sign up before October 19th at 900 p.m., you
will actually receive the October crate. If not, you'll miss that cutoff and you
won't get another chance. That crate is gone forever. You'll have to wait for
the September one. The good news is they're all pretty freaking cool and
they'll all have different themes. Whether it's like inspired by inspired
by Star Wars. There we go. We got some Hearthstone gear here. Whether it's
inspired by Marvel, The Walking Dead, whatever else the case may be, there is
always cool stuff. So, here we've got a supernatural loot crate car. We've
actually collected a whole whack ton of them now. And we've got a massive amount
of cool stuff. Is this like a a
Simpsons? That is cool. It's like a Simpsons Homer Simpson Buddha thing.
Anyway, the point is if any of this sounds appealing, you can sign up at
lootcrate.com/Linus and enter code lionus to save 10% on any new
subscription. Why is this in
a youuber lucky? Wow, we got like lots
more stuff in here. Scratch off with another coin. Oo, claim your free card
pack. Well, whoever watches this first and claims it first is totally going to
get it. Yeah, that's right. I am all about the little bonuses for sticking
around and watching the uh sponsor spots. Right. Right, guys. Actually, I
think this is the first time I've ever done anything like that, so whatever. But uh what else we got in here? Free
mobile game. There we go. Oh, yeah. And every month you get like a little uh
booklet that'll have like uh some articles and some extra extra swag and
cool stuff like that. And then the box usually folds into some kind of like
cool diarama scene thing as well. So it's like a cool place to put
all of your summoning stuff. Now I just want to get this bag
open. There we go. Look at him. So there
you go guys. That's lootcrate.com/lininus. This hat is
awesome. Thanks for watching, guys. If this video sucked, I think you know what
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you're done doing all that stuff, you're probably wondering what to watch next. So, normally I tease something we just
did, but this time I'm going to tease something we're doing soon. I'm going to be running two systems off of a single
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