Now, this is something that I've been meaning to take a look at for a while. This is the Zotac Zbox or Zbox,
whichever you'd prefer. Personally, I'm not fussy. And this has been quite
popular for a while because it is a
barebones all-in-one net top. So, there
isn't there aren't many other companies on the market these days that are making
a net top that is actually completely customizable and doesn't come with the
things that most people would want to change. like say for example memory,
hard drive and OS. So that's pretty much the only things they haven't included
and that gives you a lot of flexibility. Like if you want to build sort of an
ultimate performance nettop, then you could throw in a bunch of RAM, throw in
an SSD drive and then throw, you know, Windows 7 on there and all of a sudden
you've got a great little config. If you decide you don't want that, you can
throw in like a the cheapest possible 2 and 1/2 in drive, the least possible
amount of RAM, and that's an optimal grandma PC. you know, install an old
copy of XP that you have lying around and great, boom, there you go. It's like
the cheapest possible thing that way. So, it gives you a lot of flexibility.
This particular one is their is part of their newest generation of products. So,
this is the HD ID40U. Yeah, their their model names
aren't really all that uh remembering exactly what they are friendly, but
here, let's go through exactly what is included here. So, it's the Atom D525.
So, it's a dual core 1.8 GHz Intel Atom processor. It has the next generation
which is well I guess the second generation NVIDIA I ion chipset with 512
megs of DDR3 graphics memory. Has uh two
DDR2 expansion slots. One 2 and 1/2 in
hard drive slot that is a SATA 3 GB per
second gigabit LAN wireless N card
reader. It also has ESATA. I don't see
that. Oh yeah, there's the ESATA. So there's all the included IO HDMI as well
as DVI. You can get VGA with a dongle. And then you've got 8 channel digital
audio included. It is extremely silent. I have personally validated this.
Cameraman's grandpa actually built a PC around the Zbox. Uh guess that was a
couple months ago and he was just super impressed with how fast it was for what
he needed, which is basically just like, you know, browsing the internet,
watching a couple videos, you know, just
sort of no big deal stuff. But also with how quiet it was, it makes almost no
noise. And this is even in comparison to other nettops on the market. It's fully
1080p capable, which is here. Okay. And
it will play 1080p video when I built one around this. I I did actually I
built it for him. So I did test that as well. It includes a visa mount and
everything else here. I think we've covered already. Uh there's a little
explanation of that which I'll leave there while we go through the packaging
itself. So, the first thing we find in the package is a power cable. So, you're
going to notice that this looks an awful lot like a notebook power adapter. You
got your power brick, you got your little DC plug, and then you've got an
AC cord that goes into it. The reason is that the inside of the Zbox is an awful
lot like a netbook. The only difference is that it doesn't have a
screen. I guess there's probably some other differences, but I'm not going to
get too far into that. So, in Canada,
here we go. with a one-year warranty on the Zbox. We have a driver installation
CD. So, here I'm going to refine my throw away the CD um suggestion to
download the LAN drivers off the CD and
then throw it away and then download the rest of the newest ones off of the Zotac
or the uh the OEM website because remember for things like audio chipsets,
you can download them directly from the OEM that makes the chip. Here is a
user's manual. Here's a quick start guide, which presumably includes things
like where to plug stuff into. You know what it looks like? It doesn't include
anything about upgrading the RAM and hard drive. So, that's kind of
interesting. I wonder if that's in the manual. I mean, is the assumption that
if you've gotten this far, you probably know how to do that already or what. Ah,
here we go. Yeah, so it does include instructions for customizing the Zbox.
Okay, what do we find in the other side? In the other side, we find a DV uh DVI
to VGA adapter, some mounting screws,
which I guess we'll need for something, as well as a little stand if you want to
have it sit on your desk like
that. So, it's time to play. Yeah, you
won't be playing too much on this particular one unless it's like videos
and stuff. Not really uh not really a gaming machine, Intel adamant. Okay, so
here we go. It comes pre-attached to its little vasa mount. Visa visa, I don't
know. Okay, so you just press that little switch, take that off, no
problem. Oh, look, it even includes like ventilation built
in. Okay, so we'll have a look. Wow, it's really light actually without a uh
without a drive in it. Makes an enormous difference. You'd be surprised. Okay, so
on the front we have ESATA 1 2 3 4 USB 2.0. That's a gigabit LAN, DVI, HDMI.
That is optical digital audio out as well as our power input. Up on the top,
we have ventilation. So, you can clearly see the heat sink here that is cooling
the CPU as well as the NVIDIA ion chipset. That's where your exhaust is
going to go. So, we've got another USB port here. Conveniently located. Oh, there's
rubber feet here. So, you can actually put it down this way. So, that's the way
you'd use it as a desktop. So, there's the front. This is the way you'd use it
if you put it on the stand. And then if you obviously attach the vase mount,
then you put it on the back of a monitor. On the front, you can see we've
got a power switch as well as a couple activity LEDs for wireless as well as
presumably the hard drive. We have another USB port, so it's a total of six
and an SD card reader. We have a microphone port as well as a headphone
port. That's all you're going to get for analog audio. So unless you want to run
digital, you're only going to get uh 2.0 0 or I guess you could run 2.1 if you
had a built-in subwoofer. Uh, so you're only going to get two channels
out. I guess that's pretty much everything there is to say about it. So,
basically, you need RAM, drive, and OS,
and you are ready to go. So, here's how it works on the back of an LCD. I
promised you guys I'd show that. Oh, looks like you can also wall mount it. That's kind of neat. Okay, so thank you
for checking out my unboxing of the Zbox. And don't forget to subscribe to
Linus Tech Tips and leave a comment criticizing how I'm saying this letter
wrong because everyone seems to do that.