Computex 2015 Zotac Visit

Zotac is known for their advances in mini pcs first with full featured MiniITX motherboards and now with the famed ZBOX.  At Computex this year Zotac was showing a normal complement of ZBOX designs including a ready to run Steam Machine running SteamOS and this DIY build using the same components. 

The ZBOX EN970 comes with a Broadwell based Core i5 5200U backed by an NVIDIA GTX 970M with storage options of 2x 2.5” SSDs and a single M.2.  Of course this is mobile based hardware so you won’t get the same power as a fully built desktop however for something smaller than an XBOX it is quite powerful.

During Computex NVIDIA launched the GTX 980Ti GPU and ZOTAC had a good compliment of video cards on display using a mix of reference design cards and custom PCBs.

While I tend to gravitate to cards with something better to offer than stock internals I have to admit the new heatsink design is very pleasing to the eye.  The first design is the ArticStorm and features a dual design of water and air.  Next to that is the AMP edition featuring the new cooler design.  Both of these cards are reference based and will likely come in a hot-clocked variant.

The custom cards include this 2.5 slot monster called the GTX 980 Ti AMP Extreme followed by the AMP Omega.  AMP Extreme comes with a 1250Mhz Core clock and is programmed to boost to 1335Mhz.  Final clocks have not been determined for AMP Omega however, it is safe to say they will likely be higher than 1250Mhz.