Zotac ZBOX Black / Silver Mini / Booksize Barebone System

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Forget Atom & ION. This is the minimal ION platform worth thinking about. Low power and effective. Perfect always on pc around the home. Netflix HD works wonderful. All the connections you'll need. Tiny also "plastic". with Win7 64bit & 8G of memory it juggles numerous users and VMs w/o problem. A more quickly 7200 drive is a have to.

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Modest. Mac mini sized. Quickly enough for every little thing I've thrown at it as a common purpose Ubuntu ten.ten desktop - significantly far more responsive than any atom netbook or netbox I've ever triedFrom the booting bios chirp to the ubuntu ten.10 login < 8 seconds consistently. That's more quickly than my desktop - almost certainly the SSD I installedEffortless to open - installing an SSD and some ram took much less time than receiving them out of their plastic wrapped hiding locations - the drive moiunt is truly basic and clever. The sodimm sockets are easy to fill Not affordable compared to dual atoms but significantly, much fasterFan/heatsink - see the silentpc review - its not silent but I'm old and deaf enough not to actually care all that significantly - if you want a silent media pc this may well be a tiny noisyUtilizing a standard hdd will make the heat complications worse I threw in a 60GB ssd and 4GB of ddr3 sodimm ram. I haven't tried an ordinary hdd given that I don't want the storage there. Will update when I attempt the wifi - review say it's not wonderful - I utilized a wired connection.

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I replaced a tower at my desk with this - 64GB SSD, 4GB RAM, Linux Mint (Ubuntu 10 based.) Boots quicker and runs at least as well as the tower it replaced - which was no slouch. Entirely 100% content. Every thing works seriously properly. The SSD actually makes this setup rock. It is quiet and unobtrusive. Absolutely everyone is impressed. Just can't complain. Yes it is a lttle cheapy hunting, but it is tucked beneath a monitor stand with a USB DVD-RW drive on leading. You hardly notice its existence.

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Add a challenging drive and ram and you have a nice small HTPC. It is a even smaller than I imagined, nearly the very same size as a router. And unlike other models, this one has optical audio output (on the back) No troubles at all playing back 1080p MKV at 1920x1080, it is even quiet when performing so. Far exceeds the performance of atom models. And its the sort of overall performance distinction you can essentially feel, not just on paper. Would have preferred a dual band wifi chip, this one particular is two.4Ghz only. CPU runs a little hot when maxed out. But because video decoding is handled by the nVidia chip, it isn't an issue as an HTPC. **Windows 7 users make confident you get the updated wifi driver from RaLink, (model 2860) The windows update version has rather poor signal strength. A Bios update is also accessible from the Zotac site.

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SmallerLots of USB portsSurprisingly rapid (just don't expect significantly when it comes to gaming) Sound stopped operating within weeksSpotty WifiFlimsy caseLouder than expectedNo DVD drive I wanted to discover a smaller Computer that would take parts from my broken Macbook Pro and at some point turn out to be a HTPC. The Zbox fit the bill, and I was happy with it initially. Surprisingly, I was in a position to get OS X running with all of the information from my Macbook's difficult drive intact. It was louder than I expected, so I lowered the fan speed in the BIOS. The wifi card was spotty, so I replaced it with a superior one particular from my Macbook. Then, Specifically 31 days soon after I purchased it, the sound on the proper channel stopped working, rendering it useless as a HTPC. Newegg was no support. I'm nevertheless in speak to with Zotac. I'm extremely disappointed. Manufacturer Response:Sorry to hear you are getting difficulty with our item. This item must still be covered under warranty, please speak to our assistance department and we will be pleased to support you with diagnosis and replacement if needed. Thanks!External Link(s): ZOTAC Technical Assistance| Support Ticket Submission| ZOTAC Request a RMA|

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With the NVIDIA ION, playback of 1080i content material with MythTV, XBMC, Boxee, and other VDPAU-enabled software is superb. Looks wonderful on my 40in LCD Tv. And thanks to the Celeron CPU, other activities such as flash video, web browsing, compiling code, GIMP, and even 3-D games run smoothly. It is far more versatile than the boxes with the usual Atom chips. The box is small and not bad seeking, and by working with HDMI, you have only a couple of modest cables coming out the back - it sits nicely on leading of the dvd player, with no complaints from my interior decorator/wife. The unit does have a fan which runs quick when the box is doing any heavy lifting - but it is reasonably quiet, and at couch-distance, it is barely noticeable. It was a snap to install a hard-drive and memory, and then load Ubuntu from a USB key. The glowing orange ring seemed kind of cool at initial but that gets old quickly - fortunately it can be shut off by way of the BIOS. It would be nice if you could control it from software program although.All of the ports (ethernet, USB, HDMI, and even the SD card slot) are upside down when you have the box sitting horizontally. This is really annoying when you are attempting to plug something in and it just won't go, due to the fact you assume that the orientation would be like any other typical consumer device!Though the box is not bad searching, it's not that fantastic either. The black top and bottom are cool, but the silver-colored sides make it appear a small inexpensive/clunky. It would have been good to have an all-black color scheme. I put a 30GB SSD in this thing, it boots into Ubuntu so swiftly that it is generally up and operating before the Tv comes on. I also added a Rosewill USB MediaCenter remote, which works wonderful with MythTV.The box does have built in WiFI, but I haven't genuinely tried to make use of it. Obtaining Ubuntu/MythTV etc to run, with video and audio more than HDMI, and LIRC for the Rosewill remote, took quite a bit of googling and hacking. Not advised for non-geeks!

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Great solid create and performance for mini HTPC, very best of the ION chipsets(original) combined with a full Celeron processor. this is the only create I would have ever considered using a Celeron processor in, but it's a dream. Operating PinguyOS, a flavor of Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid, Boxee works, Hulu Plus works, what more could I want? Mini PCIe slot for half cards does not work at this time with SSD drives. voided the warranty pretty much straight out of the box to try the mini PCIe SSD drive, and it didn't work!!! Located a post on 1 of the boards shortly right after that to come across that I am not the only 1 with this issue. C'mon Zotac!!