Zotac ZBOX MAGNUS EN970 - Best Compact Gaming Desktop

**The Zbox Magnus: A Bare Bones Gaming PC with a Big Impact**

In this article, we will be discussing the Zbox Magnus, a bare bones gaming PC that packs a punch when it comes to performance and features. The system was sent to us for testing, and we were eager to put it through its paces.

One of the first things we noticed about the Zbox Magnus is its power draw. We were surprised to see that the system only consumes 100 watts during idle, which is a big plus if you're an eco-concerned individual who's worried about power draw. This is especially impressive when compared to full-fledged desktop rigs that consume close to 200 watts while idle.

We also put the system through a couple of synthetic benchmarks to get a feel for its non-gaming performance. The results were respectable, with scores of 255 in Cinebench, 7438 in WinZip, and okay, although these numbers are just fractions of what you'd expect to get with a desktop Core i5 or Core i7. However, considering that the i5 5200U is a low-power part and only has two physical cores with four threads, these scores are still impressive.

Of course, no discussion of the Zbox Magnus would be complete without mentioning its gaming performance. We were curious to see how the system would hold up in terms of graphics rendering, but unfortunately, we found that games don't always cooperate well with two cores or less. Your mileage may vary in terms of the long-term usability of the system for gaming.

**Conclusion**

Overall, we're impressed with the Zbox Magnus, and it's definitely an interesting choice for anyone who wants a bigger-than-it-looks gaming experience in a tiny, lightweight package. The solid 1080p performance, thermal management, and superb acoustics make this system a great option for those looking to game on the go or in a small space.

**Loot Crate: A Monthly Subscription Box for Geeks and Gamers**

In addition to reviewing the Zbox Magnus, we also took some time to unboxing September's Loot Crate, which featured an October-themed box with a "Time" theme. Loot Crate is a monthly subscription box that sends six to eight items, including licensed gear, apparel, collectibles, and unique one-of-a-kind items.

The good news is that every Loot Crate comes with a 40-value guarantee, ensuring that you'll always get a high-quality box filled with cool stuff. The bad news is that the crate will only be available for September's subscribers who sign up before October 19th at 9:00 PM. If you miss this cut-off, you'll have to wait until next month to receive your crate.

We're excited to try out future Loot Crates and see what cool stuff we can expect each month. With themes ranging from Star Wars to Walking Dead, there's always something new and interesting to look forward to. And with the option to use our affiliate code to shop at Amazon or make a direct contribution to our community forum, you can support us directly while getting access to exclusive content.

**Upcoming Content**

Finally, we want to tease some upcoming content that we're working on. We'll be running two systems off of a single box and comparing their performance head-to-head in a gaming showdown. This is going to be an exciting competition, and we can't wait to share the results with you. Stay tuned for more updates and make sure to subscribe to our channel for the latest news and reviews.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enbuilding a fairly compact super powerful system with like a gtx 980 and a mini itx 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 off-the-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 brix 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 en 970 compact gaming desktop at only about 20 centimeters long and wide and about five centimeters 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 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 pokemon and hearthstone so let's start with a look at the magnus's specs at the heart of this tiny pc is an intel core i5 5200u processor running at 2.2 gigahertz with a turbo boost speed of up to 2.7 gigahertz for graphics you get a desktop class nvidia geforce gtx 960 with three gigabytes of gddr5 vram and well okay you don't get a whole lot else this is a bare bones kit meaning that you get no storage no ram and no operating system included but it's got two two and a half inch theta three six gigabit per second base 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 gigabytes of ram although we were able to install 32 gigs of this fancy pants high density 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 ports as well as two usb 2 ports four hdmi outputs two gigabit ethernet ports and antenna connector for the built-in wireless ac wi-fi and of course a power connector for the included 180 watt power brick while another type of display output such as display port would have been nice to see at least these are hdmi 2.0 ports meaning that you can get 4k at 60 hertz 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-in 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 read-only 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 is samsung 850 pro installed with a very simple tool-less 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 thumbscrew 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 two and a half inch mechanical drives if you're more into that sort of thing giving you the capability to throw an m.2 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 crysis 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 fxaa 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 10 38 megahertz during both our crisis 3 skybox stair load test as well as a firmark stress test at 1080p with msaa cranked up and while that clock speed is about 90 megahertz 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 degrees celsius throughout the ida 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 fermark 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-concerned 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 7438 in winzip 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 i5 5200u 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 was kind of detectable when it was first opened 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 eight hundred dollars is pretty steep for a bare bones 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 uh basically basically it's a monthly subscription box for geeks and gamers as well as pop culture aficionados 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 9 00 pm you will actually receive the october crate if not you'll miss that cut off 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 uh 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 linus to save 10 on any new subscription why is this in a you buy very lucky wow we got like lots more stuff in here scratch off with another coin ooh claim your free card pack well whoever watches this first and claims it first is totally gonna 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 um some articles and some extra extra swag and cool stuff like that and then the box usually folds into some kind of like cool diorama 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 there you go guys that's lootcrate.com linus this hat is awesome thanks for watching guys if this video sucked i think you know what to do but if it was awesome get subscribed hit the like button or even consider supporting us directly by using our affiliate code to shop at amazon buying a cool t-shirt like well this is a sweatshirt but whatever you get the point or with a direct contribution to our community forum now that 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 gonna tease something we're doing soon i'm gonna be running two systems off of a single box and gaming head-to-head it's gonna be amazing make sure you're subscribedbuilding a fairly compact super powerful system with like a gtx 980 and a mini itx 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 off-the-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 brix 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 en 970 compact gaming desktop at only about 20 centimeters long and wide and about five centimeters 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 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 pokemon and hearthstone so let's start with a look at the magnus's specs at the heart of this tiny pc is an intel core i5 5200u processor running at 2.2 gigahertz with a turbo boost speed of up to 2.7 gigahertz for graphics you get a desktop class nvidia geforce gtx 960 with three gigabytes of gddr5 vram and well okay you don't get a whole lot else this is a bare bones kit meaning that you get no storage no ram and no operating system included but it's got two two and a half inch theta three six gigabit per second base 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 gigabytes of ram although we were able to install 32 gigs of this fancy pants high density 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 ports as well as two usb 2 ports four hdmi outputs two gigabit ethernet ports and antenna connector for the built-in wireless ac wi-fi and of course a power connector for the included 180 watt power brick while another type of display output such as display port would have been nice to see at least these are hdmi 2.0 ports meaning that you can get 4k at 60 hertz 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-in 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 read-only 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 is samsung 850 pro installed with a very simple tool-less 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 thumbscrew 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 two and a half inch mechanical drives if you're more into that sort of thing giving you the capability to throw an m.2 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 crysis 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 fxaa 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 10 38 megahertz during both our crisis 3 skybox stair load test as well as a firmark stress test at 1080p with msaa cranked up and while that clock speed is about 90 megahertz 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 degrees celsius throughout the ida 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 fermark 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-concerned 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 7438 in winzip 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 i5 5200u 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 was kind of detectable when it was first opened 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 eight hundred dollars is pretty steep for a bare bones 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 uh basically basically it's a monthly subscription box for geeks and gamers as well as pop culture aficionados 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 9 00 pm you will actually receive the october crate if not you'll miss that cut off 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 uh 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 linus to save 10 on any new subscription why is this in a you buy very lucky wow we got like lots more stuff in here scratch off with another coin ooh claim your free card pack well whoever watches this first and claims it first is totally gonna 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 um some articles and some extra extra swag and cool stuff like that and then the box usually folds into some kind of like cool diorama 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 there you go guys that's lootcrate.com linus this hat is awesome thanks for watching guys if this video sucked i think you know what to do but if it was awesome get subscribed hit the like button or even consider supporting us directly by using our affiliate code to shop at amazon buying a cool t-shirt like well this is a sweatshirt but whatever you get the point or with a direct contribution to our community forum now that 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 gonna tease something we're doing soon i'm gonna be running two systems off of a single box and gaming head-to-head it's gonna be amazing make sure you're subscribed\n"