Zotac's New Magnus Mini PC Roars With Hexa-Core Intel CPU And GeForce RTX 2070

Zotac rarely misses an opportunity to crank out a new mini PC, and so it is no surprise that its newest model, the Magnus EC52070D, pairs an 8th generation Intel Core processor with NVIDIA's newfangled GeForce RTX 2070 based on Turing. The end result is a miniature box that punches above its weight class.

We have not tested this particular model, though we have played around with several previous generation Zbox machines. It always amazes us the level of power that can be crammed into a comparatively small chassis. In this case, the Magnus measures 8.86 (L) x 7.99 (W) by 5.04 (H) inches. It's not Zotac's tiniest enclosure, but is certainly dwarfed by traditional desktop towers, even compact ones.

The newest Magnus comes standard with an Intel Core i5-8400T processor, which is a 6-core/6-thread chip clocked at 1.7GHz to 3.3GHz with 9MB of SmartCache. It also sports a pair of SO-DIMM memory slots supporting up to 32GB of RAM. For storage, it has both an M.2 slot supporting both PCIe x4 and SATA 6Gbps solid state drives, and a 2.5-inch drive bay.

It's the GeForce RTX 2070 that is the star of the show, though. This brings the power of Turing and, by extension, real-time ray tracing and DLSS support to the mini PC form factor. In rasterized workloads, the GeForce RTX 2070 delivers comfortable gaming performance at 1440p, and can handle 4K gaming in some titles. The caveat is that it might throttle a bit quicker than it would in a bigger case with more airflow. That said, we have not run into thermal issues with Zotac's mini PCs in the past.

Rear connectivity consists of four USB 3.1 ports. a pair of gigabit Ethernet ports (one of which is powered by Killer), 802.11ac Wi-Fi, three DisplayPort 1.4 outputs, an HDMI 2.0b output, and DL-DVI-D output. On the front, users will find two USB 3.1 ports (Type-A and Type-C), a 3-in-1 card reader, and a microphone input.

Zotac is offering two main SKUs at the moment—one that is a bare box (you need to add RAM, storage, and an operating system) and one that comes with a 128GB M.2 SSD with Windows 10 installed, a 1TB hard drive, and 8GB of RAM. If you're eyeballing the Magnus, our advice is to go for the bare box and go with a more capacious SSD, especially now that prices have fallen.

There is no information on price or availability at the moment.