Zotac ZBOX ID80 Plus Mini PC Review

Preliminary Testing with SiSoft SANDRA Synthetic Benchmarks

By desktop standards, the synthetic results spit out by Sandra are rather anemic here, but it's important to keep things in perspective. This isn't a desktop-class machine, it's a mini PC, or nettop if you prefer, built around Intel's Cedar Trail platform. The Atom D2700 processor features two processing cores (four threads) clocked at 2.13GHz, 1MB of L2 cache, and a 10W TDP.

There's not much to brag about in the memory benchmark either. As for the 5400 RPM hard drive, performance is about where we would expect it to be with fairly impressive peak performance.

HD Video Playback and CPU Utilization HD Video Decode Performance

To test video decode and playback capabilities of the Zotac Zbox Nano AD10 Plus, we attempted to play back a 1080p H.264-encoded QuickTime clip, numerous 1080P MKV files, and HD Flash videos. We then fired up Windows Task Manager take a look at CPU utilization in all instances.

Streaming video is really what the ZBOX ID80 Plus is all about, and while the system struggles with 3D gaming, it does a much better job serving up HD content from the Web and on your desktop. In the screenshot above, we streamed a 1080p movie trailer in full screen from YouTube over an 802.11n Wi-Fi connection and watched the CPU utilization bounce around from 10 percent to 15 percent. The video played back smoothly without any dropped frames and annoying jitter.

Performance was equally good when viewing offline content locally, whether played back from a file on the internal hard drive or streamed over our in-home network.