Zotac ZBOX ID89 Plus Mini PC Review
Performance: PCMark Vantage & PCMark 7
Test System Configuration Notes: We rounded up previous mini PC and HTPC configurations we've reviewed in the past and compared their scores to that of the Zotac ZBOX ID89 Plus. Not all of these systems fall into the same performance category, but as a whole, the benchmarks give you an idea of what kind of performance gains (or losses) you can expect out of the ZBOX ID89 Plus compared to other systems on the market.
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To kick things off we fired up Futuremark's system performance benchmark, PCMark Vantage. This synthetic benchmark suite simulates a range of real-world scenarios and workloads and stresses various system subsets in the process. Everything you'd want to do with your PC -- watching HD movies, music compression, image editing, gaming, and so forth -- is represented here. Also, most of the tests are multi-threaded, making this a good indicator of all-around performance.
Zotac's ZBOX ID89 Plus came out swinging at the competition with top scores nearly across the board, save for Gaming. It's no surprise that the integrated Intel Graphics 2500 couldn't keep up with with ASRock's discrete GeForce GT 425M solution, but it wasn't exactly a bloodbath, either. What's more, the ID89 system posted a better Gaming score than the APU-based systems in this comparison.
What's impressive about Zotac's showing in PCMark Vantage is that it scored so well, yet the setup leaves plenty of room for improvement. As we previously stated, adding another 4GB stick of RAM and swapping the slow spinning hard drive for an SSD or a hybrid drive would supercharge this system.
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The Zotac configuration posted another relatively strong score in PCMark 7. Much of the credit here goes to Intel's 3rd Generation Core i5 3470T processor based on the chip maker's Ivy Bridge architecture. This is a dual-core chip with Hyper Threading support and 3MB of Smart Cache. It's not really in the same ballpark as some of the low-power processors found on other SFF systems.
