Zotac ZBOX ID89 Plus Mini PC Review

Cinebench R11.5 is a tile-based rendering performance test based on Cinema 4D from Maxon. Cinema 4D is a 3D rendering and animation tool suite used by 3D animation houses and producers like Sony Animation and many others. It's very demanding of system processor resources and is an excellent gauge of pure computational throughput.

This is a multi-threaded, multi-processor aware benchmark that renders a single 3D scene and tracks the length of the entire process. The rate at which each test system was able to render the entire scene is represented in the graph below.

Cinebench gives the Zotac ZBOX ID89 Plus another opportunity to showcase the strength of its Ivy Bridge foundation, while also highlighting the weakness of integrated graphics versus discrete solutions. This is an especially unforgiving benchmark that's geared towards evaluating a system's prowess for 3D design and CAD work, but we like to run it to see how systems compare with one another. Once again, adding a stick of RAM to put the system in dual-channel mode would likely yield a slightly higher score here.

3DMark Vantage's built-in CPU tests are multi-threaded DirectX gaming metrics that are useful for comparing relative performance between similarly-equipped systems. This tests consists of two different 3D scenes that are processed with a software renderer that is dependent on the host CPU's performance. Calculations that are normally reserved for the 3D accelerator are instead sent to the CPU for processing and rendering. The system's performance in each test is used to determine the final score.

The Zotac machine reviewed here relies on integrated graphics for gaming chores, but in the absence of a discrete GPU, the CPU is able to pick up some of the slack on the back of a strong architecture and two physical cores and four processing threads.