Dubai: The Zotac Zbox Sphere OI520 Plus is a mini desktop computer perfect for home entertainment or daily use. The design will turn the heads as consumers are used to square or rectangular shapes.
This is more semi-spherical in shape with a cube-shaped base moulded in smooth back plastic with matte finish but the matte finish attracts fingerprints.
This is also the first time Zotac is coming out with a different shape altogether.
I had reviewed their earlier models — Nano XS AD13 Plus, and Nano XS AD11 — and was quite impressed with its performance. Zotac has shrunk a desktop CPU into a mini-PC.
The round top of the chassis can be opened with a twist and the internal parts cane be viewed.
The Zotac motherboard is placed horizontally. It is powered by Intel dual-core i5-4200U 1.6GHz processor and an Intel HD4400 integrated GPU, coupled with 4GB RAM and 500GB hard drive. It weighs around one kilo. The chip can go up to 2.6GHz in Turbo mode.
One big advantage is that there are plenty of ports on the back side of the device like four USB 3.0 ports, three USB 2.0 (two on the back and one on the side), HDMI, DisplayPort output, a Gigabit Ethernet port, line-in and line-out jacks for audio and a flash-memory-card reader that supports SD, SDHC, SDXC, and MultiMediaCard formats. Both the HDMI and DisplayPort video outputs support 4K.
I did not have either a 4K TV or a 4K content to test the capability.
There are two memory slots for up to 16GB of memory, and an mSATA slot for a 2.5-inch hard drive or solid-state drive (SSD) inside the device for future expansion plans.
The main drawback of the device is that it does not come pre-installed with any operating system. Users can install any operating system, including Linux, Windows 7 or Windows 8.
To install the software you need to have an external optical drive. The drivers for the device come on a DVD and also on a USB drive. The driver provides software for the chip set, graphics, wireless, audio and Bluetooth.
If you don’t have an optical drive, you need to transfer the software to a USB drive with another computer. Setting up the device takes time and lot of procedures, but once done, it is easy to continue.
Even though it is small, the device handles everything you throw at it and offers decent performance for the price. It is good enough for almost any form of digital media consumption. It is an ideal machine for a bedroom PC or as an expensive media centre, but lacks the raw power for anything more taxing.
There is no optical audio connector but the HDMI port supports Dolby Digital 5.1 channel, decent enough for a home entertainment use.
I ran some HD films and played some music without any trouble.
There is only one small fan at the base of the device to keep it cool and that is all is needed. The ventilation at the back of the device is really good to keep the hot air out.
Even though it is not meant to play heavy games, the device can play games in lower resolutions without any lag. But demanding games or high-end productivity software like video editing or heavy photo retouching will not run on this device.
Regarding connectivity, it has Bluetooth 4.0 and WiFi. It is priced at Dh1,829.
