Zotac ZBOX MAGNUS ONE SFF Gaming PC Review: Desktop Comet Lake Charges Up with Ampere
by Ganesh T S on August 13, 2021 10:00 AM ESTPower Consumption and Thermal Performance
The power consumption at the wall was measured with a 4K display being driven through the HDMI port. In the graphs below, we compare the idle and load power of the Zotac ZBOX MAGNUS ONE (ECM73070C) with other low power PCs evaluated before. For load power consumption, we ran the AIDA64 System Stability Test with various stress components, and noted the maximum sustained power consumption at the wall.
Idle power is similar to other gaming PCs, but the peak power consumption is the highest of the lot due to to the 220W TDP GPU in the PC. Simply put, the ZBOX MAGNUS ONE is the first gaming mini-PC we have seen with a 200W+ TDP GPU pre-installed.
Our thermal stress routine starts with the system at idle, followed by four stages of different system loading profiles using the AIDA64 System Stability Test (each of 30 minutes duration). In the first stage, we stress the CPU, caches and RAM. In the second stage, we add the GPU to the above list. In the third stage, we stress the GPU standalone. In the final stage, we stress all the system components (including the disks). Beyond this, we leave the unit idle in order to determine how quickly the various temperatures in the system can come back to normal idling range. The various temperatures and power consumption numbers for the system during the above routine are presented in the graphs below.
| Zotac ZBOX MAGNUS ONE (ECM73070C) System Loading with the AIDA64 System Stability Test |
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| Zotac ZBOX MAGNUS ONE (ECM73070C) System Loading with Prime95 and Furmark |
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Due to the availability of active cooling, the system has no trouble in keeping the temperatures well below 90C in both stress routines. The custom stress test reveals that the CPU package is able to sustain a 65W power consumption in the steady state, and the GPU can sustain 220W too, when loaded standalone.
Overall, the system has an effective thermal solution, but that comes at the cost of fan noise. For a gaming mini-PC with a 220W TDP GPU, that is to be expected.
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Samus - Sunday, August 15, 2021 - link
I'm surprised nobody has pointed out the obvious here: this thing looks better than a PS5\XBOXX while actually being smaller and more powerful. Sure it costs more but it isn't like you can actually but a PS5 or XBOXX for MSRP anyway...lemurbutton - Sunday, August 15, 2021 - link
Most people do get the PS5/XSX at MSRP. This thing is 4.8x more expensive.Threska - Sunday, August 15, 2021 - link
More closely resembles a fat Motorola Cable Modem.Spunjji - Monday, August 16, 2021 - link
"looks better than"Hmmm, I'd argue it's about the same at best? YMMV
"more powerful"
Certainly, but -
"it costs more"
As lemurbutton pointed out, it costs 4.8x more - and it's not 4.8x more powerful.
To me the comparison looks pretty favourable to the console, unless you have a specific need for a PC.
Oxford Guy - Sunday, August 15, 2021 - link
‘Overall, the system has an effective thermal solution, but that comes at the cost of fan noise. For a gaming mini-PC with a 220W TDP GPU, that is to be expected.’I see buttons for Temperatures and Power but no data about decibels (noise pollution), such as decibels-per-watt, peak noise, etc.
Since fan noise is to be expected, one would expect to be able to know how much there is of it, in order to decide if it’s worth having in order to obtain the often dubious benefit of a somewhat smaller case.
Also, does the slow RAM (in terms of the latency being 22) operate in single channel mode?
twotwotwo - Sunday, August 15, 2021 - link
With apologies for some shameless brand cheerleading, I'd love to see a similar "essentially prebuilt" SFF Ryzen option with dGPU; even a weak or past-gen dGPU could fit the non-APU chips into a smaller form factor. Retail-available APUs no longer lag the CPUs as much as they did between the Matisse launch and the 5x00G release, so maybe the difference is less dramatic now, but it's still a seemingly unfilled niche.easp - Monday, August 16, 2021 - link
I keep thinking this is a Motorola cable modem, circa 2014, when I see the hero picture for the article.aj654987 - Thursday, August 19, 2021 - link
I normally dont care much about looks of cases but for $2400 it should look cooler than this. This looks like those giant router/modem combo boxes the ISPs use, its ugly.noident - Tuesday, August 31, 2021 - link
Got this one as a barebone (1420 EUR Magnus One, + 70 EUR for 16 Gigs and 130 EUR for 1TB Samsung M2) This PC really performs as expected. The best thing is I just can put it on the desk so the child will not fiddle with any funny lights (very decent design with that glowing ring).The downside is the noise though. Since I'm playing with headphones it doesn't really bother me but taking off the headphones during gaming is like realizing you just disembarked from an airplane. Zotac should do something about the CPU and PSU fan.