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 ESTBAPCo SYSmark 25
The Zotac ZBOX MAGNUS ONE (ECM73070C) was evaluated using our Fall 2018 test suite for small-form factor PCs. In the first section, we will be looking at SYSmark 25.
BAPCo's SYSmark 25 is an application-based benchmark that uses real-world applications to replay usage patterns of business users in the areas of productivity, creativity, and responsiveness. The 'Productivity Scenario' covers office-centric activities including word processing, spreadsheet usage, financial analysis, software development, application installation, file compression, and e-mail management. The 'Creativity Scenario' represents media-centric activities such as digital photo processing, AI and ML for face recognition in photos and videos for the purpose of content creation, etc. The 'Responsiveness Scenario' evaluates the ability of the system to react in a quick manner to user inputs in areas such as application and file launches, web browsing, and multi-tasking.
Scores are meant to be compared against a reference desktop (the SYSmark 25 calibration system, a Lenovo Thinkcenter M720q with a Core i5-8500T and 8GB of DDR4 memory to go with a 256GB M.2 NVMe SSD). The calibration system scores 1000 in each of the scenarios. A score of, say, 2000, would imply that the system under test is twice as fast as the reference system.
SYSmark 25 also adds energy measurement to the mix. A high score in the SYSmark benchmarks might be nice to have, but, potential customers also need to determine the balance between power consumption and the efficiency of the system. For example, in the average office scenario, it might not be worth purchasing a noisy and power-hungry PC just because it ends up with a 2000 score in the SYSmark 2014 SE benchmarks. In order to provide a balanced perspective, SYSmark 25 also allows vendors and decision makers to track the energy consumption during each workload. In the graphs below, we find the total energy consumed by the PC under test for a single iteration of each SYSmark 25 workload. For reference, the calibration system consumes 8.88 Wh for productivity, 10.81 Wh for creativity, and 19.69 Wh overall.
In terms of raw scores, the 65W TDP Tiger Lake processor in the Beast Canyon NUC expectedly outperforms the last-gen Comet Lake-based Core i7-10700 despite the same TDP and same number of cores / threads. The MAGNUS ONE performance for the SYSmark 25 workloads is very similar to that of the Ghost Canyon NUC, but the MAGNUS ONE comes out on top in terms of being energy-efficient while completing the workloads.
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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.