Back in January at the CES tech trade show, the Zotac teased their diminutive Mek Mini and the Mek Ultra, the bigger brother. Fast forward to today, and Zotac is close to offering the Mek Mini to the public, launching the desktop's official product page. The Mek Mini offers users a powerful PC in a small 10 x 5-inch size, while sporting a Zotac RTX GPU and Intel Core i7 processor, all inside a 9-liter chassis. Zotac says the Mek Mini is one of the world's smallest gaming desktops.
Externally, the black chassis measures 10.3 x 5.4 x 10.2 inches. The small size allows you to transport the Mek Mini just about anywhere, while still allowing for desktop-caliber components. It has angled panels all around, and both side panels use static louvers for ventilation. Intake comes through the bottom and sides, while exhaust exits out the top. The front panel sports RGB LED accents, including the Zotac symbol. The addressable LEDs can be fine-tuned using their Spectra 2.0 software.
Internally, the Mek Mini sports an Intel Core i7-8700, a six-core, 12-thread CPU with a base clock speed of 3.2 GHz and boost up to 4.6 GHz. The included system memory is 16GB (2x 8GB modules) DDR4-2666, and the desktop can hold a maximum capacity of 32GB. In looking at the images from the Zotac website, these are SO-DIMMs/laptop-type memory. The graphics card is a Zotac Gaming GeForce RTX 2070 (8GB GDDR6 vRAM), which should offer users a solid gaming experience up to QHD resolution. The 2070 can play 4K titles, but some image quality sacrifices may be required to maintain 60 frames per second. Ports on this GPU include HDMI (2.0b), two DisplayPort 1.4, DVI-D and USB Type-C capable of supporting up to four monitors.
On the storage side, the Mek Mini includes a 240GB PCIe-NVMe M.2 SSD for fast storage, as well as a 2TB, 2.5-inch SATA-based hard drive for mass storage. Users are able to easily access the storage and memory by flipping a switch and sliding off the side panel. It also comes with a 3-in-1 card reader covering SD/SDHC/SDXC formats.
Zotac went all in for networking, using the Killer Network ecosystem with the Killer E2500 Gigabit Ethernet (dual Ethernet ports) and the Killer AC 1550 Wi-Fi. The latter supports up to 1.73 Gbps throughput, 802.11ac Wave 2 with 160 MHz channels and Bluetooth 5.0, along with its Doubleshot Pro technology, said to automatically pick the fastest network connection (wireless or Ethernet) and send all high-priority traffic through that interface while standard traffic goes over the other.
Rear ports include two USB 3.0 (one Type-C), four USB 3.1 (5 Gbps) ports. The microphone and headphone jacks are on the top panel, as are the card reader and USB 3.0 ports.
Zotac Mek Mini Gaming Desktop Specs
| CPU | Intel Core i7-8700 |
| GPU | Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 (8GB) |
| RAM | 16GB DDR4-2666 |
| Network | Killer Wireless AC 1550 (1.73 Gbps, 2x2, 160 Hz), Killer Ethernet 2500 (Gigabit Ethernet) |
| Storage | 240GB NVMe M.2 SSD2TB 2.5-inch SATA HDD |
| Size | 10.3 x 10.2 x 5.4 inches / 260.9 x 258.8 x 137.2mm 9L internal capacity |
| Price | ~$1500 |
Pricing was not detailed, but at CES Zotac told us the Mek Mini will be around $1,500. We should see these available soon through Newegg and Amazon.
