Over on Zotac’s Hong Kong site, a new fanless Zbox has revealed itself, as first spotted by FanlessTech. This passively cooled, silent mini-PC packs a lot into its 1.8L casing, with Tiger Lake CPUs, up to 64GB of DDR4 and Thunderbolt 4.
(Image credit: Zotac)
Inside the diminutive honeycomb case of the the Zbox C-series nano we see that it comes with a choice of 11th-gen Intel CPUs, specifically the 28W i3-1115G4, i5-1135G7, and i7-1165G7, and you can buy them as barebones units or have one made to your requirements. In addition to filling the pair of DDR4 slots (which can accept up to 3200MHz SO-DIMMs), you can attach two SSDs (one M2 PCI-e x4, the other 2.5 inch SATA). External connectivity is taken care of by a Thunderbolt 4 port which could be used for an external GPU, and there are four USB 3.1 ports and a single USB 2.0 port. Networking is handled by a pair of gigabit ethernet sockets, plus Wi-Fi 5 and Bluetooth 5. There’s an SD card reader too.
The Xe integrated GPU drives both HDMI 2.0 and DisplayPort 1.4 outputs, both capable of 4K at 60Hz. The unit has a VESA mount, allowing it to be nicely tucked away behind a monitor, but as you would expect, it does require an external power brick. Windows 10 is the only supported OS, but Zotac does note that the new Zbox is Windows 11 ready. Linux fans should also be able to run their favorite distro.
The Series-C nano models are not currently available at retail yet. A Zbox nano CI662 with 10th-gen i7, but otherwise barebones, currently costs $729.99.
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Ian Evenden is a UK-based news writer for Tom’s Hardware US. He’ll write about anything, but stories about Raspberry Pi and DIY robots seem to find their way to him.
