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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erinadreno - Friday, August 13, 2021 - link
Seems quite strange that they opt for an H470 chipset but 10th gen CPU. And that cooler is really pathetic even for a 65W CPU. Reminds me of engine 27 which also has really bad performance.abufrejoval - Friday, August 13, 2021 - link
Sadly all 4TB or greater 2.5" HDDs these days use shingled media: I'm not sure I'd want to recommend those, even for a games library.TheinsanegamerN - Friday, August 13, 2021 - link
Why not?abufrejoval - Friday, August 13, 2021 - link
Take ARK Survival Evolved for example, a game that can easily grow beyond 100GB, especially with extra DLC content. Yet it uses tons of smallish files and receives gigabytes of updates every other week. The write amplification for updating these small files will be cached as long as the drive has enough space and been left powered to re-organize and rewrite its shingles.But once it's too full or kept too busy, updates could slow below what your broadband delivers.
Shingled media delivers a 25% capacity increase. I'd rather pay those 25% and have the choice to use CMR. But that choice is no longer there, on 2.5" HDD it's currently SMR or bust (apart from some leftover stockpiles).
Spunjji - Monday, August 16, 2021 - link
As a concept it really does only make good sense for low-rate-of-change media storage and/or where the OS is explicitly aware of the drive's geometry and has appropriate caching systems in place. The decision to sell these drives directly to consumers wasn't the best.abufrejoval - Friday, August 13, 2021 - link
Thunderbolt support with a dGPU is a mess, because you have to re-route the external display ports to TB. TB4 on Gen10 hardware: Don't know if that's done or possible. TB3 would be quite nice already, but if you can't re-route the display, you won't get certified as Thunderbolt, AFAIK, while may would be fine with having support for 4 external PCIe lanes on such a compact PC.abufrejoval - Friday, August 13, 2021 - link
s/may/many--need editjeremyshaw - Friday, August 13, 2021 - link
A decent number of TB3/4 host add-in cards for desktops have DP input, to enable the video pass through. Even TB3/4 integrated on desktop motherboards will usually have a DP input to enable video passthrough (especially AMD MBs, since many of their top consumer CPUs do not have IGPs).RomanPixel - Friday, August 13, 2021 - link
Good choices for hardware I think. Having a 10th over the 11th will lessen heat as well as choosing a RTX 3000 series card with GDDR6 over GDDR6X VRAM. Not a fan of seeing some hybrid or regular HDD thou. I guess if you got the space, go for it! Or maybe it's justified to so many games becoming around 100GB in size now for storage. | If anyone is making small graphics cards it's Zotac with this RTX 3000 series, I don't think it would have been much possible to be any other board partner.Death666Angel - Saturday, August 14, 2021 - link
I have a 2TB SSD system and games drive with a 2TB SSD data drive for musik, videos, pictures and the likes. I can pretty easily install all my most wanted games, so I wouldn't go for an HDD just for games. I have an external HDD for backups and a NAS for backups and my ripped media. How many 100+GB games does one play each week? :) I haven't needed an HDD for programs/games since my 500GB Samsung 840. But I also don't play 5 different AAA games simultaneously, I guess. :DAnd Zotac is great for small form factor graphics cards. I have their 2070 in a small mATX, great card! They aren't even that much more costly I think.