Zotac Crams Broadwell And GeForce GTX Graphics Into Tiny Zbox Magnus EN970

We’ve always been enamored with Zotac’s tiny Zbox mini PCs for quite some time now, but the company just may have outdone itself with the new Zbox Magnus EN970. For starters, let’s go ahead and get this out of the way — you won’t find an Intel Skylake processor under the hood on the Zbox Magnus EN970. Instead you’ll find a completely competent Broadwell-based, dual-core Core i5-5200U CPU processor.

But the magic happens when we move to the graphics power that is lurking within this pint-sized machine, which measures just 8.3” x 8” x 2.1”. Inside you’ll find an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 graphics card with 1280 CUDA cores, a 192-bit memory interface and 3GB of GDDR5 memory at your disposal. Interestingly enough, the specs for this supposed “GeForce GTX 960” match up more with the GeForce GTX 970M, which also features 1280 CUDA cores, a 192-bit GDDR5 memory interface, and support for up to 3GB of GDDR5 memory.

I was beginning to scratch my head about the confusion behind the Zbox Magnus EN970 product name and the inclusion of a GTX 960 discrete graphics card, but there at least appears to be some “reason” behind Zotac’s madness.

With that being said, the Zbox Magnus EN970 brings with it an M.2 SATA SSD slot, two 2.5-inch HDD bays (RAID 0,1 compatible), dual GbE ports, Bluetooth 4.0 and 802.11ac wireless connectivity. You’ll also find four USB 2.0 ports, two USB 3.0 ports and support for up to 16GB of DDR3L-1600 memory via two SO-DIMM slots. In addition, the Zbox Magnus EN970 Plus comes preconfigured with a 120GB M.2 SATA SSD and 8GB of DDR3L-1600 memory installed in one of the two SO-DIMM slots.

As of now, we do not have pricing and availability for either the Zbox Magnus EN970 or its preconfigured Zbox Magnus EN970 Plus counterpart. However, we’ve contacted Zotac for some additional details on its release.