Zotac ZBOX CA320 nano PLUS Review: A Fanless AMD mini-PC
by Ganesh T S on November 26, 2014 2:00 PM ESTFinal Words
The Zotac ZBOX CA320 nano provided us with the first opportunity to evaluate a passively cooled mini-PC based on an AMD APU. Passively cooled systems are either very costly (particularly if they integrate powerful CPUs) or downright abysmal in performance (when they integrate the low-end / low-power CPUs such as the older Atoms). Zotac's offering with the ZBOX CA320 nano aims to strike a balance. $175 for a barebones configuration is quite reasonable for this type of system. With the bundled SSD and RAM, it is still less than $300.
One of the aspects we were worried about was thermal throttling, but the ZBOX CA320 nano surpassed our expectations. The chassis never got extremely hot (reaching only around 55 C, even after extended thermal stress with a couple of power viruses).
Pretty much the only downside of the unit is the relatively bad single-threaded performance of the AMD A6-1450's CPU cores and the HTPC aspects of the AMD GPU drivers. The clock rates are a bit low. Given the thermal headroom that seems to be available, Zotac could have been a tad more adventurous in overclocking. While the BIOS managed to pull up the DRAM frequency, the APU itself was clocked as per specifications. However, we shouldn't be really complaining since the system seems to operate quite nicely for day-to-day use. The SSD could be a bit better, but that is not an issue if the end-user buys a barebones configuration.
All in all, Zotac manages to deliver a very price-effective passive mini-PC in the ZBOX CA320 nano. Along with the ECS LIVA in the market, the days of users having to spend an arm and leg for passively cooled systems with decent performance are history. Zotac also has a Bay Trail-based ZBOX CI320 nano in the fanless C series, and we will be looking at that system next month.
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Ranari - Wednesday, November 26, 2014 - link
Excellent review as always!May I make a humble request. I love HTPC's, and one metric I'd like to start seeing added, or possibly benchmarked, are Twitch TV 1080p 60fps streams. Not the encoding rate, but the decode rate, as if you were watching the stream. It's a bit of an all or nothing check, but the stream does allow you to see whether or not you're dropping frames. My Core i7 3770k (desktop) can decode 1080p 60fps Twitch streams with flying colors and then some, but my Core i7 2630QM (laptop) can only do so without dropped frames if I set it to an aggressive power setting (so it clamps it at 2.0ghz instead of 1.3ghz).
I hate dropped frames! It ruins the fluidity of what you're watching. But out of all "HTPC-like" activities, Twitch.TV streaming would be my #1 usage. Love those Starcraft II tournaments! :)
zodiacsoulmate - Wednesday, November 26, 2014 - link
great idea +1zodiacsoulmate - Wednesday, November 26, 2014 - link
are you using chrome?? try IE11, it always perform way better than chrome.cbrownx88 - Wednesday, November 26, 2014 - link
For anything hardware accelerated, IE often has quite the edge.Rezurecta - Wednesday, November 26, 2014 - link
That is true, but Chrome has extensions like Better twitch tv and twitch now, which are essential to my experience.BTW the twitch.tv benchmarks are a great idea. Per browser?
nevertell - Thursday, November 27, 2014 - link
The only proper way to enjoy twitch streams is to use a python package called livestreamer, that grabs the stream and passes it on to VLC to be played 'natively' on the machine, circumventing the three million VM's anything executable has to deal with to operate on a modern browser.Nintendo Maniac 64 - Thursday, November 27, 2014 - link
I can 1-up that - use livestreamer to pass the video stream into MPC-HC, the only downside being that it only works with 32bit MPC-HC.verballydecapitating - Wednesday, November 26, 2014 - link
I would recommend using either XBMC (with twitch addon) or a Windows 8 app (I use game streams) since that should be hardware accelerated and be a lot smoother than the flash player.trynberg - Wednesday, November 26, 2014 - link
Thanks again, I really appreciate the HTPC portion of these reviews. Very useful information, especially as you build up a review database.tential - Wednesday, November 26, 2014 - link
So does this not work with 1080p Steam Streaming then?