ZOTAC ZBOX EN760 Plus Review
What it all means
When I got the ZBOX and pulled it out of the box and plugged it all in do and to be honest it performed far better than I could have hoped. Gaming performance even at Ultra settings was reasonable, and certainly when one or two of the more intensive settings were dropped, gaming became flawless.
The noise output of the ZBOX was almost none existent, over the background noise of my main machine I struggled to hear the ZBOX whirring away even when next to the case itself. If not for the lights I wouldn’t have even noticed if it was on.
One issue encountered was with driver support, not mentioned in the review itself, but during setup trying to install the latest drivers from nVidia’s site was extremely problematic going as far to cause a code 43 message to appear. What this was caused by I do not know but as ZOTACs site list the driver that came on the flash drive as the latest compatible ones I won’t hold it against them. Although I do hope they resolve it in the future.
Other downsides include the weird addition of Dual Lan Ports, which many people will no doubt have a use for, but on a compact gaming system I feel that such port estate on the rear could have been put to better use. Upgradeability is also a sticking point, the ZBOX EN760 is an as is product and while you can upgrade some parts the most important parts, such as the graphics and processor are not which will restrict its performance in the future.
Price wise the ZBOX EN760 is available for around £500 and I think you would be hard-pressed to find a better solution to the ZBOX for similar money you could certainly build a faster PC, but it would be nowhere near as compact or likely as silent as the ZBOX.
Despite the Dual Lan, despite its glossiness, despite the lack of future upgradeability the ZBOX EN760 is a proper little gaming box and one that I can happily award the Daveplays.co.uk Silver Award to.
Post Review Edit :
The company that provided the ZBOX EN760 to me have been in touch regarding my questioning of the Dual Lan setup to give direction on why ZOTAC decided on Dual Lan instead of a Display Port or other rear port real estate on the ZBOX EN760 and it kinda makes a bit more sense for an item like this.
To put simply, for people who will take the ZBOX to LAN events like the upcoming I52 (which I will be attending), Dual Lan ports allow you to specialise ports for a specific purpose, like having one used for gaming network traffic and the other for downloading or more general traffic. Which really is a solid enough reason.
