Zotac ZBOX MAGNUS EN1080K Compact Gaming PC Review

Power Consumption and Thermal Performance

The power consumption of the Zotac ZBOX MAGNUS EN1080K at the wall was measured with a 4K display (LG 43UD79B) being driven through one of its DisplayPort outputs. In the graphs below, we compare the idle and load power of the Zotac ZBOX MAGNUS EN1080K with other gaming mini-PCs evaluated before. For load power consumption, we ran our own custom stress test (Prime95 and FurMark) as well as the AIDA64 System Stability Test with various stress components, and noted the maximum sustained power consumption at the wall.

Despite the use of a NVMe SSD (compared to a SATA SSD) in the EN1080K (compared to the EN980), the former manages to have the lowest idling power consumption amonst all the three high-end flagship gaming SFF PCs. The benefits of Kaby Lake over Skylake are evident here. On the load side, we find that the EN1080K is slightly worse than the EN1080, but, the system correspondigly delivers better performance too.

Our thermal stress routine starts with the system at idle, followed by four stages of different system loading profiles using the AIDA64 System Stability Test (each of 30 minutes duration). In the first stage, we stress the CPU, caches and RAM. In the second stage, we add the GPU to the above list. In the third stage, we stress the GPU standalone. In the final stage, we stress all the system components (including the disks). Beyond this, we leave the unit idle in order to determine how quickly the various temperatures in the system can come back to normal idling range. The various clocks, temperatures and power consumption numbers for the system during the above routine are presented in the graphs below.

We repeated the same observations with our legacy stress test using the latest versions of Prime95 and Furmark.

The CPU and GPU idle at less than 30 C, which shows the excellent nature of the thermal solution. The SSD idles around 42 C (compared to the 60 C for the same SSD in the EN1080), showing that Zotac has indeed managed to address the thermal concerns for M.2 drives in the chassis design. Other than that, we find that the CPU and GPU load temperatures do not cross 90 C, and there is no throttling at play (to be expected with the active cooling solution).