ZOTAC ZBOX pico PI320 Review

Testing

First up was PCMark 8, specifically the Work Test.

The PCMark 8 Work benchmark test measures your system’s ability to perform basic office work tasks, such as writing documents, browsing websites, creating spreadsheets and using video chat. The Work benchmark is suitable for measuring the performance of typical office PC systems that lack media capabilities. The results from each workload are combined to give an overall PCMark 8 Work score for your system.

The low score was not unexpected, but from watching the test it certainly coped well with the tasks the Work Test put it through. In the second of the two images you can see that the processor boosted up to a speed of around 1.5GHz which will have helped the result. The temperature was very impressive during the whole of the test as it didn’t break 60 degrees, which for a box with no active cooling is great – I would actually have liked to take the ZBOX pico apart just to see how much of the internals are a heatsink arrangement but not having the correct tools and the chance that ZOTAC might not have been too happy stopped me in my tracks

An interesting fact after running this test is that the PCMark website results reported the processor being a bit of a Sheep in Wolfs clothing – http://www.3dmark.com/pcm8/4859475 – I personally would’ve loved a 5960X in this little box.

The CrystalDiskMark benchmark was next on the agenda, to see just how fast the Samsung BWBC3R eMMC drive in the PI320 was.

Not too shabby if I do say so myself, it’s not setting the world on fire, but navigating the desktop was snappy and boot up times are very quick.

After running these tests, I decided to use it as a thin client of sorts. My way of testing this was to remotely connect to one of my many Virtual Machines, one of which hosts this very site, on Microsoft’s Azure Cloud network.

In the real world businesses are more likely to use it for a replacement for a desktop machine. Especially if they have a work environment using Terminal Servers. Having bulky and power heavy desktop machines connecting remotely to a server that handles all the real work is a pretty pointless endeavour. Thin Clients exist for this reason, they are generally low power and compact, which allows them to be tucked out of site on the back of a monitor for example, whilst having little or no moving parts means that they are robust enough to handle even the roughest environments. The PI320 is no different with an aluminium band around the edge of the PI320 just adding to the quality feel overall.

I decided to test this aspect over the wifi on the machine, which I have to admit is more unfair than it would be in a business environment where it would be ninety-nine times out of a hundred connected via ethernet. Even so with this barrier there were no issues. Although It’s hard to give a lot of praise to the ZBOX pico as the performance seen is more indicative of the network connection you are attached to and the machine on the other end.

I decided upon a different test after this, one I have wanted to try for a while, especially on a machine such as this. In the same vein as the terminal services environment I wanted to see how and if Steam’s In-Home Streaming would be possible….

Yep. Even again over Wi-Fi. I suppose this should have been expected, as In-Home Streaming is pretty much the same as remoting onto the machine itself, just more direct and with less input lag.