Zotac Zbox Magnus EN374070C review
Recent years have seen a powerful new breed of integrated GPUs populating mini-PCs. Thus armed, such machines offer an economical and delightfully dinky way to game at 1080p. If you're looking for a compact PC with something closer to desktop-level games performance however, the options are rather thinner on the ground.
Machines which fold discrete GPUs into their design are both rarer and pricier, but they enable you to crank things up in terms of the resolutions, frame rates and graphics settings they can achieve. Pairing a 13th-gen Intel i7 mobile CPU with a laptop-grade RTX 4070, the Zotac Zbox Magnus EN does just this, and brings the fight to Asus' ROG NUC 970 and the Minisforum AtomMan G7 Ti in terms of 1440p games performance.
The Magnus is barebones from the get-go, though some suppliers offer RAM and storage pre-installed for a fee. There are several CPU and GPU variant configurations to choose from, but Intel's penultimate mobile i7 chip, the Core i7 13700HX, features in our test unit. With eight efficiency cores and eight performance cores running at 3.7 GHz to 5 GHz on the turbo, It's a powerful chip capable of desktop levels of performance, and is also a product of Intel's last-gen philosophy: power at all costs, basically.
That's reflected in Intel's stated maximum draw of 157 W, though we suspect that Zotac have chosen to tune this at the hardware level, and wisely so given the limited volume for cooling in this box. With Cinebench 2024's render-test pushing all cores to the max, the chip settles in for the long haul at around the rather more sensible 60 W mark.
CPU: Intel Core i7 13700HX
GPU: RTX 4070 mobile 8 GB GDDR6
RAM: up to 64 GB DDR5-4800 SODIMM
Storage: 2x M.2 PCIe Gen4
Networking: WiFi 6, BT 5.2, 2x 2,5G LAN
Front panel: Headphone, Mic, SDXC Card Reader, 1x Thunderbolt 4 Type C, 1x USB 3.1
Rear I/O: 2x DisplayPort 1.4, 1x HDMI 2.1, 4x USB 3.1, 2x WiFi Antennas
Price: $1,960| £1,700
Where the chip shows its age is in RAM compatibility,
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