ZOTAC, one of the originators in the Mini-ITX and SFF world, was present at Computex 2017 showing off a few small PCs, a small(ish) eGPU case, some VR stuff, and the next iteration of the GTX 1080 Mini that Drew reviewed earlier this year – the ZOTAC GTX 1080 Ti!
Yes, that is the exact cooler as on the GTX 1080 Mini that Drew guessed was possibly capable of handling the GTX 1080 Ti! Underneath the identical shroud sits a different PCB though – with beefier VRMs to cope with the more powerful GPU. Dual 8-pin power connectors are a hint that this card may still have some OC left in it. ZOTAC tells us that this card is still in development, but from what we see, it’s possible that this may be almost production ready.
A single slot (watercooled) GTX 1080 Ti was also on display. Well, it would be single slot if it wasn’t for that pesky double-height rear IO. Tsk tsk… Also, apologies for the sideways spec sheet.
We spoke with Zotac’s Buu Ly about this eGPU concept, praising them for subtle design, but we may have spent some time… half an hour or so… picking the design apart and suggesting improvements!
This is an interesting one, a much, much smaller Thunderbolt box – which can support GPUs up to 75W! Also supported are NVMe SSDs. With some modification (depending on the final product of course, as this is also in development), a dual slot GTX 1050 Ti eGPU could potentially be built using this box!
ZOTAC’s forte, mini PCs, were also on show. This is a new generation mini PC, featuring Intel 7000-series or AMD Ryzen processors. A much subtler design than their last generation, this workstation class desktop would fit right in any office or living room.
An older external design, revised to use a 7000-series Intel processor.
And they get even smaller!
Another variant of the above. My mind is drawing a blank on these models, as unfortunately my pictures of the spec sheets for these turned out blurry. Sorry!
This unit, designed for industrial or display use, is utterly tiny! Intel’s Apollo Lake is the processor of choice, but as you can tell from the USB Type C cable, this unit would fit almost anywhere.
A little sneaky advertising inside the booth for ZOTAC – this PicoPC was hiding on the back of the VR demo display!
Quite a few Magnus Gaming Mini PCs were also on display, with CPUs from both teams.
One of the big draws to the booth was the in-development ZOTAC Mek prebuilt systems. A new design and direction for ZOTAC, these larger but more capable systems draw on inspiration from the likes of the Silverstone RVZ01 and NFC’s S4 Mini in terms of layout. ZOTAC was unable to tell us anything about the motherboard or power supply as they are still up in the air from a development perspective.
And for fun, we had Craig (KMPKT on the forum) try out ZOTAC’s VR system. There is video, but we’ll leave it up to the community and Craig if it gets released!
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Thoughts? Discuss them in the forum.
