How small can a desktop PC be without losing any features? Well, that’s a question that Zotac might be able to help us answer, as its new ZBOX nano XS AD11 Plus manages to squeeze in an impressive amount of technology into the almost pocket friendly 106x106x37mm (WxDxH) computer.
The 1.65GHz AMD E-450 APU with integrated Radeon HD 6320 graphics is hardly going to be suitable for playing the latest games, but think of the ZBOX nano XS AD11 Plus as a second computer or as the brains of your smart TV and it’s still pretty decent. Zotac will ship the ZBOX nano XS AD11 Plus with 2GB of DDR3 1333MHz memory – which is upgradeable to 4GB – and a 64GB mSATA SSD which is apparently a Kingston mS100 based around a Phison controller which offers read speeds of up to 255MB/s and write speeds of up to 170MB/s.
Around the front of the ZBOX nano XS AD11 Plus there’s an IR receiver, a memory card readers that accepts all standard forms of SD cards, MMC cards and Memory Sticks’, a combo eSATA/USB port and a pair of audio jacks where the headphone jack does double duty as optical S/PDIF out. At the rear we have an HDMI port, two USB 3.0 ports, a Gigabit Ethernet port and two USB 2.0 ports that appears to be the high Amperage kind, at least if Zotac has gone for the same colour scheme as Intel.
Zotac also includes a 150MBps 802.11n USB W-Fi dongle, a Windows MCE compatible remote with a USB IR receiver and a VESA mounting place for slapping the ZBOX nano XS AD11 Plus onto the back of a display of some kind. Overall, this is a pretty impressive little box in terms of how much hardware Zotac has managed to pack into a really tiny space, but at US$359.99 (S$455) we won’t be the first lining up to get our hands on one as soon as it’s available.