My “Zotac Zbox Nano XS AD11 Plus” 2012 SFF MINI-PC!

Hold your horses! Don’t have it … yet, but what I’ve been reading so far about this amazing peace of pico-ITX engineering makes my ‘nerd heart’ beat faster, as I’m a true sucker for systems like these. Quick recap: Micro ATX back in 2001, my involvement as Associate Editor at SFFtech.com in 2002-2004 working with ASUS, MSI, Shuttle barebones, Asus 1000H in 2005, the past few years basically had all kinds of netbooks, a few months ago a refurbished Shuttle X200, and currently an ultrabook predecessor the Dell Latitude D430. Anyway! Nuff about my background. I’ll let Zotac present:

I’ve already did all my research so I’m jumping straight to the comparison of my current ‘workstation’. The U7700 1.33GHz in my current D430 has a CPUbenchmark.net score of 749. The AMD E-450 APU a score of 774. So it seems just slightly faster, but there’s a whole lot more going on. The APU holds an ATI HD6320, that’s three times as fast as the GPU in my D430! And from there on things get really exciting with Kingston V100 series mSATA 64GB SSD, 2x USB3, 2x powered USB2, HDMI 1.4a, eSATA, IR receiver + remote, WiFi 802.11n, Gigabit LAN, mic input, VESA mountable, 6in1 memory card reader, incredible low dimensions (10.6 x 10.6 x 3.7CM), etc. etc. Are you drewling as much as I am already? DIY builds like these won’t cost you ~ 325EUR. Cause that’s how ‘much’ they are charging us!

NXS AD11 info by the manufacturer:

• Official Press Release 11 April 2012
• Zotac USA
• Zotac Global
• Specsheet Brochure (PDF)
• Quick Install Guide (PDF)
• User Manual (PDF)
• Memory compatibility list | yes it comes with 2GB, but can be upgraded to 1x4GB DDR3 SODIMM

• AnandTech.com
• HardwareHeaven.com
• Hardware.info (Dutch)
• HotHardware.com
• Vortez.net

Interesting to note:

• will it run OSX86 / Hackintosh? Nope, but who cares! Windows 7, XBMC or Linux all the way in this particular case! Well add more good info over time. Oh … you do care about Hackintosh support? Then a Zotac Zbox Nano ID61 might be a better fit for you (but you might run into HDMI output issues).
• Zotac has promised to release an optimized XBMC soon! So no second guessing to get OOTB support.
• It’s not passively cooled, and the fan is said to be rather noisy at high CPU loads
• 802.11n WiFi isn’t 300Mbs, but limited to 150Mbps.