Zotac ZBOX MAGNUS EK71080 Compact Gaming PC Review

4K HTPC Credentials

The ZBOX MAGNUS EK71080 comes with a number of fans with a noise profile that might be annoying for some users. While the EN1080K, EN1080, and EN980 made for decent home-theater PCs with their liquid cooling system, the same can't be said for the EK71080. The unit is not for the discerning HTPC enthusiast who is better off with a passively cooled system. In this section, we provide a detailed analysis of the EK71080's 4K HTPC credentials. All the testing in this section was done with the PC hooked up to a TCL 55P607 4K HDR TV through a Denon AVR X3400H receiver.

Refresh Rate Accuracy

Starting with Haswell, Intel, AMD and NVIDIA have been on par with respect to display refresh rate accuracy. The most important refresh rate for videophiles is obviously 23.976 Hz (the 23 Hz setting). As expected, the Zotac ZBOX MAGNUS EK71080* has no trouble with refreshing the display appropriately in this setting.

The gallery below presents some of the other refresh rates that we tested out. The first statistic in madVR's OSD indicates the display refresh rate.

Network Streaming Efficiency

Evaluation of OTT playback efficiency was done by playing back the Mystery Box's Peru 8K HDR 60FPS video in YouTube using Microsoft Edge and Season 4 Episode 4 of the Netflix Test Pattern title using the Windows Store App.

The YouTube streaming test played back the 4K non-HDR version (VP9 video and Opus audio), while the Netflix one delivered the 16 Mbps HEVC HDR10 version.

The graph below shows the power consumption at the wall and the GPU loading parameters for streaming the YouTube video twice - the first time with the display in HDR mode, and the second time, with the non-HDR mode. We can see that disabling HDR mode for this playback results in the at-wall power dropping by as much as 40W. In the second case, we see hardware acceleration kicking in for the non-HDR stream.

A similar graph for the Netflix streaming case is also presented below. Manual stream selection is available (Ctrl-Alt-Shift-S) and debug information / statistics can also be viewed (Ctrl-Alt-Shift-D). Statistics collected for the YouTube streaming experiment were also collected here. An important point to note here is that the 4K streams are enabled only if the HEVC Video Extensions from Device Manufacturer app is installed from the Microsoft Store.

It must be noted that the debug OSD is kept on till the stream reaches the 16 Mbps playback stage around 2 minutes after the start of the streaming. Toggling the state of the debug OSD results in significant variation in the at-wall power consumption (around 40 - 50W). In the steady state, the GPU loading is around 18%, VPU around 30%, and the at-wall power around 90W.

Decoding and Rendering Benchmarks

In order to evaluate local file playback, we concentrate on Kodi 17.6 and VLC 3.0.1 (for the casual user) and madVR (for the HTPC enthusiast). Under madVR, we decided to test out only the default out-of-the-box configuration. We recently revamped our decode and rendering test suite, as described in our 2017 HTPC components guide.

madVR 0.92.12 was evaluated with MPC-HC 1.7.15 (unofficial release) with its integrated LAV Filters 0.71. The video decoder was set to Direct 3D mode.

We see that GPU load is around 60% at the maximum for streams that require scaling. At-wall power consumption ranges from around 42W to 110W (for the VP9 Profile 2 video, which has no hardware acceleration). madVR in default state, along with the rest of the configuration mentioned earlier, was able to switch to and back from HDR based on the content being played back.

Kodi also shows similar characteristics to madVR, but the absolute power numbers are much lower - around 40W to 80W.

VLC has interesting power spikes when the content is about to start, but, quickly settles down to expected levels. Power consumption numbers are similar to / slightly lower than Kodi.

Moving on to the codec support, the GTX 1080 is a known quantity with respect to the scope of supported hardware accelerated codecs. DXVA Checker serves as a confirmation.

The only odd aspect is the absence of VP9 Profile 2 hardware decoding (used in the YouTube HDR streams).

Concluding the HTPC section, we take a look at the output of the Ultra HD Blu-ray Advisor tool from CyberLink.

We see that the system can't play back Ultra HD Blu-rays even if a UHD Blu-ray drive were to be attached to it. The main reasons are the absence of SGX support software, updated ME firmware, and the inability to make use of the Intel GPU's protected audio-video path for processing the Blu-ray streams.