We’ve seen plenty of gaming hardware revealed at Computex 2017 today, and Zotac has added to the growing pile of kit with the introduction of the world’s smallest GeForce GTX 1080 Ti graphics card and new gaming PCs (complete with a new brand, no less).
Zotac prides itself on making compact PCs and graphics cards, and miniaturizing the mighty 1080 Ti is no mean feat. Nevertheless, the company has produced two shrunken efforts – the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Mini and GTX 1080 Ti Mini ArcticStorm.
The first is claimed to be the smallest plain 1080 Ti ever made, and the other is the smallest water-blocked 1080 Ti.
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Both cards are 9-inches or 228mm long, with the latter obviously benefiting from liquid cooling, compared to the former’s air cooling (dual fans). As Zotac observes, the water-blocked effort offers "extreme performance in the most compact size." And, nifty ‘Spectra’ lighting offers an additional touch of cool.
Zotac also unveiled a number of new mini PCs, including the Magnus EN1050K which is powered by either an Intel Kaby Lake or AMD Ryzen CPU, and is the first of the firm’s miniature machines to fit in a full-fat GeForce GTX 1050 desktop graphics card. (We reviewed the Magnus EN1060 at the end of last year, incidentally).
Another mini PC first from Zotac is the introduction of the thinnest ZBox yet in the form of the Pico PI225 which is a ‘card-sized’ machine. As you can see from the image above, it’s certainly very small (5.5mm thick) and unsurprisingly has a fanless (passively cooled) design to save on space.
Zotac didn’t elaborate on the spec at this point, but did say that the tiny box sports enough power to drive a 4K display. New ZBox M series PCs are also coming with support for Kaby Lake processors or AMD AM4 APUs.
Mek warrior
Also on the PC front, a new brand – Zotac Gaming – was launched by the manufacturer, with the first product to carry that label being the Mek Gaming PC. This is a relatively compact machine which runs with Kaby Lake chips (up to Core i7) benefiting from a low-profile CPU cooler, paired with a Zotac GeForce GTX 1080 Mini GPU.
Zotac notes that this is a new premium brand, with the machine having a ‘futuristic’ design. It looks something like a console with a fancy lit trim (check out the pic above).
Still not done yet, Zotac unveiled a couple of external enclosures, one of which is designed for a GTX 1080 Ti graphics card, in order to plug the thing into your laptop for smooth frame rates when gaming. The other is designed for an NVMe PCIe SSD, in order to boost storage (both boxes connect via a Thunderbolt 3 port, so you’ll need one of those on your notebook or PC).
Finally, Zotac announced a refreshed VR Go, with the virtual reality backpack getting an upgrade from a Skylake processor to Kaby Lake (although the company didn’t specify the exact model of CPU – or whether there would be any further boosts on the hardware front).
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