ZOTAC MAGNUS EK71080
Minimalist design, miniature footprint
A FEW YEARS AGO, Valve had this grand plan for Steam Machines—console-like PCs that were intended for gaming on a TV in a living room. Steam Machines never really took off, but we’re a big fan of the idea of kicking back on a couch and playing games on the big screen. Of course, we still want those games to be played on PC.
Zotac’s Magnus EK71080 fits that bill well. With a squat, black body and minimalist design, it fits right in next to a receiver and cable box—if you still have one of those—on a home theater console. Measuring just shy of 8 x 9 inches, it doesn’t take up much space either. The small size is helped by offloading PSU duties to an external power brick, much like the kind used by high-power gaming laptops.
Despite the small form factor, the Magnus still packs a decent punch. It’s rocking an Intel Core i7-7700HQ CPU, while gaming duties are handled by an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080. You’ll notice that the CPU, in addition to being a seventh-gen Kaby Lake processor (Zotac announced a Coffee Lake version at CES earlier this year, but we haven’t seen it in the wild yet), also bears the “HQ” designation—it’s the CPU usually found in laptops, and overclocking is off the table.
The other bummer is that the Magnus is usually sold as a barebones system. It’s plenty easy to pop open and upgrade, but the base $1,500 configuration doesn’t include RAM, an HDD, or Windows. It does have a 120GB SSD in there, but that’s basically just enough for your operating system and maybe a game. The upgraded version costs $1,799 for the addition of 8GB RAM, Windows 10, and a 1TB HDD. That’s what we tested, just minus the HDD—as such, we actually weren’t able to benchmark GhostRecon: Wildlands, because the game’s 95GB install was too large to fit on the measly SSD.
Speaking of games, the Magnus performs OK for its size, but you definitely feel the effects of the mobile processor and single-channel 8GB of RAM. It scored an average of 88fps across Riseof the TombRaider’s three-part benchmark, and 69fps in TotalWar: WarhammerII. Those scores put it—at least with this strippeddown spec—at a bit less powerful than a GTX 1070-powered laptop. That’s not very promising, considering the Magnus has a higher-tier GTX 1080 inside, but we have to imagine the lack of RAM is really holding those scores down. We expect a simple upgrade on that front would unthrottle the GPU considerably.
As is, the Magnus is a bit disappointing. We love the small, minimalist form factor, and the concept of using such a box as a living room PC, but it’ll need some upgrades to get there. Luckily, the expensive stuff— CPU, GPU, mobo—is all in place, so an upgrade to the RAM and storage shouldn’t set you back too much.