Zotac Zbox CA621 nano in the test

– The Zotac Zbox CA621 nano is a completely passively cooled mini-PC with AMD Ryzen 3200U – and therefore a real one-off. For 299 euros, the solution is not a workhorse, but the test shows that it is more than adequately equipped for small everyday things with separately purchased solid-state drives and RAM in the home.

Now it's finally here, Zotac's passively cooled Zbox CA621 nano with AMD Ryzen 3000U (Picasso, not Matisse) announced at CES in January. At the market launch in Germany, BitcoinMinersHashrate takes a look at the 299 euro model, which follows a long tradition.

The Zotac Zbox has been on the mini PC market for ten years. However, this only includes AMD solutions every now and then, even though they have always had a difficult time against Intel's superiority, especially since suitable mobile chips from AMD have only recently been available again in a competitive environment. The Zbox CA621 nano is also something special because it not only uses AMD Ryzen 3000, but also cools it completely passively and thus remains silent in operation.

The Zotac Zbox CA621 nano in detail

The most striking feature of the Zotac C-series, which includes the passively cooled solutions, is the housing. With many honeycombs, it provides fresh air from all sides, because there is a large cooling element underneath that dissipates the heat of the processor and the graphics unit.

Attentive readers will notice that the housing for the passive cooling solution has recently changed significantly. The honeycomb structure, as has been used for the Zotac Zbox nano CI540 (test) since 2014, is retained. But instead of a 127.8 × 126.8 × 56.8 mm small package, which used to be used for all core variants, but now only in solutions with an Atom architecture processor (Pentium / Celeron), that is Housing grown to 204 × 129 × 68 mm. This should help the cooling, because even then it had been shown that faster core CPUs in particular got very warm, even if they did not yet reach the critical area.

AMD processor and DDR4 as SO-DIMM

The heart of the passively cooled Zbox is the AMD Ryzen 3 3200U. This belongs to the Picasso generation and offers two Zen + cores that provide four threads, as well as an integrated Vega graphics solution with 3 CUs, i.e. 192 shaders. The clock rates for the processor part are 2.6 GHz in the base and up to 3.5 GHz in turbo mode, the graphics may work with a maximum of 1200 MHz. The regular power consumption is 15 watts, but the APU can be configured with up to 25 watts on request – this is exactly what Zotac advertises. BitcoinMinersHashrate will check this later.

A maximum of 32 GB DDR4-2400 in the SO-DIMM form factor can be set aside for the processor and graphics unit. Two memory banks on the small board operate them in dual-channel mode.

Mass storage as a 2.5-inch solution or M.2 with a beauty mark

An M.2 SSD will be the most common form of fast storage solution in 2020, although 2.5-inch copies are still very widespread and therefore very cheap. The Zbox CA621 nano supports 2.5 inches in any form as an SSD or HDD without any problems via a classic SATA connection.

However, there is a big beauty spot with M.2: Here, the solution may only be in M.2 2242 format, i.e. not just 80 mm, but only 42 mm long. This limits the product selection massively, of over 250 products in the BitcoinMinersHashrate price comparison in the category "M.2 (SATA, M-Key)" only ten percent are present in this short format.

Half of it, in turn, comes from Transcend, a manufacturer that primarily manufactures for the OEM business, so that there is no real choice and the way via the classic 2.5-inch format for an SSD is much more viable. When asked by BitcoinMinersHashrate, Zotac then indicated that an M.2-2242 solution would really "is not optimal".

That's why AMD Picasso and not a Renoir yet

When reading the key data, many readers will definitely have a question on their lips: Why now and then with Picasso? After all, the successor Renoir was presented these days and should be available at the end of April. The answer that BitcoinMinersHashrate received from Zotac is a similar one that Schenker gave a few weeks ago regarding AMD notebooks:

"The will [ein System mit AMD zu entwickeln, Anm. d. Red.] was always there. But in the years leading up to the release of the Zen architecture, AMD kept withdrawing from the laptop business. It takes a long chain of support and logistics to design and build such a laptop – it is not enough just to deliver a CPU. ”

Donor

Exactly these statements also apply to Zotac, after all, the mini PC contains all the notebook technology and the manufacturer is pleased that this "is finally available". The new APU Renoir is virtually not accessible for these smaller companies; large OEMs take precedence, while smaller solutions should not be considered until the end of the year.

According to AMD, Renoir should initially be installed in a few dozen notebooks in the first half of the year, which should be increased in the second half of the year. The previous generation lives on, which is why Picasso is the current state of affairs here and now. However, the success of this solution should decide whether and when there is a successor with Renoir.

On the next page: Benchmarks and experiences with the Zbox CA621 nano