Zotac ZBOX MAGNUS EK71080 Compact Gaming PC Review

Gaming systems and small form-factor (SFF) PCs have turned out to be growth segments in a desktop PC market that has been subject to severe challenges recently. Many vendors have tried to combine the two, but space constraints and power concerns have ended up as performance-limiting factors. Zotac, in particular, has been very active in this space with their ZBOX MAGNUS series. Starting with the EN980 (Intel Core i5-6400 / GTX 980), they have been on a regular release cadence - the EN1080 with an updated Pascal GPU came in mid-2016, while the CPU upgrade to Kaby Lake in the EN1080K came to the market in Q3 2017. All these systems carried a premium due to the integrated liquid cooling system. In order to hit a lower price point, Zotac has now started experimenting with fully air-cooled systems in the same form-factor. Today's review takes a look at the Zotac ZBOX MAGNUX EK71080 with a Core i7-7700HQ and a NVIDIA GTX 1080 GPU add-in card. Read on to find out how the unit performs in our rigorous benchmarking and evaluation process.