Shown at CES 2023, Intel’s Alder Lake-N platform is the company’s newest and most recent budget platform for entry-level PCs. Zotac, whose hardware has started shipping, is he one of the first well-known PC makers to offer the use of the platform for the Zbox Edge MI351 mini PC. It’s not as small as some of its competitors, but it offers some upgradability and a large number of ports.
of Zotac Zbox Edge MI351 It is based on Intel N100 processor, offering four Gracemont CPU cores running from 800 MHz to 3.40 GHz and an Intel Xe-based iGPU with advanced media decoding (AV1, H.264, H.265, etc.) and encoding capabilities. From a performance standpoint, Intel’s N100 should offer comparable performance to quad-core Skylake-class processors from 2015-2018, albeit with a much more sophisticated multimedia engine. The latter is important not only for HTPCs, but also for various other applications targeted by N100 devices, such as kiosks and digital signage.
Looking at the MI351 design itself, it’s interesting that Zotac chose to use an active cooling system with a fan to cool the N100 processor. The N100 has an official TDP of just 6 watts, but Intel’s latest TDP mantra means the chip can consume significantly more energy than it does when turbo boosting, so manufacturers have taken Boxes are increasingly being designed to maintain higher heat.
This PC also offers a good deal of upgradeability for an affordable Atom-class box. Zotac doesn’t do the memory or NAND storage soldering commonly found in these devices, so the Zbox Edge MI351 has his DIMM slots for DDR5-4800 memory modules, as well as an M.2-2280 PCIe 3.0 x4 slot. provide. Standard NVMe SSD.
Zotac’s Zbox Edge MI351 also offers above-average connectivity for low-end mini PCs. Besides the GbE ports, there are four USB 3.2-port Type-A ports (one on the front), two 4Kp60 capable display outputs (DisplayPort 1.4, HDMI 2.0) and regular 3.5mm audio input and output connectors. Wireless connectivity is also available via the integrated Wi-Fi 6 + Bluetooth 5.2 controller, but requires an external antenna (included) to take advantage of them.
However, the trade-off for including space for DIMMs and M.2 SSDs is a slightly larger PC footprint. Zotac’s Zbox Edge MI351 system measures 149.5 mm x 149.5 mm x 28.5 mm (5.89 inches x 5.89 inches x 1.12 inches), a bit smaller than Apple’s M1 Mac Mini, but larger than many Atom-based systems. is. Still, the box is small enough to offer a VESA mount, so it can be hidden behind the display.
Finally, Zotac has not disclosed pricing for the Zbox Edge MI351 at this time. Note that this is being sold as a barebones unit, so the buyer must include his RAM and storage, as well as a copy of the OS in the budget.
