Zotac ZBOX CA320 nano PLUS Review: A Fanless AMD mini-PC

Final Words

The Zotac ZBOX CA320 nano provided us with the first opportunity to evaluate a passively cooled mini-PC based on an AMD APU. Passively cooled systems are either very costly (particularly if they integrate powerful CPUs) or downright abysmal in performance (when they integrate the low-end / low-power CPUs such as the older Atoms). Zotac's offering with the ZBOX CA320 nano aims to strike a balance. $175 for a barebones configuration is quite reasonable for this type of system. With the bundled SSD and RAM, it is still less than $300.

One of the aspects we were worried about was thermal throttling, but the ZBOX CA320 nano surpassed our expectations. The chassis never got extremely hot (reaching only around 55 C, even after extended thermal stress with a couple of power viruses).

Pretty much the only downside of the unit is the relatively bad single-threaded performance of the AMD A6-1450's CPU cores and the HTPC aspects of the AMD GPU drivers. The clock rates are a bit low. Given the thermal headroom that seems to be available, Zotac could have been a tad more adventurous in overclocking. While the BIOS managed to pull up the DRAM frequency, the APU itself was clocked as per specifications. However, we shouldn't be really complaining since the system seems to operate quite nicely for day-to-day use. The SSD could be a bit better, but that is not an issue if the end-user buys a barebones configuration.

All in all, Zotac manages to deliver a very price-effective passive mini-PC in the ZBOX CA320 nano. Along with the ECS LIVA in the market, the days of users having to spend an arm and leg for passively cooled systems with decent performance are history. Zotac also has a Bay Trail-based ZBOX CI320 nano in the fanless C series, and we will be looking at that system next month.