Power Consumption and Thermal Performance

The power consumption at the wall was measured with a 1080p display being driven through the HDMI port. In the graphs below, we compare the idle and load power of the Zotac ZBOX MAGNUS EN980 with other low power PCs evaluated before. For load power consumption, we ran the AIDA64 System Stability Test with various stress components, as well as our custom Prime95 + Furmark script, and noted the maximum sustained power consumption at the wall.

The presence of a 65W TDP CPU and a high-end discrete GPU with a TDP of around 180W, as well as the default BIOS configuration of 'Performance Boost' make the above idle and load power numbers plausible. The MAGNUS EN980 simply leaves other mini-PCs behing when it comes to gaming benchmarks. In terms of power consumption, it is the same scenario, but, it is to the detriment of the end user.

Our thermal stress routine starts with the system at idle, followed by four stages of different system loading profiles using the AIDA64 System Stability Test (each of 30 minutes duration). In the first stage, we stress the CPU, caches and RAM. In the second stage, we add the GPU to the above list. In the third stage, we stress the GPU standalone. In the final stage, we stress all the system components (including the disks). Beyond this, we leave the unit idle in order to determine how quickly the various temperatures in the system can come back to normal idling range. The various clocks, temperatures and power consumption numbers for the system during the above routine are presented in the graphs below.

We repeated the same observations with our legacy stress test using Prime95 and Furmark.

We can see from the frequency and temperature graphs that there is no thermal throttling at play. The fan speed also maxes out around 1800 RPM. The large fan diameter ensures that the noise profile remains acceptable.

Another interesting aspect to keep note of while evaluating mini-PCs is the chassis temperature. Using the Android version of the FLIR One thermal imager, we observed the chassis temperature after the CPU package temperature reached the steady state value in the above graph.

We have additional thermal images in the gallery below.

The chassis and internal temperatures do not show any reason for alarm.

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