Zotac is 10 years old, and to celebrate a decade of its existence, the company threw a big bash in Hong Kong where it held a gaming tournament and revealed a clutch of new products, including a cool new mini PC alongside a refreshed VR backpack, plus a fresh graphics card and an SSD.
So first up, that mini PC, which is a compact box of tricks offering liquid cooling and no shortage of graphics firepower with a GeForce GTX 1080 on board, alongside an Intel Core i7-6700 processor.
That’s a powerful combination for a box that could nestle happily in your living room, and the idea is that you supply your own memory and storage alongside these core components (with space for two sticks of RAM, and a pair of drives courtesy of a 2.5-inch SATA tray and M.2 slot).
The 10 Year Anniversary Edition Magnus EN1080 also offers a specially designed anniversary case with a Spectra lighting system on three sides, complete with a software utility to enable all sorts of custom lighting effects. Which just goes to show that it’s not only big gaming towers that can look flashy.
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Virtually improved
This year, we’ve seen a few VR backpacks – which make for a freer virtual reality experience by getting rid of all those annoying trailing cables, simply by putting the gaming PC on your back – including the VR Go from Zotac, which has now been upgraded with the inclusion of a GTX 1070 as the GPU.
Zotac notes that the backpack (see the pic above of it being unveiled at the event) now has a sleeker design, and it’s lighter which is obviously important given that the major drawback of these things is the weight of them on your back.
The VR Go now offers battery hot-swapping to enable uninterrupted play, and Zotac has moved the HDMI and USB ports to the top of the device. All in all, these are some smart changes to make for a more usable and powerful VR backpack.
Zotac also revealed a new GTX 1080 video card, the ArcticStorm Thermaltake 10 Year Anniversary Edition which boasts the ‘ultimate liquid cooling’ courtesy of Thermaltake, apparently.
Kenny Lin, chief executive and chairman of Thermaltake, said: “It is a great honor to partner with Zotac to bring the ultimate thermal solution to the Zotac 10th Anniversary GeForce GTX 1080 graphics card. We look forward to more future opportunities to develop more exciting products together.”
And the 10 Year Anniversary Edition of the Sonix SSD (an NVMe drive) was also revealed boasting over 10% faster read speeds than the original Sonix, reaching 2,800Mbps.
As for the Zotac World Cup invitational games, Splyce beat CyberZen two-nil in the final of the Counter-Strike: Global Offensive tournament.
Via and Image Credit: Tom’s Hardware
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