20 OCTOBER2020|COMPUTER SHOPPER|ISSUE
BAREBONESPCSYSTEMS–which come
with the motherboard, CPU and most
other components already fitted but
allow you to choose and install your own
storage,memoryand OS –can be agood
halfwaypoint between the two more
common routes towards PC ownership.
There’s most of the convenience of simply
buying acomplete, pre-built PC, with a
dash of the flexibility that comes with
building one from scratch.
It can be particularly appealing if the
design would make acompleteDIY build job
somewhat difficult or unusual, as is the case
with the ZBOXCA621 Nano.Indesktop terms,
it’s tiny,measuring just 68mm tall, 204mm
wide and 129mm deep –not thebest territory
forafirst-time builder,inother words.
SHUSH HOUR
That said, and unlike the more performance-
led Qseries and Magnus Eseries that help
make up Zotac’sminiPCline-up,the ZBOX
CA621 Nano is amuch simpler,silent system,
in asimilar vein to Intel’s barebones NUC
models or QuietPC’s UltraNUC Pro 8Fanless
(Shopper384). That means lower performance
and no dedicated graphics, in exchange fora
lower price and aCPU that doesn’t need a
noisy fantorun.
ZOTAC ZBOX
CA621Nano
★★★★★
£283•www.lambda-tek.com
VERDICT
ThisboxyPCissilent,cheap,compactand
customisable,butperformanceoftenstutters
BAREBONESPC
Specifically,the ZBOXCA621 Nano
features AMD’s Ryzen 33200U, adual-core,
four-thread CPU that’s more typically foundin
lower-end laptops like the most recent Acer
Swift 3. It includes Radeon Vega 3integrated
graphics, and that’s about it forkey internals;
both the RAM and the storage are up to you.
Happily,installing them is easy.Onthe
underside of the ZBOXCA621 Nano are four
rubber feet, which double as thumbscrews
securing the entire base panel. Once these
are removed, the panel comes off to reveal a
little baywithtwo SO-DIMM memory slots,
power and SATA connectors forasingle 2.5in
storage drive and one M.2 slot.
Installing RAM is merely amatter of
sliding astick intoeach slot and pressing
down, and while you’ll need alittle screwdriver
foreitherofthe storage mounting options
–namely to remove and replace some small
metal brackets –it’s all basic stuff, with no
fiddly cables, microscopic pin connectors or
trickyangles to deal with. Fortesting, we
installed two 4GB RAM modules (for 8GB in
total), plus a960GB 2.5in SSD,and were
powered up in minutes.
SHORTCHANGED
However,the ZBOX CA621 Nano also presents
one of the fewoccasions where we’d
recommend using an old-fashioned SATA
drive instead of taking advantage of the more
modern M.2 slot. The main issue is that
there’s only room to fit smaller M.2 SSDs of
the 2242 form factor,which gives you much
less choice than if you could fit afull-size
2280 drive,the latterbeing by farthe most
common. The slot also only supports the
SATA interface,sothere’s no waytoget the
much faster transfer speeds of NVMe storage.
Remember,also,thatyou’ll need to install
the operating system yourself.Windows 10
makes this fairly easy if you have installation
media, like aUSB drive,though getting it
working fully means adding the cost
of alicence keytothe PC, storage
drive and RAM. For, say, Windows
10 Home,a500GB SSD and 8GB of
DDR4 memory,that’sabout £
on top, which is almost half the price
of the ZBOXCA621 Nano again.
However,that’sstill less than £
in total, whichischump change by
Windows PC standards. Youcould
also cut this down further by using
4GBofRAM or a2.5in hard disk,
rather than an SSD,though we don’t
strictly recommend either.
Once everything is set up,the
ZBOXCA621 Nano does indeed
deliver on its promise on silent
running. Passively cooling a
processor with abase clock speed
of 2.6GHz and amaximumboost
clock of 3.5GHz is atallorder,but
Zotac has cleverly counteracted heat
build-up by filling the chassis full of
holes. There’s alayer of heavily
perforated metal covered in aplastic
The bestuse of the ZBOXCA621 Nano is as aTV/living room
PC you can operatefrom the sofa
