Table of contents
Conclusion
The Zbox AD02 is a pretty good piece of kit and we can recommend it without losing a second of sleep.
At €259 it’s relatively good value for money, and the barebone version, sans 2GB of memory and 250GB hard drive, costs €179, which sounds even better. Both versions ship with no OS. So, it is marginally pricier than Atom/ION 2 systems, yet it is superior in nearly every respect. Power users should probably go for the barebone, to easily add more memory and more, faster storage.
Zotac gets flying colours in the feature department. At the end of the day all you can wish for is a nice wireless desktop, everything else is on board. Build quality and cooling are top notch. We also like the design, but this is really a subjective category.
In terms of performance, Brazos stays ahead of Atom, even if some bench figures don’t reveal it and here is why. We are not comparing two high-end rigs - they wouldn't struggle with a few extra tabs and videos regardless of whether they are 10 or 15 times faster than nettops. However, in this market, even a small performance difference results in a vastly superior user experience.
With a tad more performance Brazos manages to make frugal computing fun, while Atom falls short with an unimpressive feature set. That is the bottom line.
