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Zotac ZBOX Sphere OI520 barebones vs Sphere Plus review

by on02 December 2014

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Review: DIY makes perfect sense, Plus SKU not so much

Zotac has been in the nettop and mini-PC space for more than four years now and it has managed to carve out a nice niche for itself. From humble beginnings, i.e. cheap Atom- and Brazos-powered nettops, Zotac’s ZBOX line has expanded to include more serious mini-PCs with gaming credentials, ultra-small Pico boxes, passively cooled designs and stylish models like the Sphere.

If you are in the market for a spherical PC, then the Zotac ZBOX Sphere OI520 is the one to go for – namely because it is the only one out there. The minimalistic Sphere offers a truly unique design and is bound to turn heads and start conversations. But is it just a triumph of style over substance, all too common in the tech industry today? That’s up to you to decide, so here are some facts.

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Let's play ball!

The Sphere is based on the Intel Core i5-4200U processor, arguably the most prolific Haswell U-series part on the market. It’s a hyperthreaded dual-core clocked at 1.6GHz, but it can hit 2.6GHz on Turbo, all in a cool 15W TDP envelope. The Core i5-4200U features Intel HD 4400 graphics, clocked between 200MHz and 1000MHz. The Sphere features four USB 3.0 ports, three USB 2.0 ports, Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 3160 801.22ac and Bluetooth 4.0. HDMI and DisplayPort are on board and the Sphere is 4K compatible.

The Plus version ships with a single 4GB PC3-12800 SO-DIMM module, courtesy of Crucial, as well as a Samsung branded 500GB 5400rpm hard drive, which is actually a rebadged Seagate Momentus-B drive. The average Fudzilla reader (i.e. enthusiast) is bound to spot a couple of issues – the use of a single memory module on a dual-channel platform, as well as a sluggish hard drive.

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The Sphere rests on five relatively large rubber feet

Luckily the Sphere can accommodate two SO-DIMM modules and in addition to the 2.5-inch bay, there’s also a 6Gbps mSATA slot on board. So we went ahead and did what most of our readers would do – we added an mSATA solid state drive and swapped out the single memory module for a 2x4GB Kingston HyperX DDR3L kit.

Was it worth it? Well of course it was, otherwise we wouldn’t have bothered, but we'll get to that later.


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Last modified on 10 December 2014
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