Affordable, fanless mini PC: Zotac Zbox CI360 unveiled with Intel Twin Lake CPUs housed in a tiny enclosure

Zotac has updated its lineup of mini PCs with a new addition, the Zbox CI360 nano. Based on the year-old CI338 mini PC, the CI360 boasts support for quad-core Intel Twin Lake CPUs and DDR5 memory. Pricing details are unclear as of this writing, but the specifications indicate that pricing should be on the affordable side.

Zbox CI360: Affordable entry-level performance in 0.9-litre chassis

At its heart, the Zotac CI360 mini PC is powered by the quad-core, quad-thread Intel N150 processor. This 6-watt chip is only decent for affordable, entry-level systems, and can only handle extremely modest workloads such as browsing, emails and the like. In synthetic benchmarks, the N150 appears to be roughly as powerful as an Intel Core i5 8250U chip found in ultrabooks from around 8 years ago.

A single SODIMM slot is present, which can accommodate up to 16 GB of DDR5-4800 memory. Considering the ongoing explosion of DRAM prices, the barebones variant is likely to be the only variant of the C1360 with a reasonable price. Storage requirements of the Zbox CI360 mini PC, on the other hand, will be taken care of by dual M.2 2280 slots. The I/O on offer is pretty decent, and is detailed below:

• Triple USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A
• USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C (with DisplayPort)
• SD card reader
• Dual HDMI 2.0
• Dual 1G Ethernet, WiFi 6E, Bluetooth 5.3
• Audio jack

Unsurprisingly, the mini PC lacks support for discrete graphics. The onboard iGPU with 24 EUs should be decent for video acceleration and motion, while anything heavier than the most modest of games is likely out of reach for the system.

As mentioned earlier, pricing and availability details of the Zotac Zbox CI360 mini PC are unclear as of this writing. Considering that other N150-powered mini PCs, such as the Asus NUC 14 cost around $180 for the barebones variant, the Zbox CI360 is likely to be priced similarly.