Unboxing and Setting Up / Upgrading the Zotac ZBOX HD-ID11 Nettop

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I've finally got my hands on a Zotac ZBOX HD-ID11 which has been selling for a month or two already. You can pick one up at Amazon, TigerDirect or Newegg for $250

This is a second generation Zotac nettop, with a dual core Atom D510 processor and next generation ION graphics. The design looks very similar to the first gen Zotac MAG designs except these feature a screwless design which I'll get to shortly.

Unboxing video:

Included in the box: stand, VESA mount, power brick / cable, CD for drivers (Windows XP / 7 / Linux), screws for mount, manuals and the nettop itself.

These are bare bones nettops so you will need your own RAM, storage and OS. I just transplanted the stuff I had in my Acer Aspire Revo nettop. Thanks to the screwless design you don't need to use a screwdriver at all, even to install storage. This has to be the easiest nettop to upgrade ever. Last thing you'll need are peripherals to control the thing! The nettop itself may be cheap but add on all those features and the price adds up.

Taking a look inside the Zotac ZBOX HD-ID11 (upgrading / setting up):

Will be testing it out with XBMC and Windows 7 Home Premium for benchmarking. I'm mostly interested in seeing power consumption levels and noise levels.

Photos:

Posted 06/10/10 at 07:17 PM / Reviews / Previews 8 Comments

Tag(s): nettops, nvidia ion 2, zotac nettop, zotac pinetrail nettop, zotac

Reader Comments (8)

Ion 06/10 at 11:06 PM

Peter, before you test HD video playback, can you please use the latest MPC-HC builds?

http://www.xvidvideo.ru/media-player-classic-home-cinema-x86-x64/

Also the new builds require the latest DirectX End-User Runtimes (June 2010) to be installed.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=3b170b25-abab-4bc3-ae91-50ceb6d8fa8d

Thanks.

Ion 06/11 at 01:27 AM

Peter, this might be of interest.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/3765/new-driver-enables-smooth-1080p-flash-playback-on-nvidia-ngion

“Using current drivers if you try to play a 1080p YouTube HD stream on a Next Generation ION you’ll drop frames because of this bandwidth limitation. It gets worse if you decode and play the stream full screen at a 1080p desktop resolution. As I pointed out in my Next Generation ION review, even playing 480p Hulu content scaled up to 1080p dropped frames. It’s a real problem.”

“There is an obvious solution: do the entire process on the GPU itself, thus avoiding the copying back and forth over the PCIe x1 connection. NVIDIA told me this was possible, but it required a driver update. I now have that driver update: version 257.29.”

“The driver isn’t publicly available, although NVIDIA is shooting to have a public beta on June 28th with a WHQL release sometime in July.”

“CPU utilization before and after the updated driver remains the same at around 15 - 20% of the Atom D510’s four threads. But this isn’t a CPU utilization problem. Using the current public driver the 1080p stream is unwatchable at full screen, the system drops a ton of frames. Using the updated driver? Smooth as butter.”

Hopefully you can wait for the newer 257.29 or later drivers for Youtube HD playback tests.

gozer 06/11 at 01:53 AM

Pity they made it so hard to put a Crystal HD in there with the warranty sticker and underside location.

Even with the custom Nvidia driver moving the mouse during Flash playback causes problems so Ion 2 is not an ideal solution to Flash playback.

Nightly builds of Windows XBMC can be gotten at the link below with DXVA and Crystal HD support though keep in mind these are devs builds so things do go wrong. Try r28256 or later and in settings/video/playback change render method to DXVA or Crystal HD.

http://mirrors.xbmc.org/nightlies/win32/

The regular linux/live builds of XBMC should be fine too, the xbmcfreak build is the best path as it includes lots of tweaks.
http://www.xbmcfreak.nl/en/xbmcfreak-livecd-9-11-v14/

Ion 06/11 at 02:03 AM

Crystal HD is garbage, doesn’t support DXVA L5.1 decoding and high bitrate videos as shown by the VIA DXVA high bitrate video demonstration. No one will use something which is clearly inferior in hardware capabilities and driver support.

Ion 06/11 at 02:11 AM

http://netbooked.net/blog/via-chromotion-hd-2.0-vs-broadcom-crystal-hd-decoder-card/

“Flash playback and high bitrate (80Mbps) local video playback. Broadcom’s offering is a bit stuttery for both content”

I rest my case.

gozer 06/11 at 04:17 AM

Other than a handful of Blu-ray’s no one uses L5.1 video and I’m using a Crystal HD with XBMC dev builds it works just fine for just about everything including most Blu-ray’s which I’ve tested. Not everyone holds your views that Level 5.1 support or insane bit-rates is an absolute must.

Let’s be realistic here none of the “scene” do either who encode everything into x264 .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) so the Crystal HD handles the vast bulk of videos but doesn’t play obscure stress tests videos plus a few Blu-rays which you can easily encode.

So yeah I’m sticking by the Crystal HD over a gimped Ion2 Nvidia GPU. Nothing wrong with the original Ion as a media playback system but the Ion2 is hobbled, who doesn’t use a mouse while playing flash ?

Lastly you seems to be taking this rather seriously, dude relax unless this is your job…

Ion 06/11 at 04:30 AM

Peter, Adobe Flash Player 10.1 Final is out also.

Firefox/Chrome(NPAPI plugin browsers)
http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/get/flashplayer/current/install_flash_player.exe

IE(ActiveX)
http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/get/flashplayer/current/licensing/win/install_flash_player_10_active_x.exe

Ion 06/11 at 05:53 AM

Zotac has released the 257.29 drivers, only for Next-Gen Ion GPU, please use this driver, Peter. If they pull it later at Nvidia’s request, oh well.

32bit
http://downloads.zotac.com/mediadrivers/mb/257.29_desktop_win7_winvista_32-bit_english.exe

64bit
http://downloads.zotac.com/mediadrivers/mb/257.29_desktop_win7_winvista_64-bit_english.exe