[section_title title=”Performance”]Performance
The results for the EN760 are a bit of a mixed bag and that’s for a variety of reasons I’ll breakdown now although they’re both hardware and software related.
First up the hardware. The dual-core i5 in the EN760 is slower than the Sphere – as expected – but worryingly it’s also slower than last year’s Zbox Plus, too. Whilst the shortcoming only shows up in synthetic tests it does already highlight that there is a weakness in the EN760. In fairness, the Zbox Plus from last year was a true quad-core with HT whereas the i5 in both the EN760 and slightly faster Sphere are dual-core with HT. Even so, we’re heading into this generations first proper Christmas, game development wise, and now developers will be using highly threaded, more CPU heavy engines meaning the EN760 may struggle sooner rather than later.
Secondly is the lack of USB 2.0 ports on the EN760. What does this mean and why is it a negative? It means you have to go around the houses to create a bootable  USB drive to install Windows on the EN760. Obviously there is no disc drive in the EN760 so this is your only installation solution. For whatever reason, ZOTAC don’t include a guide on how to make a bootable USB 3.0 stick compatible with the USB 3.0 ports on the EN760.
All in all, the actual results aren’t bad and the PCMark 7 results show how overall, it’s actually a potent system. Running some other relevant benchmarks too, I was able to get 43FPs @ 1080p on the Tomb Raider benchmark (max settings, no SSAA or TressFX) and the same again in BioShock Infinite which is mighty for a box no larger than a standard router.
Crossing over to the software side of things I also encountered some other issues which I think may be due to a dodgy BIOS given how new the EN760 is. Some benchmarks refused to run outright and for some reason the only GPU driver I could get to install was the one off the utilities thumb drive that’s included. No matter if I tried to brute force the driver install through Windows, download the driver myself or through GeForce Experience I got no dice. Again, this means that the results above are done on an old driver (337.50) and the next one in Nvidia’s release cycle has specific improvements for games at 4K – 4K gaming being a selling point of the EN760.
The hardware decisions were of course meant to be but not including a guide on how to get up and running is a strange omission. Likewise, ZOTAC wouldn’t out out a knowingly bad BIOS and in the world of computing components and software do sometimes just not work but not being able to upgrade the driver for your standout component isn’t great.
How does the EN760 stand on it’s own feet as well as against the other recent Zboxes we’ve covered?
