At last year’s Computex, ASUS aside, ZOTAC were the only vendor with 2 booths; one for their hardware lineup and the other for hosting their ZOTAC World Cup esports tournament. This year, they have decided to combine the 2 together into a quasi-display/tournament/hands-on demonstration booth, and it was hard to differentiate all that was going on.
Let’s kick things off with ZOTAC’s VR backpack.
This is version 2.0 of ZOTAC’s VR Go backpack and the most important aspect of it is that they have reduced the weight to approximately 4.5kg, which when you consider all the hardware and battery packs that is actually inside the backpack, it is rather lightweight. The entire chassis has been redesigned, so not only is it lighter, it is more much smaller. Inside the ZOTAC VR Go 2.0 packs an 8th generation Intel i7-8700T CPU, a GeForce GTX 1070 graphics card, a 240GB M.2 SATA SSD and 2 x 8GB of DDR4 RAM. Power-wise there are 2 x 86.4WH li-ion batteries inside giving you 1.5 hours of use, which is a reduction from the original model which had heavier batteries but would give you a longer 2 hours battery life.
Aside from graphics cards, ZOTAC is renowned for their mini-desktop PCs and this year their range has expanded even more with 2 more Mek PCs. The Mek Mini features an Intel Core i7-8700T processor on a mini-ITX motherboard, GeForce GTX 1080 graphics card, 2x8GB of DDR4-2666 memory, a 2TB 2.5″ HDD with 32GB of Intel Optane memory, in addition to an extra M.2 2280 slot for PCIe x4 or SATA SSDs.
The Mek Ultra is a move from ZOTAC away from the ‘mini’ desktop PC into a full blown ATX desktop. This beast houses an Intel Core i9-7900X CPU on an E-ATX motherboard, 2x16GB of DDR4-2666 memory, and a Zotac GeForce GTX 1080 Ti AMP Extreme graphics card, a 512GB PCIe NVMe M.2 SSD and a 4TB 3.5″ HDD with 32GB of Intel Optane memory.
We mentioned that there was a growing trend of immersion cooling mods at this year’s Computex, and ZOTAC had their own offering on display. The chassis for this mod was supplied by Barrow but the core of the mod is the 3M coolant used which is non-conductive. Using Barrow’s water-cooling components, the 3M coolant is pumped to a radiator to disperse the heat. One thing you will notice with these immersion cooling mods is that they are completed sealed, otherwise with the coolant’s boiling point at 60C it would evaporate.
Go on then, just one booth babe from ZOTAC…
