Zotac ZBOX EI750 Plus: A Feature-Rich Iris Pro mini-PC

ZBOX EI750 as a HTPC

The ZBOX EI750 has a much better acoustic profile compared to the BRIX Pro (thanks to the larger chassis, which, in turn, allows for a fan with a larger diameter). But, it is still noisy for HTPC use. However, it does have the credentials for a gaming HTPC, where noise is not that much of a concern. The Core i7-4770R should be capable enough for madVR when the algorithms and video stream resolutions are restricted. There are two HTPC aspects that we will explore in this section, one related to network streaming (OTT services), and the other related to local file playback. Prior to that, we have a small sub-section dealing with refresh rate accuracy.

Custom Refresh Rates

We found last year that Haswell provided excellent display refresh rate accuracy, and reconfirmed that in multiple Haswell mini-PC reviews. Our experience with the ZBOX EI750 was also flawless.

The gallery below presents some of the other refresh rates that we tested out. The first statistic in madVR's OSD indicates the display refresh rate.

Network Streaming Efficiency

Evaluation of OTT playback efficiency was done by playing back our standard YouTube test stream and five minutes from our standard Netflix test title. Using HTML5, the YouTube stream plays back a 720p encoding, while Adobe Flash delivers a 1080p stream. The power consumption at the wall as well as the GPU usage while playing them on Mozilla Firefox are provided in the graphs below.

Netflix streaming evaluation was done using the Windows 8.1 Netflix app. Manual stream selection is available (Ctrl-Alt-Shift-S) and debug information / statistics can also be viewed (Ctrl-Alt-Shift-D). Statistics collected for the YouTube streaming experiment were also collected here.

Decoding and Rendering Benchmarks

In order to evaluate local file playback, we concentrate on EVR-CP and madVR. We already know that EVR works quite well with the Intel IGP for our test streams. Under madVR, we used the default settings initially. madVR also has an option to utilize the hardware scaler that is specific to Intel HD Graphics (instead of the specific algorithms that can be configured via its interface). Other than these, we also put together a 'madVR stress configuration' with the upscaling algorithms set to Jinc 3-tap with anti-ringing activated and the downscaling algorithm set to Lanczos 3-tap, again with anti-ringing activated. The decoder used is from the LAV filters integrated in MPC-HC v1.7.3.

These results present data points additional to whatever we had for the BRIX Pro. The PC has no trouble, as expected, with EVR-CP for any of our test streams. Even madVR works in the default and DXVA scaling configurations. Problems start to appear only for 60 fps progressive streams as well as 4K streams when advanced madVR scaling algorithms are chosen.