Zotac debuts palm-sized Zbox mini-PC

Components company Zotac has announced its Zbox nano mini-PC, with a form factor of 127mm square and 45mm deep.

The one-typo-away-from-a-lawsuit Zbox is built on AMD's Brazos E-350 APU platform, which includes Radeon HD 6310 graphics for high-definition Flash and Blu-ray support.

In its barebones form, the wee PC ships without memory or a hard drive but it will accept DDR3 RAM and a 2.5-inch SATA 6.0Gb/s hard drive or solid state drive.

However, the Zbox nano AD10 plus model ships with a pre-installed 320GB hard drive and 2GB of RAM.

Mystery science theatre

Zotac clearly has home theatre PC users in its sights, and the mini-PC can be VESA-mounted on the back of your television or monitor.

Outputs are catered for with HMDI and DisplayPort connections, as well as 7.1-channel digital audio, USB 2.0, USB 3.0 and eSATA ports.

Network connectivity comes in the shapely form of onboard 802.11n WiFi, an ethernet port and Bluetooth 3.0.

Most exciting of all is the bundled remote control and infrared unit, which gets a big thumbs up from us. Most PCs of this form factor ship without any form of control, which leaves you with a useless tiny box until you buy a rubbish multimedia keyboard from eBay.

"There was a lot of demand for a bundled remote with our mini-PCs so we listened and engineered a solution that would work for all home theatre PC installation scenarios," said Carsten Berger, Zotac International's marketing manager.

We look forward seeing the Zbox in action, and whether it can do anything that other micro-form-factor PCs don't. Like running games.